In “Caledoun”, the long exile of the “Kabyles of the Pacific”

Between 1864 and 1897, more than two thousand Algerians were relegated to New Caledonia. Among them, the instigators of the great Kabyle (cabyle) insurrection of 1871.

A look back at an unknown deportation.
After 140 days at sea, Vou Mezrag Mokran, number 2922, disembarked from the boat “Calvados”. We are on January 18, 1875. Under his feet, New Caledonia, its white sand and turquoise waters. The land of the “great punishment” and its colonial prison at the end of the world. Two years earlier, he was sentenced to death, sentence commuted to deportation, “guilty of incitement to civil war and complicity in looting and burning in the province of Constantine and Algiers in 1871”.
Like him, more than 2,000 North Africans, the vast majority of them Kabyles, were sent, between 1864 and 1897, to this prison in the Pacific nearly 20,000 kilometers from their native land. Upon arrival, the detainees are sorted. On the left, towards Nou Island, they “transported”, the common law convicts. On the right, towards the Isle of Pines, the “deportees”, the political convicts. It was there, on a land of plains described in the “Official Journal of the French Republic” of September 3. 1872, as “fertile” and with “lush” vegetation, that Bou Mezrag Mokran remained thirty years in forced exile.
Cross tattooed on his right arm as a distinctive sign, in his thirties, the man is the most famous captive of the empire. In 1871, he was at the head of the “Kabyle insurrection”:
In the terminology of the French settler, the name Mokran is made Arabic and Muslim by transforming it into “Cheikh Al Mokrani”. This same French who knows no case of conscience buried him in a cemetery they called “the Arab cemetery”. An Arab cemetery to bury only the kabyles. Sadism in the smallest detail.