Algeria

From Numidian kings and Roman Hippo to the war of independence and the Hirak.

Algeria, the largest country in Africa, is an ancient land of the indigenous Amazigh (Berber) peoples whose recorded history begins with the Numidian kingdom of Massinissa and the Roman cities of the coast, among them Hippo Regius, home of Saint Augustine. After Vandal and Byzantine interludes, the Arab-Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries reshaped the Maghreb, and a succession of Berber dynasties—Zirids, Hammadids and others—ruled before the Ottoman Regency of Algiers made the city a feared corsair power for three centuries. France invaded in 1830 and, against the long resistance of Abd al-Qadir, imposed a settler colonialism that lasted 132 years. The brutal War of Independence (1954–1962) led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) ended with Algerian independence on 5 July 1962; the decades since have seen the rule of Ben Bella and Boumédiène, the civil war of the 1990s known as the "black decade," and the Hirak protests of 2019 that ended the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika.