ABSTRACT
Ben Bella was born in Marnia in the Oran district of Algeria, on the MoroccanAlgerian border, on 25 December 1916. At the time of his birth Algeria was a French colony with over 1 million French settlers and colonial policies that openly discriminated against Algeria’s Muslim population. One of seven children, his father was a peasant farmer and small trader; Ben Bella was the only one of five sons who lived beyond early adulthood. He was educated locally in Marnia and then at a secondary school in Tlemcen, where he was one of the pupils who openly opposed the eurocentric teaching imposed under French colonial rule. Around 1937, Ben Bella became involved with the nationalist and anti-settler movement in Algeria, spearheaded by the Union Nationalist des Musulmans Nord-Africains, which in March of that year became the Parti de Peuple Algérien, an organisation that was savagely persecuted by the French colonial authorities.
