Bou Saâda

Bou Saâda grew where a permanent stream leaves the Ouled Naïl mountains and waters a palm grove at the edge of the Hodna basin, the last dependable water before the desert. A settlement of gardens and a fortified ksar had formed by the medieval period, and the town lived on the exchange between two worlds: grain, dates and fruit from the oasis against wool, meat and hides from the nomadic tribes of the steppe. Its name, understood as 'place of happiness', belongs to that role as a halt on the caravan roads between the Tell and the Sahara.

French forces occupied the town in 1849, during the campaign that pushed the army south through the plateaus, and Bou Saâda became a garrison post and the seat of a military administration overseeing the tribes of the Ouled Naïl. A new quarter of straight streets, barracks and a market square was laid out below the ksar, and a settler-built mill was put up on the wadi.

From the 1880s the town became a destination for European painters and writers drawn by the light, the gardens and the desert beginning just beyond. Étienne Dinet first came in 1884, bought a house in the town in 1903 and spent three quarters of each year there, converted to Islam, took the name Nasreddine and was buried in Bou Saâda after his death in 1929; his work made Bou Saâda one of the best-known names in Orientalist painting. Since independence the town has grown outwards with housing and light industry while the old ksar has been steadily emptied.

Bou Saâda sits in the country of the Ouled Naïl, a large Arab-Bedouin confederation whose name the mountains behind the town carry, and the culture is that of the steppe: unhurried greetings, strong obligations of hospitality, and poetry recited and sung to the gasba reed flute and the bendir drum. Saints'-day gatherings, the waadas, bring families in from the surrounding country for communal meals, and fantasia displays of charging horsemen firing powder rifles are staged at weddings and festivals.

The town's second identity is artistic. Dinet's paintings of Bou Saâda's streets, gardens and festivals hang in museums in France and Algeria, and the museum and tomb keep his memory locally; other painters followed him, and the town still appears in Algerian writing as shorthand for the oasis on the desert's edge. That reputation has always sat awkwardly beside the realities of colonial-era tourism, including the trade in images of Ouled Naïl women that circulated in Europe on postcards.

Craft is the other continuity. Bou Saâda is known across Algeria for the bousaadi, a slim, curved-handled knife made by local smiths, and for knotted woollen rugs, palm-fibre work and the white burnous cloaks worn by older men. Religion has a strong local focus in the Sufi zawiya at El Hamel, a few kilometres away, which has drawn students and pilgrims since the 19th century.

About 126,000 people lived in Bou Saâda at the 2008 census, which makes it the second most populous commune of M'Sila province after M'Sila itself. The population grew quickly through the later 20th century as families from the steppe settled, and the newer districts of flats and low villas now cover far more ground than the old ksar.

Work is in trade, administration, building, small workshops and the oasis gardens, which still produce dates, pomegranates, figs and vegetables from plots watered by channels from the wadi. Sheep matter as much: the surrounding steppe is grazing country, livestock markets serve herders from a wide area, and the weeks before Eid al-Adha are the busiest of the trading year. Knife-making, rug-weaving and leather work continue on a small scale, partly for visitors from elsewhere in Algeria.

Life is organised around the heat. Shops open early, close through the middle of the day in summer and reopen in the evening, when the main street and the café terraces fill and the gardens are watered. Water supply, drought and the slow advance of sand are constant worries, and the emptying of the old ksar — where mud-brick houses collapse when they are no longer maintained — is a recurring local issue. Young people leave for Algiers or the coast for study and work, and return for family occasions.

The dish most associated with Bou Saâda is zviti: roasted hot green peppers, garlic and salt pounded in a wooden mortar with crumbled flatbread and olive oil into a fiery paste eaten straight from the bowl, usually with more bread and a glass of buttermilk to cool it. It is a herders' dish in origin, quick, cheap and hot enough to be a point of local pride.

Around it is the cooking of the steppe. Couscous, steamed and served with mutton and a thin vegetable stew, is the Friday and family dish; méchoui, a whole lamb roasted slowly over embers or in a pit, marks celebrations; chorba with cracked wheat and chakhchoukha, torn flatbread in a spiced mutton sauce, appear in homes and small restaurants. Bread is baked as flat rounds at home or in the neighbourhood ovens, and grilled skewers of lamb and liver are the standby of the town's eating places.

The oasis supplies the sweet side: dates eaten plain or with lben, the salted buttermilk, and worked into rfiss, a crumble of semolina or bread with dates and butter, and into makroud, the fried semolina cakes filled with date paste and dipped in honey. After the spring rains, desert truffles dug on the steppe, the terfas, are sold at the roadside and cooked in sauce with meat. Strong green tea with mint accompanies all of it.