In 2013, the political transition authorities in Libya granted minorities (Tuareg and Toubous) a quota of six seats out of sixty in the Constituent Assembly. A decision immediately denounced by the Berber community, which estimates this figure ridiculous and insufficient to defend its rights. In most of the politically Arab countries of North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya), the defense of Berber (or Amazigh) culture is an issue of identity common to the whole nation. Niger or Mali, for example, where the Tuareg community is an ethnic minority as well as a geographically concentrated linguistic minority, essentially claims regional autonomy and respect for its culture.
At the World Social Forum in Tunis in March 2013, the large crowd and the passionate debates that had accompanied the workshops on the Berber issue revealed new interest and enthusiasm surrounding it. In Morocco and especially in Libya, where the Gaddafi dictatorship had denied the very existence of a Berber culture, the newly acquired freedoms allowed the Amazigh community to more openly promote its culture and demand more rights: teaching the local language, the lifting of prohibitions on cultural events, etc.
Socio-economic conditions must be discussed first since the level of poverty and illiteracy is higher in mountainous and rural areas, where they are often the majority. Political and cultural conditions second.
Morocco’s constitutions, from 1962 to 1996, ignored the Amazigh component of Moroccan identity.
Despite the progress of the 2011 Constitution in this area (granting official status, theoretically usable in public administrations), Moroccan Berbers (nearly one in two Moroccans) wish to see their languages raised to the rank of national status, on an equal footing with Arabic. In Libya, where the Berbers of mount Nefoussa played a decisive role in the success of the 2011 insurrection against the Gaddafi regime, the Amazigh community is multiplying its actions to assert its rights, including recognition of its language. In 2013, they blockaded the Nalout oil pipeline in August and the Millitah gas pumping station in September in Tripolitania and demonstrated in front of the Parliament in Tripoli on August 13th.
The Hilalians who arrived in the eleventh century, though relatively small in demographic terms, with at most a few tens of thousands of individuals, had a cultural and socio-economic role. These incursions, known as the Hilalian invasions, have been decisive for the beginning stages of Arabization of the region. They were not characterized by direct confrontations between the Arab and Berber armies, but rather by summary occupations, systematic looting, and ultimately the permanent settlement of these tribes in the Maghrebi landscape. Berber princes among the Zirids, Hammadites, and later Almohads recruited many soldiers among these Arabs. They penetrated more and more into the countryside, living beside the Berber tribes where lifestyles that dominated the region merged.
Hardly did the Hafsids in Tunisia (1207-1574) and the Merinids in Morocco (1269-1465) vaguely attempt to redo the unity of the Maghreb to their advantage. Arabization was also reinforced by the arrival of the Andalusians driven from Spain in the 15th century, who were mostly totally linguistically Arabized Berbers.
Indeed, unlike Persia, the process of linguistic assimilation proves more effective after these events. The present-day social climate is a manifestation of Berber resistance to Arab supremacy. Most families from the Maghreb are concerned with attaching themselves to a Middle Eastern genealogy. This phenomenon is accentuated in the cities, which is why the Berber has better preserved in the countryside and the hinterland (Kabylie, Moroccan Middle Atlas, mount Nefoussa, etc), hence the stereotype that the Berbers are only primitive groups, a “people of the mountains”.
To be convinced of this, it is enough to recall the words of the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri who, in his autobiographical novel Le temps des erreur (1994), wrote about his little brothers and sisters (the story takes place in the 1950s): “Born in Tangier and Tetouan [when the author was born in the Rif], my mother speaks to them in her language, and they respond in dialectal Arabic.”
Yet, to put it mildly, the Berbers carry a very dynamic history which they can boast, the non-Berber-speakers of today are also the heirs. Since Antiquity, when they represented the majority of the North African population, the Berbers experienced a golden age through Numid’s hegemony, especially during the era of the monarch Massinissa (203-148 BC). In the Middle Ages, Berber kingdoms are numerous and active. Those of the Almoravids (1056-1147) and the Almohads (1147-1269), who seized Andalusia and Algeria and founded a brilliant civilization, perfectly illustrate this dynamism. A few centuries earlier, it was a Berber, Tariq ibn Ziyad, that the expanding Muslim empire owed the conquest of Spain between 711 and 714. Much closer to us, the rare resistance movements against European colonization in North Africa were the work of local Berbers, for example Abdelkrim al-Khattabi in the Moroccan Rif against the French and Spanish troops, between 1921 and 1926.
In rural regions, assimilation has failed, since it has not succeeded in relegating Berber languages to the background of the Arabic language.
The phenomenon is not devoid of paradoxes, as Gabriel Camps explains in his above-mentioned work: the Berber, “whether Kabyle, Riffian, Chleuh or Chaouïa, resides in an Arabized country that abandons its language and often its customs, all by finding them easily again when he returns to the countryside,” and since the mountains inhabited by Berbers constitute “the great demographic reservoir of Algeria and Morocco”, these countries have seen over the centuries and still see today ‘the share of Arab blood, already small, will be reduced to the extent that they are culturally and linguistically’.
The Moroccans, for example, having left their campaign to settle in the city and who, having sometimes changed their name, leave their children to lose their linguistic notion of Berber, are innumerable. This assimilation is thus perfectly successful, since their descendants, from the next generation, often forget that their grandparents were still defined as Berbers. It is comical to note also that in Morocco, the language of Molière seems to be the object of more attention by the Ministry of Education after only 45 years of French protectorate (a speck of dust in human history), than the Berber languages. These, though massively used on this land for several millennia, hardly begin to be taught in schools.
This permanence, more or less marked, cannot be presented as a dichotomous factor allowing to artificially separate “Arabs” and “Berbers”. This Berber permanence is not restricted to Berber-speakers, and yet it is not always obvious. It is, however, the originality of the Maghreb both in the Arab world and in the African world.
