Fadhma Aith Mansour Amrouche was a Kabyle writer and singer whose posthumously published autobiography Histoire de ma vie (1968) is one of the most extended first-person accounts of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Kabyle women's life in any language. She was born in 1882 in the village of Tizi Hibel in Greater Kabylia, the daughter of a poor widowed mother in a village from which she was eventually banished as illegitimate.
She was sheltered in early childhood by the Sisters of the White Mission school at Ouadhias and converted to Christianity at adolescence — a conversion that closed off her possibility of return to the Muslim Kabyle village community and shaped the rest of her life. She married Belkacem Amrouche, also Kabyle Christian, and the family moved to Tunis around 1910, where she raised the next generation of the family.
Her seven children included the poet and broadcaster Jean Amrouche, the novelist and singer Marguerite Taos Amrouche, and several other children who did not survive childhood. The Amrouche household in Tunis became one of the principal nodes of mid-twentieth-century Kabyle diasporic intellectual life, in continuous correspondence with the broader French-speaking Maghrebi literary milieu.
Histoire de ma vie was completed in 1946 in Maxula-Radès in Tunisia and held back from publication until after Fadhma's death in 1967, on the request of her son Jean. The memoir traces her trajectory from Kabyle peasant childhood through the school of the White Sisters, marriage, motherhood, the family's migrations between Algeria and Tunisia, and the long late life in France; it is widely treated as the principal nineteenth-century Kabyle women's autobiography. Her Kabyle song corpus, transmitted to her daughter Taos and recorded across the 1939–1975 period, is one of the principal documentary sources for unaccompanied women's song.