The history of Algeria

Algeria, the largest country in Africa, runs from a narrow, fertile Mediterranean coast across the Atlas Mountains into the vast Sahara. Its oldest inhabitants were the ancestors of the Berbers, or Amazigh, who built the kingdom of Numidia before Rome absorbed the coast. From the seventh century the land became Muslim and gradually Arabic-speaking, ruled by a succession of Berber and Arab dynasties, then from 1516 by the Ottoman regency of Algiers. France conquered the country from 1830 in a long and extremely violent campaign and ruled it as part of France for 132 years, until a war of independence costing hundreds of thousands of lives ended with independence in 1962.

Algeria holds some of the oldest evidence of human toolmaking outside East Africa. Stone tools and butchered animal bones at Ain Boucherit, near Sétif, have been dated to around 1.9 million years ago, and possibly earlier, and fossils of Homo erectus found at Tighennif (Ternefine) are about 700,000 years old. Later Stone Age peoples produced the distinctive Aterian tools of the Middle Palaeolithic, and around 20,000 years ago the Iberomaurusian culture spread along the coast from the Oran region.

When the Sahara was green, between roughly 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, hunters and then cattle herders lived across what is now desert. The rock paintings and engravings of the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau in the south-east record giraffes, elephants, herds of cattle and human figures, a picture of the Sahara before it dried out. From these Neolithic populations came the Berber peoples, the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, whose languages are still spoken today, above all in Kabylie, the Aurès and among the Tuareg of the deep south.

From about the eighth century BCE, sailors from Phoenicia and later from Carthage set up trading posts along the coast, including Icosium, the future Algiers, and Hippo Regius, modern Annaba. Carthage traded with and drew tribute and cavalry from the Berbers inland rather than conquering them. By the third century BCE two Berber kingdoms had formed: the Masaesyli in the west and the Massyli in the east.

During the Second Punic War, Masinissa of the Massyli sided with Rome, and his cavalry helped defeat Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE. He then defeated his western rival Syphax and united the two kingdoms as Numidia, with its capital at Cirta (Constantine). Masinissa ruled for more than fifty years, encouraging settled farming and building a state on the Carthaginian model. After his death in 148 BCE his grandson Jugurtha seized the whole kingdom and massacred Italian merchants at Cirta, provoking a war with the Roman Republic that ended with his capture in 106 BCE. Numidia survived as a client kingdom until Juba I backed the losing side against Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, after which much of it was annexed.

Under the Roman Empire the north of Algeria was divided among the provinces of Africa, Numidia and Mauretania Caesariensis, whose capital Caesarea is modern Cherchell. Cities such as Timgad, Djémila and Tipaza grew up with forums, baths and theatres, and the region exported grain and olive oil to Italy. North Africans rose to senior ranks, and the emperor Macrinus was born in Caesarea. Christianity spread from the third century, and Augustine of Hippo, born at Thagaste (Souk Ahras) in 354, became bishop of Hippo Regius and one of the most influential theologians in Christian history. The Donatist schism divided the African church for over a century. In 429 the Vandals crossed from Spain, taking Hippo in 431 as Augustine lay dying, and established a kingdom centred on Carthage. The armies of Justinian I overthrew it in 533, but the Byzantine Empire controlled only part of the coast, while Berber kingdoms ruled the interior.

Arab armies of the Umayyad Caliphate began raiding North Africa in 647, but the conquest took more than sixty years because of fierce Berber resistance. In 683 the Berber leader Kusayla ambushed and killed the commander Uqba ibn Nafi near Biskra. A second resistance in the Aurès was led by a woman remembered as al-Kahina (Dihya), who was defeated and killed around the end of the seventh century. By about 709 the Maghreb was under Umayyad rule, and Berber soldiers formed much of the army that invaded Spain in 711.

Conversion to Islam was widespread, but resentment at Arab discrimination fuelled the great Berber revolt of 740, often in the name of egalitarian Kharijite Islam. The Abbasids never restored control in the west. In 778 Abd al-Rahman ibn Rustam founded the Ibadi imamate of Tahert, near modern Tiaret, which prospered on trans-Saharan trade until destroyed in 909; its Ibadi survivors settled in the oases of the Mzab, where their communities remain. That same year Kutama Berbers from the mountains near Sétif, converted by an Ismaili missionary, carried the Fatimid Caliphate to power. When the Fatimids moved to Egypt in 973 they left the Maghreb to their Sanhaja Berber governors, the Zirids, whose founder Buluggin ibn Ziri rebuilt Algiers, Médéa and Miliana. A branch of the family, the Hammadids, established their own state with capitals at Qal'at Beni Hammad and then Béjaïa, which became a major Mediterranean port and centre of learning.

The western Maghreb's great reform movements then swept east. The Almoravid dynasty took Tlemcen and the west in the late eleventh century, and the Almohad Caliphate, whose founding caliph Abd al-Mumin was himself a Berber from near Tlemcen, conquered the Hammadids in 1152 and united the whole of North Africa for the first time. When Almohad power broke up in the thirteenth century, the Zayyanid dynasty ruled the west from Tlemcen (1236 to 1550), a city of mosques, madrasas and Saharan trade, while the east fell under the Hafsid dynasty of Tunis. The historian Ibn Khaldun served at these courts and wrote part of his great history in western Algeria. The arrival of Arab Bedouin tribes, the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, from the eleventh century spread Arabic across the countryside, a slow process that made most of the population Arabic-speaking.

After Spain completed its conquest of Granada in 1492, Spanish forces seized ports along the North African coast, including Oran in 1509 and a fortress off Algiers. The people of Algiers turned for help to the corsair brothers Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa, who took the city in 1516. Hayreddin placed it under the protection of the Ottoman Empire in 1519 and later became admiral of the Ottoman fleet under Suleiman the Magnificent. In 1541 a great expedition led by Charles V was wrecked by a storm before Algiers.

The Regency of Algiers was ruled at first by governors sent from Istanbul, but power passed to the janissary garrison and the corsair captains, and from 1671 to deys chosen locally. By the eighteenth century it was effectively independent, paying only nominal allegiance to the sultan. Its borders, set in wars with Morocco and Tunis, roughly anticipated those of northern Algeria, governed through beys at Constantine, Médéa and Oran. Corsairs from Algiers captured European ships and coastal villagers, and tens of thousands of Christian captives were held for ransom or enslaved; European states paid tribute for protection. A small Turkish-speaking elite held power over a mostly rural population of tribes and religious brotherhoods. In the early nineteenth century the Regency was weakened by plague, revolts and European naval power, including the US war of 1815 and an Anglo-Dutch bombardment in 1816.

A dispute over French debts for grain led Dey Hussein to strike the French consul with a fly-whisk in 1827. France blockaded Algiers and, in June 1830, landed an army that took the city on 5 July. Constantine, under Ahmed Bey, held out until 1837. In the west Emir Abdelkader, a young religious scholar, built a state with its own administration and army and fought the French from 1832 until his surrender in 1847; he is remembered as Algeria's national hero. The French generals, notably Bugeaud, answered with a war of scorched earth: crops and villages were burned, and in the "enfumades" of 1844 and 1845 hundreds of people sheltering in caves were suffocated by fires lit at the entrances. Warfare, famine and epidemics reduced the Algerian population by perhaps a third between 1830 and the 1870s; historians such as Ben Kiernan estimate hundreds of thousands killed, and many Algerians and some scholars describe the conquest as genocide. Major revolts, including the Kabyle rising of 1871, were crushed and followed by vast confiscations of land.

In 1848 northern Algeria was declared part of France and divided into departments. European settlers, from France but also Spain, Italy and Malta, took the best farmland, and by the early twentieth century they formed a large community, known later as the pieds-noirs, that dominated politics and the economy. Muslim Algerians were French subjects but not citizens, governed under a separate code, the indigénat, and could gain citizenship only by renouncing Islamic personal law. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 made Algeria's Jews French citizens. Vineyards for export replaced food crops, and most Algerians remained poor, with little access to schooling.

Algerian soldiers fought for France in World War I, and many men went to work in French factories. Nationalism grew in several forms between the wars: Messali Hadj demanded full independence, the reformist scholar Abdelhamid Ben Badis promoted Arabic and Islam as the basis of Algerian identity, and Ferhat Abbas at first sought equal rights within France. In World War II Algeria was governed by Vichy until the Allied landings of November 1942. On 8 May 1945, the day the war ended in Europe, a nationalist demonstration in Sétif turned into a rising in which around a hundred Europeans were killed. The army, police and settler militias responded with massacres across the region of Sétif and Guelma; French figures acknowledged about 1,500 Algerian dead, while other estimates run from several thousand to 45,000. Many nationalists concluded that only armed struggle could succeed.

On 1 November 1954 the newly formed National Liberation Front (FLN) launched coordinated attacks across Algeria. The war that followed was fought with great brutality on both sides. The FLN attacked settlers and Algerians it considered collaborators, and killed thousands in its struggle with the rival nationalist MNA. The French army deployed up to half a million soldiers, used torture systematically, most notoriously in the Battle of Algiers of 1957, carried out summary executions, and forced more than two million rural Algerians into regroupment camps. In Paris on 17 October 1961, police killed dozens of Algerian demonstrators, and possibly many more.

The crisis brought down the French Fourth Republic and returned Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958. He gradually moved towards accepting self-determination, which provoked a failed putsch by generals in 1961 and a terror campaign by the settler OAS. The Évian Accords of March 1962 led to a referendum in which Algerians voted overwhelmingly for independence, declared on 5 July 1962. Estimates of Algerian deaths range from about 300,000 to the official Algerian figure of 1.5 million; historians often cite figures between about 400,000 and 700,000. Nearly a million Europeans and most of Algeria's Jews left for France within months, and tens of thousands of harkis, Algerians who had served with the French, were killed in reprisals.

Ahmed Ben Bella became the first president, ruling through the FLN as the sole party, and fought a brief border war with Morocco in 1963. In 1965 he was overthrown by his defence minister, Houari Boumediene, who built a socialist state led by the army. Oil and gas were nationalised in 1971, and revenues funded heavy industry, schools and hospitals. Algeria became a leading voice of the non-aligned movement and of decolonisation, supporting liberation movements across Africa and the Polisario Front's claim to independence for Western Sahara, a cause that has kept relations with Morocco tense ever since. After Boumediene's death in 1978, Chadli Bendjedid opened the economy somewhat, but the fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s brought unemployment and shortages.

Riots in October 1988 forced political reform, and a 1989 constitution ended one-party rule. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won local elections in 1990 and the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991. In January 1992 the army forced Bendjedid to resign, cancelled the second round and banned the FIS. The insurgency that followed, waged by armed Islamist groups, above all the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and met by harsh state repression, killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Villages were massacred, notably at Bentalha and Raïs in 1997, and journalists, intellectuals and foreigners were assassinated. President Mohamed Boudiaf was murdered in June 1992.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a former foreign minister, became president in 1999 with army backing. Amnesty laws in 1999 and 2005 persuaded thousands of fighters to disarm, and violence fell sharply, though an Islamist insurgency linked to al-Qaeda continued in the mountains and the Sahara. In 2002 Tamazight, the Berber language, was recognised as a national language, and in 2016 as an official one. High energy prices paid for housing and subsidies, but the economy remained heavily dependent on hydrocarbons. Bouteflika removed term limits in 2008 and was re-elected in 2009 and 2014, although a stroke in 2013 left him rarely seen in public.

His bid for a fifth term in 2019 set off the Hirak, months of peaceful mass protests every Friday. Under pressure from the army chief, Bouteflika resigned on 2 April 2019. Abdelmadjid Tebboune won the presidential election of December 2019 on a very low turnout, and a revised constitution was approved in a referendum in 2020. Street protests were banned in 2021, and rights groups have reported the jailing of activists and journalists. Tebboune was re-elected in September 2024 with an official majority of over 80 percent, a result his opponents disputed. Algeria remains one of Africa's largest economies and a major gas supplier to Europe, while the memory of the colonial war continues to shape its relations with France.