Mouloud Mammeri was the principal Berber-Algerian writer, ethnographer, and linguist of the twentieth century. Born in 1917 in Taourirt-Mimoun in the village of Aït Yenni in Greater Kabylia, he was educated at French lycées in Rabat and Algiers and at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied classics and modern letters before returning to Algeria as a teacher.
His literary work — the novels La Colline oubliée (1952), Le Sommeil du juste (1955), L'Opium et le bâton (1965), and La Traversée (1982) — established him as one of the principal voices of Algerian and broader Maghrebi francophone literature. His ethnographic and linguistic work was the more sustained project: the collection and editing of Si Mohand u M'hand and the wider corpus of Kabyle oral poetry, the critical edition of Yusuf u Qasi Sidi M'hand u-Lhusin's Cheikh Mohand u-Lhusin (1989), the Tajerrumt n tmazight (Berber grammar, 1976), and the Lexique français-touareg (1980).
In March 1980, the Algerian authorities cancelled a public lecture that he was scheduled to deliver at the University of Tizi Ouzou on ancient Kabyle poetry. The cancellation triggered the protests of the Berber Spring of April 1980 — the foundational political event of the modern Amazigh movement — and made Mammeri the central intellectual figure of post-independence Berber cultural politics, a role he held with notable reluctance.
He died in a road accident near Aïn-Defla on 26 February 1989, returning from a conference in Morocco. His funeral at Aït Yenni was attended by tens of thousands; his archive is preserved at the Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi Ouzou, founded the same year and named in his honour.