Djamila Boupacha was born February 9, 1938 in Algiers, French Algeria to a middle class family. She grew up in a revolutionary time; Algerian liberation was nigh, and she would prove to be an important figure in the liberation to come. Although she was initially sympathetic to the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front) and their activities, she only became one of their militants around the time she worked at the Beni Messous Hospital in Algiers as a teenager. Whilst working towards her practical certificate in nursing, she was told by the French administration that she would never be able to obtain it, on account of her ‘race’ as a ‘Moslem’. From then on, she would steal medical supplies from the hospital for the FLN, participate in intelligence gathering for the party, and shelter members of the resistance in times of need during the revolution.
On the 10th of February, 1960 Boupacha was arrested alongside her family and temporarily held in El Bier - a French military barracks turned prison. She was being held under the suspicion of her involvement of the café bombings performed by female FLN members in months previous during the Battle of Algiers. During her short time in the barracks, she was tortured; revealing nothing about the inner workings of the FLN.
A mere week later, on the 17th of February 1960, she was transferred to the infamous Hussein Dey prison, where she was subjected to horrendous, unfortunately common torture practices (I will include a trigger warning for the next few sentences; the graphic nature of the descriptions is not gratuitous, it plays a role in later events). They tortured her with “electroshock on her face, nipples, and genitals, water torture in a bathtub, and lit cigarettes ground in her skin…Eventually, a group of French officers penetrated her vagina with an empty beer bottle, leaving her “passed out in a pool of her own blood...she was a virgin.”’ (Kunkle).
These horrors continued until the 15th of March, 1960 where at her trial, Boupacha confessed to planting the bomb. History would later prove this to be a false confession, spoken simply to stop the torture inflicted upon her. In the same breath as her admission however, came an accusation of the French officials for assault, torture, and rape during her time in detainment. Boupacha was met with officers who feigned ignorance, doctors who falsified documents, and Frenchmen who laughed at the idea that an Arab woman had any purity to protect in the first place.
Here, Boupacha meets Gisèle Halimi, a French-Tunisian lawyer who takes her case. Halimi herself had been adversely affected by racism in France, and was sympathetic to the liberation movement and the FLN. She was determined to publicize Boupacha’s case so that it could not get swept under the rug as so many other torture scandals had been during the revolution. And so Halimi enlisted the help of prominent feminist and sympathizer to Algerian liberation, Simone de Beauvoir.
Boupacha’s tide turned on the 3rd of June, 1960, when de Beauvoir’s Le Monde article detailing the very graphic details of Boupacha’s time in prison, including the rape with a glass bottle. Not only was the recounting horrifying, ‘her intervention in Le Monde…highlighted this disturbing (act as) commonplace in order to make a difference: she focused on indifference, rather than ignorance, as a locus of a scandal.’ (Surkis). The story was shocking yet well-timed; international support for France from the U.N. and the U.S. was wavering as it was; the war was bloody, expensive, and more and more horrifying accounts of French torture methods were coming to light in the international community. De Beauvoir’s letter scandalized not only those in the leftist upper crust, but the French populace at large. Halimi’s desired effect had taken place; Boupacha would not - could not - be forgotten as so many other women were.
Boupacha was not sentenced to death, but was kept imprisoned until March of 1962, when the Evian Accords were signed and Algeria won it’s hard-earned independence from the French. Stories of the torture Algerians suffered during the revolution are infamous, the women spared no mercy: just the opposite, the sexual violence inflicted upon female ‘insurgents’ seemed coded and pointed in it’s content; women were raped as commonplace practice, as Fanon notes in Wretched of the Earth; his section on Colonial War and Mental Disorders is taken directly from is time working as head of a hospital, witnessing the medical distress of the men and women brought there. Although the French understood precious little about the actual workings of Algerian culture, they grasped the knowledge that ‘defiling’ a woman not only broke the spirit of the victim, but brought shame in men, at their inability to protect them. It was psychological warfare on the most degrading scale, and the violence was even more widespread in the countryside, where women had no chance at any retributive justice against the oppressors.
Djamila Amrane-Minne ad Louisette Ighilahriz were two young FLN members also imprisoned during the Battle of Algiers and subjected to similar if not worse torture than Boupacha. They are similarly iconic women of the revolution; upon their releases after Algeria won it’s independence they dedicated their lives to telling the stories of the fellow women they had been imprisoned alongside. The men of the revolution had their glory- their pin was spoken aloud and understood, while the women were left to at once be the heart of tradition and virtue, to never speak or think of the horrors they had lived or the freedom they had espoused. Amrane-Minne and Ighilahriz used their unique privileges of wealth and literacy, bringing to light hundreds of women’s stories chronicling their lives, strengths, woes, and at times deaths. Amrane-Minne used her unfortunate understanding of the pain these women faced to conduct 88 interviews of imprisoned women and FLN members, documenting their lives and dedication to the cause. Ighilahriz, after 40 years of silence forced on her by fellow (male) comrades, family members, and countrymen she fought alongside, published her highly detailed memoir Algerienne of the revolution and her time in prison.
Works Cited:
Fanon, F. (2021). The wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.
Kunkle, R. (2013). "we must shout the truth to the rooftops:” Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha, and sexual politics in the Algerian War of Independence. The Iowa Historical Review, 4(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.17077/2373-1842.1022
Mortimer, M. (2012). Tortured bodies, resilient souls: Algeria's women combatants depicted by Danièèle Djamila Amrane-Minne, Louisette Ighilahriz, and Assia Djebar. Research in African Literatures, 43(1), 101. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.43.1.101
Surkis, J. (2010). Ethics and violence: Simone de beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War. French Politics, Culture & Society, 28(2). https://doi.org/10.3167/fpcs.2010.280204