In the annals of colonial brutality, few stories capture the horror and resilience of the human spirit like that of Zuleikha Al-Shayeb. Captured by French forces during the Algerian War of Independence, she was denied the protections of a Prisoner of War under the Geneva Convention. Instead, on October 15, 1957, the French dragged her through the streets of Algiers, chained to a Land Rover. Her skin peeled away as she was paraded like a trophy, while loudspeakers blared a chilling warning: “This is the fate of those who resist French rule. France will show no mercy, not even to women.”
France, the nation that gave the world the ideals of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” revealed a darker face in its colonies. The psychiatrist Franz Fanon, in his 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth,” captured this hypocrisy: “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them.” For Algeria, the price of French occupation was staggering—nearly two million lives lost, 18,000 villages destroyed, and chemical weapons used against civilians.
Zuleikha was no ordinary fighter. Educated and from a privileged background, she chose to join the National Liberation Front (FLN). The French feared Algerian women, understanding that to break the resistance, they had to break the women. Fanon wrote in his 1959 essay “Algeria Unveiled”: “If we want to destroy the structure of the Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women.” Zuleikha, like many women, served as a courier, hiding weapons beneath her veil.
After ten days of torture, the French took her in a helicopter and dropped her into a dense forest. She fell to her death, her body hidden from the world. For 27 years, her fate remained a mystery until an Algerian villager, who had buried her remains, came forward in 1984. She was positively identified.
France did not formally acknowledge its atrocities in Algeria until September 13, 2018, when President Emmanuel Macron admitted to acts of barbarism and pledged to open archives on disappeared civilians and soldiers. He spoke of Maurice Audin, a mathematics professor who died under torture, and acknowledged that the French Parliament’s 1956 special powers “laid the ground for terrible acts, including torture.”
Zuleikha Al-Shayeb remains a symbol of unyielding resistance. As the Zulu proverb says: “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.” She is a rock that the French could not break. Her story is a call for accountability—for colonial apologies and reparations. Algeria, which later supported liberation struggles across Africa, including Nelson Mandela’s fight, honors her memory. May the souls of Algerian patriots rest in power.
