Mustapha Ourrad, the murdered Charlie Hebdo editor, was an
Amazigh Algerian but he never saw the arrival of the new year 2695, Yennayer.
The Amazigh are generally known in western discourse as
Berber (al-barbar in Arabic), but given that the term derives from the Greek
barbarian, activists prefer the terms Amazigh (which means "free
man") in Tamazight language. Amazigh language and culture in North Africa
have been marginalised, if not outlawed, by regimes that have embraced Arabic
as an official language, and pan-Arabism as a national identity and
state-building strategy. This policy was the response of newly-independent
states to French colonial policies that tried to divide and rule Berber and
Arab. Tensions between Islamist and Berber activists have boiled over following
the Arab Spring uprisings.
Yennayer - the first day of the Amazigh New Year, based on
the Julian calendar - has long been celebrated in various parts of Morocco,
Algeria and Libya. Flag-waving Amazigh activists, left Algiers and began a
three-day tour of seven provinces of Algeria, under the slogan of
"Yennayer, Feast of National Solidarity". Before departing, the
"Yennayer caravan" was handed an Algerian flag and wished the best by
Mounia Meslem, Algerian Minister of National Solidarity. In neighbouring Libya,
the besieged western town of Zuwara declared a public holiday on January 13 in
honour of Yennayer, the Amazigh new year. In Morocco, civic associations
celebrated the day and circulated a petition calling on the government to
recognise Yennayer as a national holiday. The political magazine Zamane ran a
frontpage story, with the headline "Are we all Amazigh?" In Paris,
Barcelona, Stockholm, Montreal and more than a dozen American cities - with
significant North African populations - Amazigh communities are gathering this
week to celebrate the start of the year 2695 at a tense, yet hopeful, political
moment.
The Amazigh-speaking population of North Africa is estimated
to be about 20 million-strong, scattered between Morocco (where an estimated 40
percent of the population is Amazigh-speaking), Algeria (roughly 20 percent
Amazigh-speaking), Libya (10 percent Amazigh-speaking), and with smaller
communities in Tunisia and the Siwa oasis in western Egypt. There are also
approximately one million Touareg Amazighs who live in Niger and northern Mali.
North African states defined themselves as Arab, repressing Amazigh culture and
Sufi pratice. Yet over the last three decades, a cross-border Amazigh movement
has emerged, that is forcefully challenging Arabisation policies and official
narratives.
In 1980, a wave of protests and riots swept the region of
Kabylia in Algeria - that would become known as the "Berber spring"
("Tafsut Imazighen") - followed by demands for recognition of Amazigh
language and rights. And it was in 1980 that a Paris-based Algerian scholar,
Ammar Negadi, a member of the Union of Amazigh People, developed the Amazigh
calendar, honing in on 943 BC as the first year of Amazigh history; this was
the year that the Amazigh warrior Shoshenq I - a member of the Meshwesh trive
of Libya - defeated Ramses II, and made himself pharoah of Egypt.
By the late 1990s, as the Algerian civil war was winding
down, leaders in the Maghreb had grown wary of the rising power of Islamist movements
- and began to see Sufi brotherhoods and Amazigh nationalism as a political
counterforce. When Mohammed VI assumed the thone in 1999, his (limited)
cultural liberalisation brought to the fore a host of politicised Amazigh and
pan-African music groups - Hoba Hoba Spirit, Darga, Amarg Fusion, Ribab Fusion
- that insisted on singing in local vernacular and Amazigh, explicitly
challenging the pan-Arab discourse that denied North Africa's ethnic diversity.
Moroccan authorities, in the early 2000s, also introduced Tamazight instruction
in primary schools, and began Amazigh-language programming on national
television and radio. Amazigh activists would also press for a rewriting of
history textbooks that claim all Moroccans came from Arabia. Ahmed Assid, a
prominent Moroccan intellectual says that Amazigh have lived in North Africa
for millennia, yet Moroccan history textbooks claim implausibly that that
"the first inhabitants of Morocco were Berbers, came from Yemen and were
therefore Arab". In Algeria, the protests and clashes between Amazigh
activists and state authorities in 2001 would lead the Algerian government to
recognise Tamazight as a "national" but not "official"
language.
The upheavals of 2011 had a discernible impact on Amazigh
politics. In June 2011, at the height of the Libyan uprising, a radio station
appeared in Jado, in the country's western Nafusa Mountains, broadcasting in
Tamzight, a language that Gaddafi had banned for decades. Across the Maghreb,
Amazigh communities began demanding rights. In July 2011, the Tunisian
Association for Amazigh Culture was established with full support from the new
government - the first such organisation in modern Tunisan history. In Morocco,
a new constitution presented in June 2011, would recognise Amazighite as an
integral component of Moroccan national identity, and declare Tamazight an
"official" state language.
Religious conservatives took particular exception to
expressions of pre-Islamic identity. In Morocco, zealots would damage an
8,000-year-old Amazigh carving in the High Atlas called the Plaque of the Sun.
In Libya, where Amazigh leaders are fearing an all-out assault from takfiri
militias (as occurred to Yazidis in Iraq), are now pushing for an autonomous
Amazigh region in western Libya. Yet it was the Libyan civil war and the
Touareg mercenaries fleeing south who would found the short-lived Amazigh state
of Azawad in northern Mali.
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