Lalla Fatma N'Soumer

Lalla Fatma N'Soumer (c. 1830 – September 1863), born Fadhma Si Ahmed Ou Méziane, was a Kabyle leader of the Algerian resistance to the French conquest, remembered as the heroine of the Djurdjura.¹

She was born about 1830 at Ouerdja, near Aïn El Hammam in Kabylie, into a maraboutic family; her father headed a Qur'anic school attached to a zawiya of the Rahmaniyya order, and she received the schooling usually reserved for boys.² She refused the marriage arranged for her and devoted herself to prayer, teaching and the care of the poor.²

In the Dahra she met Sherif Boubaghla, who from 1850 led a rising in the Babor Mountains, and she became his ally in the resistance in Kabylie.¹ After Boubaghla's death she continued the struggle in the Djurdjura, organising supplies and leading the tribes in battle against the French columns of Marshal Randon.²

On 11 July 1857 she was captured and imprisoned in the zawiya of El-Aissaouia at Beni Slimane, then held under house arrest; she died there in September 1863, aged about 33.³ In 1995 her remains were transferred to the El Alia Cemetery in Algiers.³

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