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In 1939, Albert Camus and Mohamed Bensalem, another journalist for Alger républicain, made the unique choice of sharing the pen name ‘Antar’. This unusual phenomenon warrants an analysis of Bensalem’s trajectory, and an exploration of the various meanings that the name ‘Antar’ might have carried in colonial Algeria, in order to better elucidate its use by both Camus and Bensalem. This investigation sheds light on interethnic ‘contact’ between members of the same militant organisation, the limits of their fight for equal rights, and Camus’s stand on Algeria at that time, as compared to his revised position in the 1950s.