Oum El Bouaghi Province
Ben Bella's autogestion experiment met the Aures high plains. Salt marshes, barite mines, and perpetual bureaucratic subdivision—identity always in transition.
Oum El Bouaghi demonstrates Algeria's revolutionary idealism and its collision with geography. In the first years after independence, Ahmed Ben Bella chose this high-plains region to showcase autogestion—worker self-managed farms where laborers shared in management and profits. The experiment required ideal conditions. The Aures high plains offered 500mm annual rainfall and established grain cultivation. It wasn't enough.
The province's identity has been perpetually in flux. The French called the capital Can Robert, then Sidi R'Ghis; it became Oum El Bouaghi before independence. In 1974, the province was carved from Constantine. In 1984, Khenchela and Mila were carved from it. Bureaucratic mitosis on top of colonial renaming on top of Ottoman administration.
Today the province functions as a trading center for wheat, barley, figs, and olives grown in the surrounding high plains. Salt marshes (chotts) provide seasonal grazing for livestock. Underground, the Ain Barbar barite mine supplies drilling-grade material for oil and gas operations. ALGRAN operates a dolomite quarry at Djebel Taioualet. The autogestion farms are history. What remains is a diverse economy neither fully pastoral nor fully industrial—a province that never found a single identity because the landscape wouldn't allow it.