Author Description

As the history of a largely illiterate people depends heavily upon oral tradition for its preservation, so students of that history must rely upon those few collectors and translators who commit oral traditions to print. For students of north African history, Prof. Heggoy provides just such a service by translating four separate indigenous accounts of a central events in Algerian history: The French conquest of Algiers, 1830. The early "eyewitness" record of Hajj Ahmad Effendi serves to establish essential historical details while two versions (ca. 1853 and 1905) of the poem of Si Abd al-Qadir indicates the development of a significant oral account over many decades. These, along with the fanciful, stylized account collected by Desparment in 1910 trace the evolving Algerian understanding of events and Algerian attempts to accommodate them to the country's past and future. As a group, these accounts from the mid- and late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide a unique window onto the nationalistic, racial, religious and other dominant moods of nineteenth-century Algeria.