Myth and Counter-Myth: “The Berber” As National Signifier in Algerian Historiographies

Radical History Review

Volumn 2003, Issue 86, 2003, Pages 66-88

  McDougall, James ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85135297349     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2003-86-66     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. I use Maghrib (occident, the classical Arabic designation for the westernmost part of the Islamic world) and North Africa interchangeably to refer to the area comprising the present-day states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. “Maghrib” is the proper Arabic transliteration and has been used in the text. The proper French transliteration is “Maghreb” and has been used where appropriate in the notes. All unmarked translations in this article are those of the author.
2. The subject of these confrontations is not “the Berber question” in a simple sense, but rather a series of social conflicts whose articulation has occurred, in a sequence of interrelated forms, through the idiom of Berber/Arab opposition. On the “Berber Spring” of March/April 1980, and the commercial and bureaucratic class interests involved, see Hugh Roberts, “Towards an Understanding of the Kabyle Question,” Maghreb Review 5.5–6 (1980): 115–24. In 2001, the issues involved ranged from the status of Tamazight and cultural pluralism to unemployment, insecurity, and the accountability of the security forces.
3. For more detail on the colonial period, see Charles-Robert Ageron, “Du mythe kabyle aux politiques berbères,” in Le mal de voir: Ethnologie et orientalisme: Politique et épistémologie, critique et autocritique, ed. Henri Moniot et al. (Paris: Université de Paris–VII/Union des Éditions Générales, 1976), 331–48; Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: Tauris, 1995).
4. The FLN pursued the war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and subsequently became the single party of independent Algeria, ruling until 1989.
5. Ali Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie, 1925–1940: Essai d’histoire sociale et religieuse (Paris: Mouton, 1967), 93.
6. Salem Chaker equivocates as to whether it had existed here, too, in antiquity, and was effaced by Arabization—and, indeed, as to whether the general use of the term in antiquity can be assumed among indigenous populations or is only ascertainable as a Latin literary usage. Chaker, “Amaziγ (Amazigh), ‘le/un Berbère,’” in Encyclopédie berbère, vol. 4 (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1984), 562–68.
7. Salem Chaker equivocates as to whether it had existed here, too, in antiquity, and was effaced by Arabization—and, indeed, as to whether the general use of the term in antiquity can be assumed among indigenous populations or is only ascertainable as a Latin literary usage. Chaker, “Amaziγ (Amazigh), ‘le/un Berbère,’” in Encyclopédie berbère, vol. 4 (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1984), 565. See also M. Benbrahim, “Le mouvement national dans la poésie kabyle, 1945–1954,” Awal: Cahiers d’études berbères 1 (1985): 124–43.
8. Chaker, “Amazigh,” 567.
9. David Cherry, Frontier and Society in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 9.
10. David Cherry, Frontier and Society in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 11–12; Jean-Baptiste Chabot, Receuil des inscriptions libyques, no. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1940–41).
11. Cherry, Frontier and Society, 10.
12. Gabriel Camps, Berbères aux marges de l’histoire (Toulouse: Éditions des Hespérides, 1980).
13. Fergus Millar, “Local Cultures in the Roman Empire: Libyan, Punic, and Latin in Roman Africa,” Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968): 129–30, 133.
14. The script is now used among Amazigh communities in the diaspora, including in internet publishing (see www.tamazgha.org, the site of the Illinois-based Amazigh Cultural Association in America).
15. The script is now used among Amazigh communities in the diaspora, including in internet publishing (see www.tamazgha.org, the site of the Illinois-based Amazigh Cultural Association in America). 129. As far as I am aware, no recent research has shed any more decisive light on this question.
16. See the final declaration issued by the Second World Amazigh Congress (Agraw n Imazighen n Umad’al) in Brussels, August 7–9, 2000, available at www.tamurt-imazighen.com/tamazgha/agraw/decl_bru_080900.html (11/20/2000).
17. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27.
18. For a neat, and influential, statement along the lines Arab/Kabyle, see Eugène Daumas, La Kabylie (1856; Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 2001), 38–50. See also (esp. for the couple nomad/sedentary) Emile-Félix Gautier, Le passé de l’Afrique du Nord: Les siècles obscurs (Paris: Payot, 1937).
19. Daumas, Kabylie, 47.
20. Merad, Réformisme, 93.
21. Tawfiq al-Madani, Kitâb al-Jazâ’ir, 2d ed. (Cairo: Dar al-ma’arif, 1963), 9.
22. Tawfiq al-Madani, Qartâjanna fî arba’a ‘usûr, 2d ed. (Algiers: Enterprise nationale du livre, 1986), 17.
23. The English term berber (Fr. berbère) traditionally derives from Latin barbarus (pl. barbari), from Greek barbaros (pl. barbaroi). Camps (Berbères, 86–87) declares himself unconvinced by this etymology, preferring to see a generalization from Latin bavares, assimilated in time to barbares (but not barbari), attested by five ancient authors (whom he does not name) as the name of a tribal group among the Mauri. His alternative is of marginal impact, however, even if accepted, since the Arabic verb barbara certainly has the same force as the Greek barbaróô: to be inarticulate, jabber meaninglessly, and so on.
24. Tawfiq al-Madani, Taqwîm al-Mansûr, vol. 5 (Algiers: Matba’at Muhammad al-Muhab, 1348/1929–30), 70.
25. Al-Madani, Qartâjanna, 14.
26. Al-Madani, Kitâb, 98; emphasis added.
27. Al-Madani, Qartâjanna, 18.
28. Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75.5 (1973): 1338–46.
29. Qartâjanna, 160; emphasis added.
30. Salem Chaker, “L’émergence du fait berbère: Le cas de l’Algérie,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 19 (1980): 473–83, esp. 475–76; Chaker, “Quelques évidences sur la question berbère,” Confluences Méditerranée 11 (1994): 103–111, esp. 105–6.
31. Al-Madani, Qartâjanna, 17.
32. Al-Madani, Kitâb, 99.
33. Al-Madani, Qartâjanna, 8.
34. For example, in the work of Louis Bertrand, director of the review Afrique Latine. See the discussion in Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 196–213, and also the characteristically brief and incisive passage in Berque, Maghreb entre deux guerres (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 242–43.
35. Al-Madani, Qartâjanna, 8; emphasis added.
36. Al-Madani, Kitâb, 73. He is referring to the tifinagh alphabet, which the Berbers invented “at the dawn of history.”
37. Al-Madani, Qartâjanna, 34.
38. Duara, Rescuing History, 50.
39. The extent to which the reformists’ significance has reflected the influence, as opposed to the adoption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of their agenda by the régime (le pouvoir), is another question.
40. Préfecture, Algiers, October 15, 1937, Alger/4I/13/3(2F), Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence). The conference had agreed that their needs in general literature could be amply met by Mashreqi texts “to which nothing can be added.” Al-Madani’s Jughrâfiyat al-qutr al-jazâ’irî [Geography of the land of Algeria] was also prescribed in AUMA schools in the late 1940s.
41. Rédouane Ained-Tabet, “Manuels d’histoire et discours idéologique véhiculé,” in Comment on enseigne l’histoire en Algérie, ed. Mohammed Ghalem and Hassan Remaoun (Oran: Centre de Recherches en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle, 1995), 43. On the preoccupation with “a general view of our National History,” see also Mahieddine Djender, Introduction à l’histoire de l’Algérie, 2d ed. (Algiers: Enterprise nationale du livre, 1991).
42. Ained-Tabet, “Manuels d’histoire,” 44.
43. See also Abdelkader Djeghloul, “Nationalisme, arabité, islamité, berbérité: La crise de la conscience historique algérienne,” in Les Arabes et l’histoire créatrice, ed. Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-I, Sorbonne, 1995).
44. Al-Mili (1897–1945) wrote a two-volume History of Ancient and Modern Algeria, published between 1929 and 1932.
45. Salem Chaker, “Langue et identité berbères (Algérie/émigration): Un enjeu de société,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 23 (1984): 173. The notion of the Berber as belonging to a closed historical space is reiterated with particular force by Abdallah Mazouni, “Cultures et sociétés: Le cas de l’Algérie de 1962 à 1973,” Revue algérienne des sciences juridique, économique et politique 12.1 (1975): 151–52; Mazouni, Culture et enseignement en Algérie et au Maghreb (Paris: Maspero, 1969).
46. Rachid Yefsah, “L’arabo-islamisme face à la question berbère” in Les Kabyles: Eléments pour la compréhension de l’identité berbère en Algérie, ed. Tassadit Yacine (Paris: Groupement pour les Droits de Minorités, 1992), 106–7.
47. Mahieddine Djender, “La Berbérie, la Kabylie à travers l’histoire,” in Yacine, Les Kabyles, 62.
48. Djender, 61–64; al-Madani, Kitâb, 74.
49. Djender, 78. Compare the similar divisions over “Eastern” versus “Mediterranean” identities in Egypt throughout the twentieth century.
50. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Social Science Information 24.2 (1985): 201–2.
51. Michael Brett, “Ibn Khaldun and the Arabisation of the North Africa,” Maghreb Review 4.1 (1979): 14. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie de l’Algérie, (Paris: Presses Univérsitaires de France, 1958).
52. Maya Schatzmiller, “Le mythe d’origine berbère: Aspects historiographiques et sociaux,” Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Mediterrannée 35 (1983): 148. The significance of this might be lessened if such myths, tying “the Berber” to the Arabs and Islam, in fact “remained the [exclusive] spiritual inheritance of a restricted [lettered, elite] sector of the population, the masses of which, in general, did not in any respect share it,” as she argues pace Brett. 153.
53. Kitâb mafâkhir al-barbar, quoted in H. T. Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature (London: Longman, 1982).
54. Mohamed Harbi, “Nationalisme algérien et identité berbère,” Peuples Méditerranéens 11 (1980): 33.
55. Omar Carlier, “La production sociale de l’image de soi: Note sur la ‘crise berbériste’ de 1949,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 23 (1984): 348.
56. Duara, Rescuing History, 236.
57. Mouloud Mammeri, La mort absurde des Aztèques (Paris: Perrin, 1973), qtd. in Yefsah, “Arabo-islamisme,” 124.
58. See, for example, the magazines Tifinagh and Amazigh Voice, published in France and the United States, respectively. The climate of the late 1990s, too—antiglobalization movements, the championing of autochthonous rights (Breton, Basque, and Native American sovereignty are also addressed in some of this literature)—has massively influenced the morphology of the contemporary movement. The World Amazigh Congress’s Brussels declaration (August 9, 2000) stressed that “the Amazigh struggle is part of the vast movement of resistance to globalization, which is a movement that is in essence against cultural identities.”
59. Youcef Rezzag, “Apres 60 jours d’emeutes—la police tire de nouveau a balles reelles en Kabylie,” Le Matin (Algiers), June 19, 2001. After sixty days of rioting, the security forces in Kabylia were again responding with live ammunition.