Скачать или смотреть BOUZIANE EL KALAI The Fairless Resistance leader, Mountain Avenger, and unsinkable Hero of colonial

In 19th-century Algeria, a humble shepherd named Bouziane Sahnoun, born in 1838 in Kalâa (present-day Relizane province), would come to make history. With no formal education but a burning sense of justice, he became a symbol of popular revolt against French colonialism.

His life changed forever when a caïd (a local collaborator working for the colonial authorities) violently demanded unjust taxes in front of Bouziane's family. Outraged and humiliated, Bouziane beat the caïd, stripped him, and paraded him through the village — a public act of resistance that ignited a regional uprising.

Soon after, Bouziane took to the mountains of Beni Chougrane, launching a guerrilla war against colonists and collaborators. Leading a group of rebels, including the legendary Djilali El Qaate, he orchestrated night raids, seizing crops, livestock, tools, even beehives and pigeons — burning everything else in defiance. The people called him "the Algerian Robin Hood."

For 13 years, he eluded French forces, inspiring widespread admiration and resistance among the youth. Frustrated, the colonial authorities placed a large bounty on his head.

On October 16, 1875, Bouziane was betrayed by two collaborators and captured. He was tried in 1877, and publicly executed on July 26, 1877, in Mohammadia (Mascara). The French colonial forces beheaded him and sent his skull to the Muséum of Man in Paris, where it was displayed for decades.

But history did not forget him. On July 3, 2020, his remains — along with those of 23 other resistance fighters — were repatriated to Algeria in an official ceremony. On July 5, Algeria’s Independence Day, Bouziane was laid to rest at El Alia Cemetery in Algiers, among the nation's revered heroes.

Celebrated in folk songs and immortalized in cinema by Belkacem Hadjaj’s 1983 film (which won the Venezia Genti Mostra prize in Venice), Bouziane El Kalâi remains a living legend — a symbol of dignity, defiance, and the unbreakable spirit of a people who never bowed to tyranny.