Lalla Fatma N'Soumer ( 1830 – 1863) (; ) was an Algerian anti-colonial leader during 1849–1857 of the French conquest of Algeria and subsequent Pacification of Algeria. She led several battles against the French forces, until her capture in July 1857. She was imprisoned until her death six years later. She is an Algerian national hero.
Name
Lalla, the female equivalent of the Berber word mass, is an honorific reserved for women of high social rank or for holy women. "N'Soumer" means "of Soumer", where Soumer was the village nearest the zawiya of her lineage, the Sidahmed. She also sometimes bore the name "Lalla N'Ouerdja". Her birth name seems to have been "Fadhma Si Ahmed Ou Méziane", but she went by Fatma N'Soumer and eventually Lalla Fatma N'Soumer with time.
Biography
Fadhma Si Ahmed Ou Méziane was born in 1830 to her parents Sid Ahmed Mohamed and Terkia n'ath Ykhoulaf in what is now the commune of Abi Youcef, near Aïn El Hammam. As her last name suggests, she descended from the lineage of a respected marabout, Ahmed Ou Méziane, which gave her more influence than most women of Algerian society of the era. Her family would extend to 8 children: 5 brothers and 2 sisters. Fadhma's father was the head of a madrasa (Islamic school) linked to the zawiya of the Rahmaniyya order of Sufi Islam, originally founded by Sidi M'hamed Bou Qobrine in the late 1790s. As a result, Fadhma had access to more of an education than many children of the era. Around the age of 16–18 and with the approval of her older brother as head of the family after her father's death, Fadhma was put in an arranged marriage with a family cousin, Si Yahia n'ath Ikhoulaf. However, the couple quickly separated; she returned to her religious studies. Out of spite, her husband refused to grant her a divorce, making it impossible for her to remarry.
The territory of her birth and life is loosely called Kabylia, the land of the Kabyle people. The French conquest of Algeria began in 1830, the same year she was born. After successfully capturing Algiers the same year, the French focused on the coastal cities at first; Kabylia is mountainous and not easily accessible, with much of the land dominated by the Tell Atlas range of the Atlas Mountains. Growing French influence from their strongholds on the coast eventually reached the mountains, which saw violent resistance to French attempts to impose their authority there. While many Kabyle tribes and leaders engaged in raids and attacks on French positions and outposts as part of "jihad" before, mainly under the leadership of Mohamed ben Zamoum the region of Kabylia itself was only attacked in the 1830s. Through the 1830s and 1840s, many Kabyle tribes (such as the Igawawen or the Iflissen Umellil) swore allegiance to the emirate of Mascara led by Emir Abdelkader, which's goal was to liberate and establish a modern Algerian states, these tribes would be defeated and the region of Kabylia penetrated in 1846-1848. In 1849, a young Fatma entered the resistance and rallied to the cause of Si Mohammed El-Hachemi, a marabout who had waged an insurrection in the Dahra Range since 1847. There, she met Sherif Boubaghla, another Algerian rebel from the western region of Saida who would be another leader and ally in the following years. In 1850, Sherif Boubaghla started an anti-French rebellion in the Babor Mountains. A local assembly of Soumer, the tajmâat, also rebelled. They delegated leadership of the volunteer soldiers to Sidi Tahar (Fatma's brother) and Fatma herself, perhaps leading to the time when she began going by Lalla Fatma N'Soumer. The Soumer-focused rebellion was in the Djurdjura region of the Tell Atlas, and drew from several villages in the area such as Illilten.
In the spring of 1854, a French incursion led by came to near N'Soumer's villages. The Battle of the Sebaou River then occurred at the Sebaou River near Aïn El Hammam. N'Soumer's forces were able to repel the French; allied cavalry led by Sherif Boubaghla were able to harass the retreating French, but French superiority in cavalry ensured they made their escape. The surrounding villages remained independent. Boubaghla was said to be quite taken with N'Soumer and to have obtained permission from her brother to court her, but her husband continued to refuse to grant a divorce, so the two stayed merely friends.