Responding to this panel’s focus on new waves in Maghribi history, including the recent historian interest in the post-independence, this contribution will concentrate on the first years of North-African independence. It will focus on the ways in which city youth, in particular students, have developed practices allowing them to connect or reconnect with the peasantry or the countryside of their countries. Focusing on Algerian youth and to a lesser extend on Tunisian students, it will describe and analyze several such practices that developed in the 1960s and the 1970s, when young men and women from the cities had the opportunity to travel to the countryside and enter in dialogue with peasants and their families. These practices are of three types: the Algerian Volontariat de la Révolution agraire, or agrarian revolution brigades of volunteers (who went to the countryside to explain the Agrarian revolution to the peasant as well as give courses in reading and writing); amateur theater troops that circulated to collect information and inspiration for their creations; and finally students who took part in research projects in sociology, anthropology or even popular literature that also brought them to the countryside. This question of how young people of the cities attempted to connect or reconnect to the peasantry takes place in a context that is both demographic and political: in the first years of independence, the major demographic transformation at work was the migration of rural populations to the cities (accelerated in the case of Algeria by war and it’s 1962 resolution). Many of the young men and women who took part in these returns to the countryside were the first city-born generation in their family and often also the first educated generation. This paper will explore how reconnecting with the countryside may have been a way of dealing with such rapid demographic change. The peasantry and the countrysides were also at the core of nationalist discourses (in particular in the more populist Algeria) and the experience of direct knowledge of peasant life can also be analyzed as a means of insuring a form of legitimacy in the new societies that were emerging from independence. This contribution is based on interviews conducted with participants in such forms of return to the countryside, as well as on the books presenting the research in which, as students in anthropology or sociology, they participated.