Algeria’s revolutionaries, who rose up against the French military and ultimately forced France to cede control of the country, captured the world’s attention, and their success became one of the high points of efforts across much of Africa to shake off European colonialism.
Today, that revolutionary generation is rapidly fading away. Drif is among the dwindling number who remain and one of the most iconic.
At 86, she moves softly and wears wire-rimmed glasses, her light hair cut close to her ears. Decades have passed since she and her friends moved between hideouts in the winding streets of the casbah of Algiers, where freedom fighters once organized in secret. But Drif can still recall in remarkable detail the events that would forever shape not only her future but that of her country.
The bombing of the Milk Bar, frequented by French settlers, aimed “to create in the civilian French population the same panic” that Algerians were experiencing, she said in an interview at her son’s home in the Algerian capital last month. The Europeans “were so overprotected, it was as if there wasn’t a war. . . . And we had to tell them: The war is everywhere. It’s not only for us, it’s also for the French,” she said, expressing no regrets.
The French considered Algeria part of France, and around a million Europeans had settled there by the time war broke out. “If we look to the period of decolonization, settler colonies in the world are the most violent and the hardest to decolonize,” said Jennifer Sessions, a University of Virginia historian.
Although the war began in 1954 and was fought across rural Algeria, the September 1956 attacks marked the beginning of a tumultuous new period in the capital.
The explosive that Drif planted was one of three bombs placed by Algerian women in Algiers that day — a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that enraged and terrified Europeans in the city. The French military spent the following year identifying and dismantling cells of fighters and supporters of the independence movement. Thousands were rounded up and detained, including Drif. Many were tortured or killed — and many others disappeared entirely.
Drif had made for a somewhat unlikely militant.
Born in 1934 in western Algeria, she grew up in the French educational system but understood from a young age that in the eyes of the French, she would always be regarded as an other in her own land, she recounts in her memoir, “Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter.”
An exceptional student, she eventually moved for her studies to Algiers, where she was one of only a handful of Algerians at her boarding school. There, she met Samia Lakhdari, who would become her closest friend and later her co-conspirator in the resistance. Lakhdari died in 2012.
“Knowing everything that had happened in our country, it was clear for us there was no option but an armed struggle, and that we had to confront the French, and with violence,” Drif recalled.
The young women’s immersion in French school and ability to blend into European neighborhoods made them ideal candidates for undercover work on behalf of the movement.
On the same evening in 1956 that Drif planted a bomb in the Milk Bar, Lakhdari and her mother posed as Frenchwomen and placed a bomb in a popular cafe. Another female combatant, Djamila Bouhired, planted a third bomb in an Air France office the same day, but it failed to detonate. The victims included children, some of whom required amputations due to the severity of their injuries.
A framed photo of Drif, then 22, immediately following her arrest in September 1957, on display in her son’s home in Algiers. (Siobhán O’Grady/The Washington Post)
Before the explosion, Drif managed to exit the ice cream bar unnoticed. But she was still close enough to feel the blast a few minutes later. In a panic, she went to the home of a family friend, a Frenchwoman who had no idea Drif was behind the attacks, she recalled.
Drif played dumb as the woman expressed her anxiety over the explosions. Then she rushed to return to Lakhdari’s house.
“The instructions were not just to drop the bomb, and to leave before it exploded, but to not get arrested,” she said. “We had to come back, because if we were arrested, it would practically have been a failure.”
Their attacks were famously depicted in “The Battle of Algiers,” an acclaimed 1966 film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo that reenacts some of the critical moments of the Algerian resistance in the capital and the French crackdown. The film, considered controversial in France, was temporarily banned by authorities there.
After the bombing, Drif continued to work in secret for the armed wing of the National Liberation Front, or FLN, which would go on to become the country’s ruling party after independence.
She was arrested at a hideout in the casbah in 1957 but freed five years later, when Algeria declared independence in 1962, sparking the mass exodus of Europeans from the country.
Drif went on to marry Rabah Bitat, one of the masterminds of the independence movement and later a prominent politician and interim president of Algeria. She worked as a lawyer and eventually became the vice president of Algeria’s senate. The couple also raised three children before he died in 2000.
Two years ago, when an enormous wave of peaceful, anti-government protests swept Algiers, Drif said she felt as if the youth of Algeria had “picked back up the torch” from her generation.
Unemployment was spiking and frustration was running high with the longtime president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, himself a veteran of the independence struggle, and his network of powerful military officials, businesspeople and politicians — known as Le Pouvoir, or the Power. Drif said she saw the protests as proof that the new generation was “profoundly attached to their country.” Bouteflika was ultimately forced to resign.
Algeria’s newly appointed prime minister, Ayman Benabderrahmane, tested positive for covid-19, Algerian state TV said Saturday. He will quarantine, but continue work virtually, the report said.
For Drif, the passion that younger Algerians displayed left her feeling more heartened about the country’s future.
They “were fighting for the same principles we fought for, meaning a country that is governed by its children,” she said.
