Ferhat Mehenni is the founder of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK) and the principal contemporary advocate of Kabyle political autonomy. Born in 1951 in Maraghna in the Tizi Ouzou region of Greater Kabylia, he began his career as a musician, founding the group Imazighen Imula in 1973 — among the first to perform contemporary Kabyle song that openly named its political horizon.
His political career emerged from the cultural mobilisations of the 1980s. He was among the founders of the Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocratie (RCD) in 1989, served as a Tizi Ouzou deputy in the Algerian National Assembly from 1997 to 2002, and broke from the RCD during the Black Spring of 2001 over what he characterised as inadequate political support for the Aârouch movement. The Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia, founded in June 2001 in the wake of the Black Spring, was reorganised in 2013 as the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia.
In June 2010 Mehenni proclaimed the Provisional Government of Kabylia (Anavad) from Paris, with himself as President; the government claims to represent the Kabyle people in their pursuit of self-determination and operates as an exile institution funded principally by the Kabyle diaspora in France. He has been the subject of repeated Algerian judicial proceedings in absentia.
Mehenni's son Ameziane was killed in Paris in 2004 in unclear circumstances widely treated in Kabyle public opinion as a politically motivated assassination. He continues to lead the MAK and the Anavad from Paris and Brussels, where the Kabyle diaspora's media, cultural, and political institutions are concentrated.