Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
These students who changed the course of history
Sixty-eight years ago, on May 19, 1956, hundreds of Algerian students and high school students launched, across all cities, the largest student rebellion of the colonial era.
Dozens of them will follow the call of the General Union of Algerian Muslim Students (UGEMA), mortgaging their intellectual future for the oh-so-important adventure once upon a time for the future of the Algerian nation that many hoped would be free and independent, less than two years after the start of the armed struggle.
This strike will then be one of the most important political acts of the war of national liberation. She has had a considerable impact on young people around the world.
Sixty-eight years celebrated by young generations of Algerian high school and university students now numbering in the millions, and who at each stopover in this spring month revisit the challenge dared by young intellectuals, many of whom had just come out of adolescence.
Several of them responded to the call from the front and the National Liberation Army and, the day after May 19, joined the resistance.
If three categories stood out from this young intelligentsia, those affiliated with telecommunications and health and care, several had the mission of closely following, via the French press, colonial strategies, and also had the mission of writing reports for the revolutionary network.
Dozens of others were sent abroad to continue their studies or receive training. They were destined to become the leaders of independent Algeria.
It was also a strong signal of the commitment of the young elite alongside the mujahideen, whose numbers were growing. This movement then surprised colonial France which, however, had, after decades of procrastination, authorized “Muslim Algerians” at the beginning of the 1950s to continue their secondary and, therefore, university studies, then reserved only for the sons of settlers, feet -blacks and offspring of the military.
A movement whose shock wave ended up corrupting French students in Algeria and mainland France, many of whom aligned themselves with the theses of the left-wing movements opposed to the war and whose main representative was the National Union of French Students (UNEF ). Several of them ended up allying themselves with the side of the oppressed.