Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter

Zohra Drif

4 ideas

1. The Milk Bar bomb, Algiers 1956

   On 30 September 1956, Zohra Drif, a 22-year-old law student at the University of Algiers, carried a bomb in a beach bag into the Milk Bar, a café popular with European settlers on Place Bugeaud. That same evening Samia Lakhdari bombed the Cafétéria on rue Michelet, and Djamila Bouhired's bomb at the Air France terminal failed to go off. Drif then hid with Yacef Saâdi's network in the Casbah until paratroopers found their hiding place at 3 rue Caton on 24 September 1957; she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labour and released at independence in 1962.

2. Settler civilians inside a colonial system

   Drif argues that in a settler colony, European civilians are not neutral bystanders: they hold the land, the vote and the privileges, and they back the army and police that keep the colonized majority down. Because the colonial order already used lethal violence against colonized civilians, she holds that refusing to strike the settler population would have left the violence running in one direction only. She presents this as a justification of the act itself, not an apology or an excuse.

3. Reprisal escalation that sets the targets

   The FLN in Algiers moved to bombing civilian sites after the state and settler 'ultras' struck the colonized population first. The key events were the guillotining of FLN prisoners in June 1956 and the 10 August 1956 rue de Thèbes bombing in the Casbah, which killed dozens of Algerian residents. In Drif's account, each side's attacks on the other's civilians became the stated precedent for the next attack, so the choice of targets followed the logic of reprisal rather than purely military logic.

4. Exploiting the occupier's stereotypes as camouflage

   Colonial security assumed that a threat looked like a veiled Muslim woman or an Arab man, so checkpoints waved through young women who looked and dressed like Europeans. Drif and her comrades took off the haik, dyed their hair and wore Western clothes to carry bombs past the barriers. The occupier's own ideas about who looked 'civilized' and harmless created a blind spot the resistance could use.

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