Cheikh Bouamama

Cheikh Bouamama (born 1833 by the French article's sourced account, 1841 in the English article; died 17 October 1908) was an Algerian resistance leader of the Awlad Sidi Shaykh who fought the French conquest in the southwest of Algeria from 1881 to 1908.¹

He was born at El-Hammam El-Fougani in the ksar of Figuig, in present-day Morocco, into the Awlad Sidi Shaykh, and received a Sufi education; in about 1875 he settled at Moghrar Tahtani, in the Algerian South Oranais, and founded a zawiya for teaching the Qur'an.²

His rising opened with the battle of Sfissifa, south of Aïn Sefra, on 27 April 1881, in which the French column was defeated.² For more than two decades he sustained a mobile guerrilla war across the South Oranais and the northern Sahara, withdrawing at times into Morocco and the Touat, and was never captured.¹

He died on 17 October 1908 (the French article's text gives 7 October) at El Aioun Sidi Mellouk, near Oujda.³ His life was the subject of the Algerian film The Epic of Cheikh Bouamama (1983).¹

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