1. Family

Bouzid Boushaki was born in 1935 in the French colonial town of Ménerville (now Thenia), southeast of the present-day town of Boumerdès in lower Kabylia, about 50 km east of the large city of Algiers and the eastern limit of the plain of Mitidja, and his The noble family belongs to the social class of the Chorfas Morabitone, who descend from the Malikite Muslim theologian Sidi Boushaki (1394-1453), founder of the Zawiya of Sidi Boushaki in 1442 in the 15th century.

His father, Mahamed Boushaki (1907-1995), was born in the ancestral village of Soumâa, south of Ménerville, and had become a wealthy merchant in the Algiers department, and his mother is Fatma Stambouli (1912-1938), originally from the village of Talilt (Aïth Si Ali) in the current commune of Beni Amrane, south of the province of Boumerdès, and Mahamed had settled with his father, the politician Mohamed Seghir Boushaki (1869-1959), in the center of the city of Ménerville, where he managed with his two brothers Ali and Mohamed a Moorish café (known as Café Bouzid) next to the pharmacy of Jérôme Zévaco, long elected or appointed mayor of Ménerville.

Bouzid was the second child in the family after his older brother Boualem Boushaki (1931-2003), and both were born in the family home, a large villa located on Rue Verdun (now Rue Hocine Koubi) in the Cité Siegwald, near that of the city's train station, among the houses of the French pieds-noirs.

In fact, the Boushaki Berber tribe had played an important role in the resistance against the French since July 5, 1830 during the French conquest of Algeria and the invasion of the Kasbah of Algiers, and Sheikh Ali Boushaki (1809-1846 ) had been an acolyte of Emir Abdelkader and Sheikh Mohamed ben Zamoum in the anti-colonial guerrilla until his death in 1846 during a battle with the colonial troops of the Army of Africa in the region of the Col des Beni Aïcha (Tizi Naïth Aïcha).

The French massacres against the Kabyle villagers around Ménerville, from the 1837 expedition to the Mokrani revolt in 1871, left their aftermath in the collective memory of the indigenous survivors, and Bouzid Boushaki drew his commemorative reference from this oral narrative that recounts the arrival of the French to the stronghold and the bosom of his ancestors and the murder of his great-great-grandfather Sheikh Ali Boushaki in 1846 in the middle of battle, and the repeated destruction of the Zauía of Sidi Boushaki by soldiers of the French army , as well as the expropriation of hundreds of hectares of agricultural land and its concession to farmers in mainland France.

2. Education

Bouzid Boushaki entered the first year of primary education in September 1942 at the Ménerville boys' school in the company of several native Algerians among dozens of French children of the pieds-noir settlers of the neuralgic city.

His classmate was his paternal cousin Rabah Boushaki, son of Ali Boushaki and Fatma Bouchou, as well as his Muslim co-religionists Omar Rahmoune, Chakir Tadjer, Noureddine Mokhtari, Mohamed Bourenane, Ali Bouhaddi, Mohamed Belaïd and Ali Laoufi.

Their educational path was already defined, since the natives did not have to go beyond the primary cycle, and were guided during their short schooling to compensate only for their illiteracy in the French language, which was intended to prepare them to become hard-working professionals with precarious jobs in the colonial administration.

Indeed, his older brother Boualem Boushaki had been expelled from the fourth year of primary school in June 1942 to get a small job in the city with the pieds-noirs, but his father Mahamed Boushaki quickly put him on the path to Koranic education in a Zawía of the region of Alma (currently Boudouaou), called Zawía of Sidi Salem.

Starting in the fall of 1942, and in the midst of Operation Torch during the Second World War that devastated the European continent, Boushaki began to stand out in these primary studies where he began a tough competition with his French rival named André Ferrer, despite the fact that The Settler Alfred-Henri de Sulauze, then mayor of Ménerville, did much to maintain the academic success that only the French enjoyed.

Bouzid then clung to his school studies, and his brother Boualem urged him not to abandon his zaouia, and the end of the Second World War saw the return of mayor Jérôme Zévaco, who had been dismissed from his duties in 1939, and this return After the massacres of May 8, 1945, it was accompanied by a policy of calm and assimilation that wanted to gain the sympathy of the natives through school and employment.

Despite the heaviness and repression of the French colonial Empire system, Boushaki finally passed his sixth-year primary school exam with merit on July 6, 1948, ahead of his other pied-noir colleague, Yvon Rocamora, and the press. Algerian newspapers disseminated these results on several occasions, in this case the newspapers Alger Républicain and L'Écho d'Alger.

3. War of Independence

From November 1, 1954 and the day after the outbreak of the Algerian independence revolution, when he was only 19 years old, he was well prepared intellectually, politically and physically to rally and support the Algerian nationalist insurgents against the enemy colonial troops with the aim of definitively extirpating and overthrowing the French colonial system from the land of Algeria.

But with the ascending and growing course of the violent war action against the armed French and the pied-noir settlers shortly before the organization of the Soummam conference on August 20, 1956 and the revolutionary structuring of the Algerian territory, the armed attacks of subversion and sabotage was entrusted to Bouzid Boushaki in the colonial town of Ménerville to relieve French retaliatory pressure on the surrounding mountainous and rural regions. This sabotage would implicate the revolutionary cell led by Boushaki in the city, which was made up of a dozen militants. These militants were to root the insurrection and perpetuate it by attacking the interests of the French settlers in this strategic city of Ménerville (currently Thénia), which was located just 3 km north of the native village of Boushaki called Soumâa.

His older brother, Boualem Boushaki, who worked as a nurse at the Ménerville hospital, supervised the operation and provided him with the information necessary to prepare the placement of the bomb in the Post Office compound in front of the commune headquarters of the city and the delivery of These explosives had to be made before the night of July 14, 1956, coinciding with the French festivities related to this important annual occasion, the National Day of France. The bomb explosion made headlines and the Algerian and Parisian metropolitan press, especially from this P.T.T. office. It was placed in front of the French gendarmerie brigade that guaranteed the pacification of the city and the dismantling of the Algerian revolutionary networks to compensate and counteract the various sabotage actions that targeted colonial agricultural properties around this strategic route of the city. .

Bouzid's cousins, such as the revolutionary leader Yahia Boushaki (1935-1960) and the resistance fighter Mohamed Rahmoune (1940-2022), roamed the maquis surrounding Ménerville and attacked the agricultural and military interests of French settlers, as well as like public opinion. The city had to be turbulent and abrupt, even if these revolutionary actions ended with the death of martyrs (shahid) on the field of honor, and this is how Bouzid Boushaki and his sabotage cell ambushed in the city had to support the efforts of the warriors of the National Liberation Army (ALN) in their insurrectional division based in Ménerville, in the middle of the third war district, in the first independence region, east of the historic fourth wilaya.

4. Prison

Bouzid Boushaki was subjected to a violent arrest on July 4, 1956 by the French police and the French army at his family home located in the town of Ménerville, in Siegwald, and this early arrest occurred following an intelligence leak that provoked the post office. bombing operation derailed and failed, and thus almost all members of the urban rebel cell were kidnapped and tortured before being killed or imprisoned. The great torture was carried out against Boushaki and his collaborators in the Ferme Gauthier torture and physical violence camp located north of the city of Souk El Had.

Bouzid was then horribly tortured with electric shocks from the Gégène and suffered brutal trauma while also being buried and caged with his cousin Mohamed Rahmoune in the wine vat pits of this winery transformed, among other agricultural sites, by the executioners Scarfo and Mathieu in concentration camps and extrajudicial physical elimination.

Many detainees in this sinister and abominable place of torture and immoral and filthy abuse succumbed to the bruises, shocks, pain and ill-treatment they suffered. Thus, their bodies and remains were hidden in wells or thrown into the waters of the Isser River, and the two rebel leaders, Bouzid Boushaki and Mohamed Rahmoune, were transferred by miraculous luck, after a few weeks of torture, to the Serkadji prison in the Kasbah of Algiers with local leaders of the revolution to be judged.

5. Death

Bouzid Boushaki died in 2023 in his house located on Ali Anou Street, next to the villages of Soumâa, Gueddara and Meraldene.

He was then buried next to his father, Si Mahamed Boushaki (1907-1995), and near his grandfather Mohamed Seghir Boushaki (1869-1959), and his brother Boualem Boushaki (1931-2003), in the Muslim cemetery of Thénia called Djebbana El Ghorba.