IMAZIGHEN, FREE HUMAN BEINGS OF
NORTH AFRICA
By Helene E. Hagan
I am an anthropologist, a native of Morocco, and a Kabyle of
Algeria.
It is with great pleasure that I
accepted the invitation to speak today on the topic of Amazigh (Berber) history
and culture. I have been in the US for
several decades, and have bemoaned long enough the absence of information about
the rich and diverse traditions of the North African indigenous culture. Today
is a day of celebration, because the day is devoted to this culture here in
Santa Cruz.
The very presence of a Berber
population in North Africa has given rise to a lot of imaginative hypotheses as
to possible origins. Suffice it to say
that today, the Yemen, Asiatic, and European origins have been debunked. The continuous presence of our people in
Africa from Paleolithic and Neolithic times has been documented.
We have seen over centuries a number of invasions. Despite the occupation of our lands by the
Phoenicians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Turks, the Arabs, the French and the
Spanish, we are still here, our language is still spoken, our artists are as
prolific as ever, and the survival of our culture a wonder.
The Land and the people.
Before I give you a very brief
overview of the history of Berbers, I would like to situate the land and the
people for you.
The territory where Berbers are
found and our language spoken extends from the Oasis of Siwa in Egypt through
Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Canary islands, Mauritania, the Sahara
Desert, Mali, Niger, and Burkina-Faso.
Our people include the Siwans,
the Libyan Imazighen, Tunisian villages, the several groups of the
Aures Mountains and Kabyle Mountains in Algeria, with the Mzab and Tuareg population in the south; in
Morocco, the Rif Mountains, (Tarifi spoken) the Atlas Mountains, (Tamazight
spoken) and the Souss Valley and Anti-Atlas (Tachlhit spoken, commonly referred
to as Chlleuh), then the several confederations of Tuareg people in the Sahara,
and sub-Sahara regions who speak the Tamashek.
The term “tuareg” like the term “Berber” is an appellation imposed from
the outside. In Tamasheq, and in Tamazight,
“Amazigh” means “Free Human Being” and Imazighen is the plural form of this
name.
In the Canary islands, the
situation is somewhat different. The Spanish invasion of the Islands brought
effective death to the language, where only a few survivals remain in the
topography of the ground. But the Guanche culture is rich in petroglyphs and
other signs of the earlier Amazigh culture, and the ancestral whistled language
of the Guanche is still alive as a means of communication. The Guanche of the
Canary Islands appear to be closely related to the Imazighen of Morocco.
Statistically, we are the most
numerous in Morocco, where we form the majority of the population, and recently
even the Ruler of Morocco has acknowledged that the foundations of the Moroccan
culture is Amazigh. The Arabic dialect spoken in Morocco, as a matter of fact,
is structurally, grammatically that is, Berber, on which was grafted a mixture
of Arabic and Berber vocabularies: the dialectal Arabic of Morocco is closer to
Berber that it is to classical Arabic, and few Moroccans indeed understand or
write classical Arabic.
Modern genetic studies have come
to confirm the socio-linguistic findings in isolating “the Berber Gene” and
finding it prevalent in the majority of Moroccans.
The Tifinagh alphabet. The presence of an alphabet linked
specifically with the Amazigh culture, the Tifinagh alphabet, is attested from
an early age, and even its link to the Phoenician alphabet – which gave rise to
the Greek and Roman alphabets of later dates – seems today to be contested. We
are finding Tifinagh inscriptions in the Sahara, in regions not occupied by the
Phoenicians, and that seem to pre-date the arrival of the Phoenicians on the
coast of North Africa. This is a very
rich domain of enquiry and scholarly research. Today, a form of neo-Tifinagh is
being adopted for writing and publishing, and the role of the Tifinagh – as
opposed to the Arab or Latin scripts – in schooling and publication, is being
debated. Is this script cumbersome, and
adequate? The Royal Academy of Amazigh
Studies in Morocco, recently chartered, opted for the Tifinagh script, and has
created some stir in doing so....
Rock art, petroglyphs and tumuli
(archaic tombs) have yielded a great deal of knowledge about the proto-Berbers,
and the beginning of the Berber population of North Africa. The whole region is a vast museum, from the
Libyc inscriptions of Tunisia, to the living open air museum of the Tassili and
Hoggar regions of southern Algeria, and
the human remains and tools found in Morocco of extremely ancient origin
testify to the early development of an autochthonous culture in North Africa.
The hypothesis of an Oriental
origin, or Caucasian origin, have been dismissed, and the presence of The
Mechtoid type of individual found in earliest burials have created a solid
ground for a new look at the local origin and development of a North African
indigenous culture from the western bank of the Nile to the Atlantic ocean. For more detailed information, if you are
interested in the pre-history of Berbers, you can consult
The Berbers” by, or if you read French, “Les premiers Berberes” by Malika
Hachid.
(Show Book. Only a few copies
in the US, hand carried by individuals.)
North Africa was once called
“Libya” by Egyptians, and Greeks.
Numerous groups of Eastern
Libyans are mentioned by Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, as early as pre-dynastic
times (i.e. 3,000 BC) on the Palermo or Libyc Stone, which lists some 50 Libyan
rulers before the advent of the First Pharaoh of Egypt.
Greek writers indicate that the
origins of several of their gods and Egyptian Gods are in North Africa,
particularly the Titans (ancestors to the Greek pantheon of gods) : the Garden
of the Hesperides and the story of Atlas gave the name of Atlas Mountains to
the Moroccan range of mountains, and in eastern Algeria/western Tunisia, it is
said that a prosperous kingdom gave rise to numerous deities, that of Tritonis.
The Lake and the River of Triton are in North African territories known today
as Tunisia and Algeria. (link to Poseidon, Neptune, and the Triton)
I would be derelict in my account
if I did not mention that the original Mother of the Gods in Egypt, the Great
He-she Deity who gave birth to all the gods, protected the throne of Egypt, and
the soul of all departed in their journey in the beyond, the Most ancient and
sacred deity NEITH, was born in Libya and is a North African deity. She was Goddess of Life and Death, and the
symbolism accompanying her was the arrows of combat, the weaving loom of
civilization, and the Bee. Her symbol of the Bee was associated with the Rule
of the Pharaons who all bore the title of “Son of the Bee” giving each of each
a real or fictive descendance from the original archaic ancestry of North
Africa.
For more on this topic, you can
consult my book “The Shining Ones, Etymological Essay on the Amazigh Roots of
Ancient Egyptian Civilization.” (2001)
I have done additional research in the last four years on the all
importance of the bee in Kabyle and Atlas Mountains traditions linked to honey,
and the bee.
The Phoenicians occupied the coast of North Africa and gave rise to a
Punic age, with the growth of trade and the commerce center of Carthage. The Romans made it the granary and
breadbasket of the Roman Empire. They established forts and communities
throughout the region, and the era of Roman rule recognized a number of Amazigh
rulers through their Provinces of Numidia in Algeria and Tunisia, and
Mauretania in the west.
It was a time of alliances with Berber groups ruled by Massinissa or Jugurtha, and the quelling of numerous rebellions of the large population of the Gaetules to the south of the Roman Limes.. A number of literary figures of the Latin literature are actually Berbers, Terence, and the first novelist of Africa to ever be published, Apuleius of Madauros. See my article, Apuleius of Madauros, published in 2000 in The Amazigh Voice, a scholarly Journal published in the United States. Unfortunately, time constraints do not allow me to go into much detail, but I have brought with me this article on Apuleius as the first Amazigh Philosopher and novelist, and copies are available on this table.
The Arab Invasions of the 7th
to the 11th centuries.
Upon the decline of the Roman
Empire, invasions of hordes of Vandals reached North Africa. Unlike the Romans
who left their marks on the culture of that region, the Vandals have left
practically no trace. The region was in disarray when the Arab invasions began,
invasions which came wave upon wave until the Beni Hillal in the 11th
century.
From the Peninsula of Arabia in
mid 7th century, forces began to march north to conquer Syria,
Lebanon and Iraq, and West to conquer Egypt, Libya, and North Africa.
The Arabs distinguished between
two types of population: there were the people who followed religions of the
book (Christians and Jews who were in fairly large number in North Africa) from
whom they exacted the jizya, a special tax which guaranteed their safety as
long as they submitted to the Arab rule and Islam: those groups were considered
“dhimmis” (second class citizens) The rest of the population, Berbers who were
polytheists had the choice of converting or death. They were considered “pagan”
and Islamic law allowed the killings and enslavement of such people.
With the First Treaty of Barca,
in Libya, Arabs set up the precedent of exacting 360 heads of women and
children as slaves in payment for war tax, annually. This exaction was repeated
throughout the conquest of North Africa, insuring an ample supply of slaves
that were shipped to Egypt, Syria and
the Peninsula of Arabia.
Arabisation did not take place
for a long time, but Islamization was immediate, and accomplished by threat or
persuasion. Rebelling chiefs of tribes were mutilated publicly to instill fear
in others along with warnings that it was useless to resist the invaders.
The most famous resistance is
that of The Kahena, a woman from a group of Jewish Berbers of the Aures
mountains who led forces of Berbers with the war cry “Onward, Lions of Judah,
onward Lions of Africa.” She was in the
end betrayed by a young captured Arab she had adopted, who divulged her
whereabouts to the Arab leaders. She was captured, beheaded and her head
shipped to Arabia.
One of her sons Gibral Tarik converted together with tens of thousands of Berbers, and they reinforced the ranks of the Arabs that crossed the Detroit of Gibraltar into Spain. Gabriel Tarik left to history the name of Gibraltar.
Slavery and booty was the mark of
several centuries of Arab invasion and rule throughout North Africa. In
Morocco, however, large Berber kingdoms continue to exist, with Berber
dynasties favoring the development and the protection of the arts, giving rise
to a rich civilization known as Andalusian, that spanned Morocco and Spain and
extended as far as Timbuktu, in Mali.
Modern nations
Today, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are considered Arabic
countries of “The Maghreb.” The Maghreb
is an Arabic term meaning “The Far West.”
It is only proper if it refers to Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, as
the motherland. It is therefore totally inappropriate for North Africa.
In Morocco, the Sultans
established their rule over parts of the land which was considered the land of
rule, the maghzen, but were unable to impose themselves on the land of
dissidence or “siba” in the hinterland. There powerful confederations of Berber
tribes continued to resist Arabic rule, and the majority of the land and its
resources were in the hands of Berber rulers. With the advent of the 20th
century, and the cannons and bullets of France, Moroccan rulers claimed rule over the entire land. At the close
of the French Protectorate Years (1912-1956) King Mohammed V received
allegiance from the leader of the Imazighen,
Pasha El Glaoui, and subsequently all his sons and heirs saw their lands
confiscated, their weapons removed, and were either killed, imprisoned, or went
into exile.
Since then, the process of
Arabization has been at its highest, and the Amazigh struggle, first completely
oppressed, went under ground, and only re-emerged in Cultural associations in
the 1980’s to become more evident and open in the 1990s.
Today, there is resurgence of
cultural forms, from traditional festivals still practiced in Amazigh territory
to cultural associations fostering regional culture, to individual artists at
the forefront of demands for equality of rights, the teaching of Tamazight in
schools, freedom of expression at all levels, with radio and television means
which are still unexistent, and progress is achieved through the work of urban
militants and rural cultural associations.
North Africa, and Morocco more
particularly, is a rich melting pot of cultures and traditions, where
indigenous peoples clung to their traditions, but remained open to outside
influences notable in the vernacular language, in mores, and in religion.
In North Africa, Judaism took a
hold and numerous tribes converted to Judaism.
When Christianity developed in the Mediterranean basin, many Berbers
converted to Christianity and gave Christendom a number of important bishops
and Saint Augustine, one of the most outstanding Fathers of the Catholic
Church. Jewish Berbers and their Moslem
neighbors share many aspects of the pre-Islamic marabout - or saint – worship and rituals around
maraboutic sacred spots. As a matter of
fact, the word “Chleuh” which has come to designate a whole group of Berbers
from the Souss Valley is originally a Judeo-Berber term. Shilah, and remote
villages of the anti-Atlas such as Tioute or Ifrane of the anti-Atlas testify
to Jewish traditions millennia old. The Judeo-Berber culture is a topic of its
own, attracting recent scholarship, after almost complete neglect in the past
century.
Traditional
music and songs, used ritually in the valleys of the Atlas mountains and the
Rif are surviving the onslaught of Islam on beliefs and practices, and even if
in some places they have become mere folkloric display, they remain alive for
many groups who form cultural associations to preserve the heritage of customs,
proverbs, poems, riddles, songs and dances which is endangered. Some still
harvest to the rhythm and call of millennia old songs. Some still celebrate
annual rituals around spring renewal, and in the summer many urban exiles
return to their valleys of origins to participate to such rituals which seal
cohesion, family and community ties. Those who remain absent are often marked
by stones, and counted in communal gatherings.
Though under severe threat of annihilation under policies of Arabization and Islamization, the rich cultural Berber or amazigh Heritage of Morocco and of all North Africa is undergoing a phase of re-emphasis, preservation, historical amplification, and overall renaissance.
NOTE:
Helene E. Hagan
is presently writing a book which will present the essential aspects of the
Tuareg culture, entitled ‘Tuareg Jewelry: traditional patterns and symbols’
scheduled to be published in the Spring of 2006.
Presented By:
THE TAZZLA INSTITUTE FOR CULTURAL DIVERSITY
313 South Lamer Street, Burbank,
CA 91506 - heh@tazzla.org