A policy to humiliate the Algerian people
A policy to humiliate the Algerian people
By Sahifa Sharif, archeologist
In Algeria, many families still suffer from the aftereffects of French colonization. France once imposed a patronymic system to accurately recognize the number of Algerians. Following this new system, several transcription errors occurred, as well as the creation of fanciful family names, difficult to pronounce in public, which were assigned to humiliate the Algerian people. As a result, nearly 600 people request name changes each year in Algeria.
French colonialism in Algeria used several methods to change and alter Algerian identity; one of the political achievements of the French colonizer was the creation of the Algerian civil registry, which only has Algerian names since it was created by the French colonial administration.
France, through the Algerian civil registry, falsified family names, tribes, and parts of individual identity, contributing to a rift between brothers and sisters and between cousins, and thus uprooting Algerian identity.
For the French administration, this was not just an opportunity to inventory and recognize the exact number of Algerians, but also to individualize the people by dividing them in order to conquer them more easily and to humiliate them by assigning them names with different meanings. Some names are enigmatic without a true origin; others are worthless, but the worst was to name people with nicknames, animal names, body parts were also assigned as names to Algerians, as well as obscene names taken from the Arabic language in order to dehumanize the people and subjugate them.
On the other hand, the transcription of the person’s name from Arabic to French has caused names to lose their forms; names before 1882, the date of the creation of the Algerian civil registry, were composed of four to seven surnames, this number drops to two components. Therefore, a morphological simplification for optimal transcription.
By losing their forms and components, Algerian family names lost their meaning. Furious at the ill will of the colonial administration, Algerians hurled insults at civil registry officers, who in turn took revenge by attributing these same insults as family names or other nicknames or animal names such as: Bounaadja = father of sheep, Dib = Jackal or wolf, Boudjadja = father of hen, Ben boula = son of urine, Ben kalouez = son of testicles, Ben khrina = son of our excrement, Boukhnouna = father of snotty children, others composed of French names such as Beausoir = beautiful evening, Boufis = handsome sons and other examples which can be counted by the thousands.
These Algerians who still keep these family names suffer in silence, while trying to make requests to the Algerian state to change these nicknames and insults used as family names.