Khalida Toumi is an Algerian Kabyle politician, feminist, and writer who served as Minister of Culture of Algeria from 2002 to 2014, the longest tenure of any minister in the Bouteflika cabinets. She was born in 1958 in Sidi Ali Moussa in Greater Kabylia and educated in mathematics at the University of Algiers, where she joined the women's section of the Berberist student movement of the late 1970s.
Her political career emerged from the broader Berber Spring milieu and the post-1980 women's mobilisation against the proposed Algerian Family Code of 1984. As a co-founder of the Association for the Equality between Women and Men under Algerian Law (1985) and subsequently of the Rally for Culture and Democracy (1989), she became one of the principal Kabyle-feminist voices of the late-1980s liberalisation period.
The 1990s civil war made her a target of armed Islamist movements: she was sentenced to death in absentia by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in 1993 and lived under permanent police protection through the decade. Her two memoirs from this period — Une Algérienne debout (1995) and Robes noires pour l'Algérie (1996, with Élisabeth Schemla) — are principal documents of the women's-rights confrontation with armed Islamism in 1990s Algeria.
She joined the cabinet of Ali Benflis in 2002 as Minister of Communication and Culture, then from 2004 to 2014 as Minister of Culture under successive Bouteflika prime ministers. Her tenure oversaw the institutional consolidation of Tamazight teaching, the IRCAM-related standardisation work in Algeria, and the substantial expansion of the Algerian cultural-budget apparatus. Her subsequent withdrawal from public office and partial rehabilitation in the post-2019 Hirak period remain in active development.