Ahmed Ben Bella

Ahmed Ben Bella was born in Maghnia, French Algeria, near the Moroccan frontier, on the twenty-fifth of December 1916, to a family of Moroccan descent — his father a farmer and small trader. (Ben Bella later maintained he was truly born in 1918, his father having added two years to his civil record so the boy could sit an examination.) Schooled first in Maghnia and then in Tlemcen, he met the sting of colonial prejudice early, and it planted in him a lasting refusal of imperial rule.

He served in the French army during the Second World War, earning the Croix de Guerre for manning an anti-aircraft post during the invasion of 1940, and afterward the Médaille militaire — decorated for valor in the Italian campaign, including the fighting at Monte Cassino. Yet the France he had defended would not grant his people dignity at home. In 1954 he became one of the nine "historic chiefs" of the revolution, a leader of the National Liberation Front (FLN), coordinating arms and strategy from Cairo through the longest of Africa's anti-colonial wars.

Captured in 1956 when his aircraft was forced down, he spent six years in French prisons — emerging in 1962 to a free Algeria. He was named head of government that September, and on the fifteenth of September 1963 became the first President of independent Algeria, championing Arab socialism and pan-African solidarity. Algiers under his hand became a haven for revolutionaries from across the world.

In June 1965 his defense minister, Houari Boumédiène, overthrew him, and Ben Bella endured years of imprisonment and house arrest before exile and, in time, return. He died in Algiers on the eleventh of April 2012, and his nation laid him to rest with honor at El Alia. May the founder of a free Algeria be remembered as long as his people are free.