Lalla Fatma N'Soumer
Lalla Fatma N'Soumer was a Kabyle woman who led resistance to the French conquest of Kabylia in the 1850s. Since 1995 her remains have lain in the martyrs' section of El Alia cemetery in Algiers. Born around 1830 in the village of Ouerdja, near Aïn El Hammam, in the wilaya of Tizi Ouzou, she died in September 1863 near Tablat.
Lalla Fatma N'Soumer was a Kabyle woman who led resistance to the French conquest of Kabylia in the 1850s. Since 1995 her remains have lain in the martyrs' section of El Alia cemetery in Algiers. Born around 1830 in the village of Ouerdja, near Aïn El Hammam, in the wilaya of Tizi Ouzou, she died in September 1863 near Tablat.
Fadhma Nat Sid Ahmed was her name at birth. Her father led a zawiya, a religious school, of the Rahmaniyya order, and she learned the Qur'an as a child.
She later lived at Soumer with her brother Si Tahar, and the name of the village became part of her own. In the 1850s she joined the uprising led by Chérif Boubaghla.
In 1854 she led fighters in the Sebaou valley. On 18 July 1854, at Tachekkirt, the Kabyles defeated the forces of Marshal Randon.
Randon returned in 1857 with a much larger army, and on 11 July 1857 French troops captured her at Takhlidjt n'Aït Atsou. She was held at the zawiya of Beni Slimane until her death, aged about 33.
Her remains were moved to El Alia on 8 March 1995. Belkacem Hadjadj's film Fadhma N'Soumer, released in Algeria in 2014, tells her story. In April 2026 a study day in Béjaïa presented her as a model of the Algerian woman in resistance.
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