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- I remember...

- Mediterranean area.

- I remember that in high school my friends used to call my Snoopy.

- Even one of my teachers told me, “Snoopy, to the board!”

- He had a very positive look.

- That was her surname as she had no family name.

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- My friends used to say, “We will call you Snoopy, it’s friendlier, like that people won’t see you have an acronym”.

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- Sarah, your grand-parents arrived in Marseille on November 1st, 1962.

- With my eldest brother and my eldest sister.

- She was only 2 months old.

- Even though they were born in Algeria, they were considered to be Moroccans.

- During the French occupation, to easily make the difference between the Moroccans and the Algerians, the Moroccans were registered without any surname.

- They then came to live in Aubagne, where several people came from Tlemcen.

- But we were the only SNP family.

- If only I had known that in Marseille there were others, I would have felt much less lonely.

- My mother had hard times with it.

- We could not get school grants.

- My father couldn’t get a passport.

- For years, he could not see his father.

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- My brothers and sisters refused to be called SNP, so my eldest brother had himself called Amar, my grandfather’s first name.

- Aicha and Karima chose to bear my father’s first name, Larbi.

- On the letterbox, there were the 3 of them:

- SNP, Larbi and Amar.

- I used to tell them,

- “But people won’t think we belong to the same family.”

- They answered,

- “It doesn’t matter, it is an acronym, not a surname, we won’t bear it.”

- I was scared for them, a false identity.

- The director punished your aunt because of that.

- “Who do you think you are?

- To change your name?"

- .

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- In 1985, we could finally be called Bousabaa.

- We had to follow a heavy administrative process between Algeria, Morocco and France.

- When we could call ourselves Bousabaa, you can only imagine how we partied.

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- Some people fight for peace worldwide, others against diseases,

- our family had to fight for the recognition of our ancestors’ name:

- Bousabaa, “the tribe of the 7 birds”.

- As early as 1860, the French authorities impose the registering of births, marriages and deaths in Algeria.

- The Algerians then had to adopt a name while the Moroccan community of Algeria was being imposed the name “Without Any Surname”.

- Fatiha recovered the name Bousabaa before entering high school.

- The mother of a 15 year old daughter, she now bears the name Benafia, a name we can translate as “the people of the fire”.

- Larbi Bousabaa, the father of 9 children, humorously blames his daughters for not having kept their surname.

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