Oral tradition in the Casbah of Algiers

The most important fact about how information moved in the Casbah is architectural. The roof terraces are flat, they sit at much the same level as their neighbours, and they are connected. Residents moved from house to house across them without using the street at all, and Zeynep Çelik describes the rooftops as an alternative public realm extending over the entire city.

That mattered socially before it mattered in any other way. The street was public and effectively male; the house and the terrace were private and effectively female. So the Casbah had two circulation systems stacked on top of each other, and the upper one belonged to households and to women, who could cross the quarter, meet and talk without ever appearing at street level.

Any account of what was said and passed on in this quarter has to start there. A great deal of it was said on roofs.

At street level, the documented sites of sociability are the fountain, the bath and the café. The suburban aqueducts of Algiers supplied the principal cafés of the countryside outside the walls, described in the scholarship as high places of male sociability, along with drinking troughs on the main roads. The hammams were a daily fixture, about a hundred of them at their height.

Inside the house, the well in the courtyard was used and maintained mainly by women, who were responsible for the household's water. The courtyard is therefore the room where the domestic day was organised, and it is the room the street cannot see into.

One documented form of oral transmission in the Casbah is the place name, and it is more informative than it sounds.

Wells commonly gave their names to the districts around them, so that the hydraulic culture of the city is recorded in its street names. Two Algiers names still carry it: Birkhadem, and Birmandreis, a contraction of Bir Mourad Raïs, the well of the corsair captain Mourad.

After independence the same medium was used deliberately. Streets in the Casbah were renamed for the dead of the war: the Rue de la Grenade became Kheireddine Zenouda, the Rue Kléber the Rue des Frères Bachara, the Rue de la Lyre the Rue Ahmed Bouzrina, and the Rue des Abderames, where Ali la Pointe was killed, is now the Rue Bessa Lakhdar. Natalya Vince reads the naming of a major Algiers boulevard for Hassiba Ben Bouali as an explicit attempt by the post-independence state to write an official collective memory into public space.

That is oral tradition being overwritten by official memory, in the most public medium a city has.

The Casbah is strongly associated with chaabi, the popular song of Algiers, and with the Andalusi repertoire that preceded it. This page does not set out that history, because no source meeting this site's standard could be found for it. What exists in English is largely uncited, and the serious work is in Arabic and French and was not accessible when this page was written. Rather than repeat unsourced claims about who invented what and when, the page leaves it out.

That gap is not an accident of research. Algeria has twelve elements inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage lists and none of them is from Algiers, as the culture page sets out. A tradition that has never been through a formal inventory has no institutional description to cite.

There is also a harder reason. Oral tradition lives in continuity of population, and the Casbah's population did not stay continuous. The quarter went from about twelve hundred traditional buildings in 1962 to roughly four hundred surviving dwellings by 1992, with families moving out of collapsing houses throughout.

If you hold recordings, a family collection, or published scholarship on the oral culture of this quarter, that is exactly the kind of correction this site wants. Please write to admin@casbah-alger.com.