Abane’s prison education shaped him into the F.L.N.’s first major political intellect

Evidence

A third new figure who shared the creed of Amirouche and Zighout that terror was the ultimate weapon, but of far greater weight than either of them, was another Kabyle called Ramdane Abane. … But his real education had come in prison where he had applied himself to the voracious reading of revolutionary studies, Marx and Lenin—and even Mein Kampf—and to studying minutely the political aspects of the F.L.N. revolution. Recruited by his wartime acquaintance Ouamrane, on leaving prison in the spring of 1955 (by which time he was thirty-five) Abane was put in charge of re-organising the Algiers networks that had been so badly disrupted the previous winter. Immediately he made his mark as an outstanding political intellect, something which the F.L.N. had previously lacked. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Abane as a M.N.A./F.L.N. organizer trained in prison through radical texts parallels other colonial revolutionaries educated in detention (compare to Gandhi’s South African years, or Irish Republican prison radicals).