Algeria
Capital: Algiers · North Africa
Africa's largest country by area, where Amazigh (Berber) civilization, Roman ruins, Islamic scholarship and Saharan Tuareg culture meet.
Ethnic communities
- KabyleLargest Amazigh group, Kabylie mountains; rich oral poetry tradition
- ChaouiAmazigh people of the Aurès Mountains
- TuaregSaharan nomads famed for indigo veils and Tifinagh script
- MozabiteIbadi Muslim Amazigh of the M'zab Valley's fortified towns
More communities of Algeria
- Shawiya (Chaoui) · Aurès mountain Amazigh — Dihya's homeland of fortified granaries
- Mozabites · Ibadi Muslim builders of the M'zab's five white hill-cities
- Tuareg (Kel Ahaggar) · Ahaggar confederation of the deep Sahara; Tin Hinan's heirs
- Tuareg (Kel Ajjer) · Tassili n'Ajjer nomads amid the world's great rock-art gallery
- Chenoua · Coastal Amazigh of the Dahra hills west of Algiers
- Zenata Berbers · Historic camel-nomad Amazigh branch of the high plateaus
- Ouled Naïl · Steppe confederations famed for dance and silver jewelry
- Chaamba Arabs · Saharan Arab nomads of the northern desert oases
- Reguibat · Great camel-herding tribe of the western Sahara
- Gourara Zenete · Oasis communities keeping the UNESCO-listed Ahellil chant
- Souafa · Date-grove people of the Souf's sunken palm gardens
- Beni Snous · Tlemcen-region Amazigh with masked Ayred winter festival
- Tidikelt & In Salah oasis folk · Foggara-irrigation specialists of the central Sahara
- Dawi Menia & Beni Guil · Pastoral Arab tribes of the Moroccan-Algerian marches
Languages
Major languages: Arabic, Tamazight (Berber), French
Language families: Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Berber)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Numidia
- • Kingdom of Tlemcen (Zayyanid)
- • Regency of Algiers
Heritage sites
- • Casbah of Algiers
- • M'Zab Valley
- • Tassili n'Ajjer rock art
- • Timgad
- • Djémila
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Algeria
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1916–2012
Ahmed Ben Bella
Independence
Leader of the FLN through the Algerian war of independence and the country's first president after 1962.
- Music & the arts1936–2015
Assia Djebar
Literature and cinema
Novelist and film-maker who wrote Algerian women back into the record of the war of independence, and the first North African elected to the Académie française.
- Science, business & activismb. 1957
Belgacem Haba
Semiconductor engineering
Holds hundreds of United States patents in chip packaging and three-dimensional integration, technologies now standard in mobile devices.
- Politics & liberationb. 1935
Djamila Bouhired
Armed resistance
Fighter in the Battle of Algiers, arrested, tortured and sentenced to death at 22. The international campaign for her life helped turn French opinion against the war.
- Sportb. 1968
Hassiba Boulmerka
Middle-distance running
Won the 1500m in Barcelona in 1992, Algeria's first Olympic gold, and kept training abroad under threats over her racing kit.
- Music & the artsb. 1960
Khaled
Raï
The king of raï, whose Didi and Aïcha carried a music once banned from Algerian airwaves to the top of European charts.
- Sportb. 1970
Noureddine Morceli
Middle-distance running
Dominated the 1500m through the 1990s with three world titles and Olympic gold in Atlanta.
- Sportb. 1958
Rabah Madjer
Football
Scored the backheel that won Porto the 1987 European Cup and starred in Algeria's famous 1982 World Cup win over West Germany.
Deep-dive community profiles
Amazigh (Berber)
The indigenous peoples of North Africa — 'Imazighen', the free people — whose Tifinagh script, mountain and desert civilizations, and millennia of continuous culture long predate the Arab arrival, stretching from the Canary Islands to the Siwa oasis.
Open deep profile →Chaamba
The camel Arabs of the northern Sahara — nomads of the Grand Erg whose méhariste companies the French recruited to police the desert, and whose position at Ghardaïa alongside the Mozabites has periodically turned violent.
Open deep profile →Gnawa
The descendants of enslaved West Africans in Morocco — a brotherhood rather than a tribe, whose all-night lila ceremonies heal through possession, whose guembri and iron qraqeb built a music now played from Essaouira to the world's festivals, and who are named for the country they were taken from.
Open deep profile →Haratin
The Black population of the Saharan oases and Moorish society — descendants of enslaved people who worked the date gardens and the water tunnels, the largest single group in Mauritania, and the community at the centre of the world's longest-running struggle against chattel slavery.
Open deep profile →Kabyle (Iqbayliyen)
The mountain Amazigh of northern Algeria — whose village assemblies wrote their own constitutions, whose silver-and-coral jewellery and pottery are famous, and whose Amazigh Spring forced a state to recognise a language it had denied.
Open deep profile →Kroumirs (Khroumirie)
The forest people of Tunisia's north-west — cork oak communities of the Kroumirie mountains whose cross-border raiding gave France its pretext for taking Tunisia in 1881, and whose damp green landscape is the opposite of everything the country is usually pictured as.
Open deep profile →Mozabites (At Mzab)
The Ibadi Muslims of the M'zab valley — a community that fled orthodoxy into the desert a thousand years ago and built five fortified hill cities with a religious council still governing daily life, a palm oasis engineered to catch flood water, and an architecture that Le Corbusier came to study.
Open deep profile →Ouled Naïl
The steppe confederation of the Saharan Atlas — herders of the high plains whose name became attached, through colonial spectacle and photography, to a tradition of dancers whose gold-laden performance was both a livelihood and a misrepresented one.
Open deep profile →Reguibat
The great camel confederation of the western Sahara — warriors and herders who dominated the desert between the Atlantic and the Adrar, resisted French and Spanish penetration into the 1930s, and form the backbone of the Sahrawi independence movement.
Open deep profile →Sahrawis of the Tindouf Camps
A society built in the hardest desert in Algeria and inhabited for fifty years, where camps are named after towns their residents have never seen, women run most of the institutions, and a third generation has now been born stateless.
Open deep profile →Shawiya (Ichawiyen)
The Amazigh of the Aurès — mountain farmers and herders whose fortified granaries crown the ridges, whose women fought in the war of independence in numbers, and who claim the Kahina, the queen who led the last great resistance to the Arab conquest.
Open deep profile →Souafa (people of the Souf)
Oasis cultivators of the eastern Algerian Sahara who plant date palms in pits dug down to the water table rather than irrigating them, and whose domed town of El Oued is built entirely in vaults because there is no timber.
Open deep profile →Tuareg (Kel Tamasheq)
The veiled lords of the central Sahara — matrilineal confederations who ran the desert's caravans for a millennium, write in ancient Tifinagh, and whose women own the tents, the poetry and the one-string imzad that carries the nomad soul.
Open deep profile →