Upon Algeria’s independence in 1962, a group of teachers was recruited from around the Arab world to teach the Arabic language in Algeria’s the newly-Arabized school system. This new teaching corps was meant to fill a void of personnel left by the departure of the French, whose colonial education system had all but erased the teaching of Arabic for over a century. While these teachers came to fulfill a significant and immediate educational need, they would later become an point of heated controversy. Popular memory has attributed different legacies to them: they became scapegoats for the spread of Islamism, representatives of Algeria’s investment in Pan-Arabism, or symptoms of the abandonment of Algerian identity in favor of a Middle-East centric curriculum. Historical record has little concrete to say about these teachers: their number, their provenance, or their religious and political affiliations. They seem to have survived primarily in the form of rumor, particularly in histories of Algeria’s Black Decade that cite the “impression” or “popular consensus” that they radicalized Algerian youth. This paper will attempt to reconstruct the historical traces of this teaching corps through a variety of sources. Written histories of the period, published memoirs, and other historical documents will be used to outline both the facts of these teachers’ presence in Algeria, and the development of (often distorted) historical memory about them. In particular, this paper will focus on one less-examined place that memory of these teachers has survived: fictional literary portraits of the school. Algerian novels, especially those written in French, often portray foreign teachers as “new colonizers” intent on destroying Algerian culture and indoctrinating its students. Contrasting books in both French and Arabic, written both by Algerians and (in at least one case) non-Algerians who spent time there teaching Arabic, this paper will trace the reputation of this controversial teaching corps. It will illuminate the traces they left in literature, and the persistence of the metaphor in Algeria of these teachers as “new colonizers” and Arabization as a “new colonialism.”