Amazigh Indigeneity and the Remaking of Tamazgha

Imazighen, who until recently were called Berbers, are the Indigenous people of Tamazgha, and speakers of a variety of millennia-old languages known as Tamazight. Although a neologism, Tamazgha, extending from Siwa in west Egypt to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, is grounded in historical reality. Allal al-Fassi, one of the founders of Moroccan nationalism in the 1930s, was hardly sympathetic to Imazighen, but in his book The Independence Movements in Arab North Africa, he reported that this Amazigh homeland was named after the language of its inhabitants.

According to linguist Mena B. Lafkioui, some 40 million people speak several varieties of the Amazigh language. Whereas 70 percent of Tamazight speakers live in Morocco, around 25 percent live in Algeria. Imazighen are not ethnically or racially homogeneous; their definition as an Indigenous people is based on shared language.

Historically, Imazighen were subjected to multiple colonialisms by the Romans, the Arabs, the French, and the Spanish. These successive colonizations have left their impact on the territory through changed toponymy, on the language through loan words, and on the people who lost their Amazigh ancestral tongue and started identifying as Arabs. The Arab invasion in the eighth century and French colonization of Tamazgha starting in the nineteenth century have had the most enduring ramifications, which continue to threaten Amazigh futurity in the post-independence period.

France’s colonization of Algeria in 1830 and its establishment of a protectorate in Morocco in 1912 subjected most Imazighen to the authority of a centralized state for the first time in their long history. They could no longer escape daily management by military and administrative force. French historian Charles-Robert Ageron coined the terms “Berber Myth” and “Berber Vulgate” to capture what historian Patricia Lorcin summarized as “the body of thought extolling the Kabyles and denigrating the Arabs.” This colonial weaponization of Arab–Amazigh differences for the sake of colonial interests was called the Berber Policy. Its impact on Imazighen extended beyond the end of colonial rule in Tamazgha in the 1960s.

Despite its failure in Algeria, a similar policy was introduced in Morocco between 1913 and 1930. A September 1913 decree organized the modern justice system in Morocco. Another issued in May 1930, “Regulating the Functioning of Justice in the Tribes of Berber Customs,” placed all infractions committed in Amazigh tribal lands under the purview of Amazigh customary law. Mohamed Mounib, an Amazigh activist, critiqued the instrumentalization of the latter policy by Moroccan nationalists, observing that the “bourgeois elite opposed this decree, leveling multiple accusations against it”—that it was used for “separating Moroccans from each other” as well as “attempting to Christianize the ‘Berbers’ and remove them from…the authority of the Sultan.”

Misnamed the “Berber Dahir,” this decree signaled the birth of modern Moroccan nationalism in opposition to Imazighen. Since 1930, Imazighen have faced the consequences of this disingenuous use of their name to rally against France. As a result of nationalists’ fabrications, Imazighen were associated with colonialism in the popular imagination even though their areas were the last to be subdued, costing Amazigh tribes over 400,000 lives, according to Amazigh leader Mohammed Chafik.

In 1992, Abu Bakr al-Qādirī, one of the nationalist leaders, published his memoirs, including a letter issued by a group of Rabat nationalists who protested the Dahir of 1930. The letter betrayed its signatories’ anxiety over the potential for an Amazigh–Arab conflict that would lead to the expulsion of self-identifying Arabs from Morocco if Imazighen were strengthened by France. This potential fate reminded the nationalists of the Reconquista: “if Berbers are separated from the Arabs, the Arabs would become a minority…it would not be too long before what happened to our ancestors in Andalusia befalls us, too.”

These French policies in Algeria and Morocco shaped the positions of Arab-Islamic nationalism regarding Imazighen in the post-independence period. Not only were Imazighen associated with French colonialism, but there was a deliberate endeavor to keep these accusations and suspicions alive even after independence. The self-proclaimed Arab-Islamist nationalists drew on colonial policies to create a discourse that would later legitimize the de-Amazighization policies implemented by their post-independence regimes.

Independence marked the beginning of a classic state of “internal colonialism,” whereby the Arab-nationalist governments established a political system that stripped the Imazighen of their linguistic and cultural rights, subjecting them to the ideological and cultural domination of states that defined their identities in opposition to those of their Indigenous populations. For Imazighen, this official postcoloniality was worse than the French system, which mistreated all the indigènes equally; now they were singled out for treatment as second-degree citizens. French colonialism was direct and visible, whereas internal colonialism has been more hidden, even as it has used colonialist methods to homogenize intrinsically heterogeneous Amazigh societies.

Mohand Aarav Bessaoud, the Algerian co-founder of the Académie Berbère, wrote in 1963 that “it was less dangerous to call oneself a Berberist during the French presence than it is during the era of ‘Arab Algeria.’” In addition to being subjected to physical threats, Imazighen were denied the rights of citizens in their own homelands.

The administrative, justice, and health care systems were legally Arabized, and no consideration was given to the fact that a sizable number of citizens knew no Arabic. As the linguist Salem Chaker has documented, the meager gains Imazighen accumulated under French colonialism were chipped away: “decolonization would induce the brutal and almost total disappearance of the field of Berber Studies in Algeria (as it had done before in Morocco).”

Tamazight was no longer taught, research on Amazigh languages and cultures was discontinued as institutions of higher learning were reoriented to serve other purposes, and periodicals and publishing houses that supported Amazigh cultural production were stifled. The Algerian army confiscated and melted the Adolphe Jourdan publishing house’s “Lybic and Tifinagh alphabet set,” one of only two in existence (the other is owned by France). The number of radio programs in Tamazight was drastically reduced in both Morocco and Algeria.

Yet this de-Amazighizing policy preserved aspects of the French Berber Policy that suited the goals of the political regimes in Morocco and Algeria. Educated Amazigh youth realized that they were the orphaned children of independence. They became aware of the need to act urgently in order to curb the ongoing deculturation of their people.

Hailing from villages in Kabylia and the Souss, Amazigh youth were confronted with the threat of linguistic and cultural deracination due to the aggressive Arabization policy. The frustrations that resulted from the negation of their identity catalyzed the ACM. Ouazzi defined the movement as “the ensemble of agencies that contribute, based on a modern consciousness and in an individualized or collective manner, directly or indirectly, to the defense of Tamazight” and to the development of “its components, such as language, culture, and identity.” This broad definition of the ACM demonstrates its all-encompassing nature as a multifaceted consciousness-raising enterprise, traversing the fields of education, politics, business, and art, among others.

The thirteenth-century book Mafākhir al-barbar (Great Deeds of the Berbers), whose unknown author responded to his contemporaries’ racist views of Imazighen, is the clearest indication that there has always been a form of Amazigh “activism,” stemming from an understanding of their differences from their invaders throughout history. But the new consciousness, which I have defined as Amazighitude, rests on the willingness to undertake action to rehabilitate the Amazigh dimension of the homeland. Being part of the ACM means above all that one is conscious of the unjust treatment accorded to Imazighen and their language and culture.

The modern Amazigh consciousness was born in 1966 with the establishment of the Académie Berbère by a few Amazigh-speaking Algerian expatriates in Paris. They organized literacy courses, fundraising dinners, and musical events that brought diasporic Imazighen together. The centrality of Paris as a hub for Amazigh workers and students made their ideas and programs exportable to Tamazgha. The Académie Berbère was the first organization to model trans-Amazigh dialogue, even though its leadership was Algerian. Some of these dialogues proved transformative, as when Moroccan politician Mahjoubi Aherdane suggested revitalizing Tifinagh, the Amazigh alphabet, taking the recovery and modernization of Hebrew as a model.

The Académie Berbère did more than just revive the alphabet and organize events. It put Imazighen on the cultural map in Paris, serving as a beacon for like-minded exiles. Due to its successes, some members were accused by the Algerian regime of being agents of the Mossad and colonialism. A violent security campaign targeted its members abroad as well as its sympathizers back home.

The work the Académie Berbère initiated would come home to roost in Morocco. A group of Amazigh youth, living in the metropolitan areas around Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakesh, and Kenitra, formed the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange (AMREC) in 1967. Along with Brahim Akhiate, its founding members included Amazigh linguists Boujâa Hebaz, who was forcibly disappeared in 1981, and Ahmed Boukous, dean of the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture since 2003. Although the AMREC hid its real mission under the rubric of al-thaqāfa al-sha‘biyya (popular culture) to evade the watchful authorities, its activities were essential to the development of what members called al-wa‘iy al-amāzīghī (the Amazigh consciousness).

The AMREC’s multipronged activism and its apolitical stance inspired others to create more politicized entities. Hassan Id Balkassam, a Rabat-based lawyer, established the New Association for Culture and Arts, better known as Tamaynut. The founding of Tamaynut and the Inṭilāqa (Launch) Association in 1978 marked the beginning of a new pluralism in the ACM in Morocco. The Agadir Summer School was created in 1979, followed a few years later by the Telelli (Freedom) Association of Ghris in Errachidia. The growing diversity of Amazigh actors, coinciding with a period of political openness in Morocco starting in the early 1990s, created favorable conditions for activism that led to achievements in the educational, cultural, media, and constitutional realms in the 2000s.

Political parties also adopted the language of advocacy. In Morocco, the Popular Movement and its various splinter parties espoused a pro-Amazigh discourse. Founded in 1958 by Mahjoubi Aherdane and Abdelkarim El Khatib, the Popular Movement branded itself as the party of the rural hinterlands; its opponents accused it of being the monarchy’s tool for rehabilitating rural notables who collaborated with France during the Protectorate (1912–56). In response to statements Aherdane made to a French media outlet in 1986, the Interior Ministry orchestrated a coup that ousted him from the party leadership.

In 1991, Aherdane founded the National Popular Movement, in the first of several secessions that gave rise to parties that instrumentalized the Amazigh cause. None of these parties enjoyed Aherdane’s personal popularity. During election seasons, he directly addressed Imazighen in their own language on television, giving them a new sense of recognition of their existence.

In Algeria, Amazigh-accented political parties have had a more contentious history. The Socialist Forces Front was initially formed in 1963 by a group of disgruntled politicians led by Houssine Ait Ahmed, an Amazigh nationalist leader, to oppose Ahmed Ben Bella’s regime. The defection of several co-founders who rejoined Ben Bella gave the party a more regionalist, Kabylia-focused orientation. The Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), established under the leadership of Said Sadi, emerged from the convergence of the Berber Cultural Movement (as it is still called in Algeria) and the remaining members of Ait Ahmed’s party. Starting in 1988, the RCD played the role of the Kabyle party.

In April 2024, Ferhat Mehenni, the leader of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia, declared the statehood of that region—a futile move that could hurt the Amazigh cause in Algeria. Unlike their Algerian counterparts, Moroccan parties have mostly hushed their Amazigh tones. An exception was the short-lived Amazigh Democratic Party (also known as Izigzawn, or the Greens), founded in 2005 and dissolved by a court order in 2008.

Amazigh activism has drawn repressive responses in both countries. Tafsut Imazighen, or the “Berber Spring,” broke out in 1980 in Algeria when the authorities in Tizi-Ouzou canceled a lecture that anthropologist Mouloud Mammeri was slated to give on ancient Amazigh poetry. State violence against protesters was widely reported, as Algerian Imazighen demanded cultural, linguistic, and economic rights.

In Morocco, a parallel to the Algerian situation played out in the form of unspoken repression. Ali Sadqi Azaykou was jailed in 1981 because of an article he wrote on national culture. Id Balkassam was arrested for a sign in Tifinagh outside his office, and the Agadir Summer School was canceled throughout the 1980s. A new low came in 1994 with the arrest and trial of seven members of the Telleli Association of Ghris in the Errachidia Governorate for brandishing an empty banner alongside one written in Tifinagh on May Day.

A backlash from local and international human rights organizations taught the Moroccan authorities that the Amazigh question had to be approached proactively in the new global era. King Hassan II promised to include Tamazight in the media and in education, but his promises were deferred until 2001, when his son and successor Mohammed VI established the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture. In Algeria, the authorities set up the High Commission for Amazighity in 1995, as the civil war was ravaging the country. But the political repression of Imazighen continued, exemplified by the struggle of the Aarch Movement since 2001.

The pro–human rights climate of the 1990s initiated ACM members into the notion of indigeneity. They have since tried to harness its transformative potential for the Amazigh cause.

The Yakouren Seminar in 1980 formulated collective demands for linguistic, cultural, and development justice in Algeria in the aftermath of Tafsut Imazighen. The proceedings of the seminar introduced the French term autochtones (Indigenous people) in the context of colonialism and charted a path for Amazigh advocacy.

In August 1991, Amazigh associations signed the Charter of Agadir (Mīythāq agādīr), articulating a collective vision for cultural and linguistic justice for the Indigenous Imazighen in postcolonial Morocco. It has become a key document in the history of the Moroccan ACM’s push for joint efforts to pressure the state to recognize Amazigh language and culture. This Amazigh cooperation unfolded within a global context that was favorable to the rights of minoritized and Indigenous people.

When the Moroccan state ignored the demands expressed in the Charter of Agadir, Amazigh civil society moved to internationalize its activism. In 1993, Id Balkassam and Ahmed Dgherni were delegated by the Moroccan ACM to attend the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. Their mission included the distribution of a memorandum on linguistic and cultural rights. According to Id Balkassam, this document was “the general framework for the Amazigh Cultural Movement” on the international level.

The Vienna conference marked the beginning of the ACM’s integration into the global indigeneity movement. It introduced Amazigh activists to novel concepts and frameworks that other Indigenous people had developed to reflect their dispossession and disenfranchisement. In turn, as Id Balkassam noted, “The ACM contributed to the improvements that were made to the international standards, and particularly to the crystallization” of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The Moroccan ACM leaders were divided about the meaning of indigeneity, but some made notable contributions to global debates on indigenous issues. Id Balkassam went on to become the founding president of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee. Mohamed Handaine, a Moroccan historian, currently heads the committee; he is also the president of the Francophone Autochthonous Coordination group. He has given numerous speeches at UN subcommittee meetings on behalf of Amazigh delegations as well as other organizations from North Africa, the Sahel, and the diaspora, reflecting Tamazgha’s geographical reach.

In 2004, Mohamed Sibelkacim, the president of the Amazigh Tongue Association in Algeria, addressed the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva. In contrast to the ambiguous phrasing of the Yakouren Seminar, Sibelkacim clearly described the domination of Imazighen by an Arabophone state, ranging from denial of cultural rights to state violence to the lack of development projects in the Kabyle areas. He went so far as to call for granting Algerian Indigenous populations “the right to self-determination.”

The rise of the Amazigh indigeneity discourse has expanded the scope of activism to land, resources, and ecologies. The Agadir Summer School held in July 2024 was dedicated to the topic “Tamazight: Ecology, Management of Catastrophes and Territorial Development.” The theme was prompted by the earthquake that hit the High Atlas area on September 8, 2023, killing about 3,000 people and destroying or partially damaging thousands of homes in this economically impoverished region of Morocco. The earthquake revealed how Imazighen had been neglected by the state, which focused all development programs on metropolitan areas in northwest and northern Morocco.

An emphasis on territory and resources has long been conspicuous in Amazigh poetry and songs. Reflections on land expropriation have been central to historicizing Amazigh existence and denouncing the dispossession of Imazighen.

Similarly, Tamaynut has been a pioneer in organizing meetings on land grabbing and resource extraction in Amazigh areas. The latest of these meetings took place in Casablanca in 2019, identifying the state as a culprit in the ongoing expropriation. Reflecting the influence of the global indigeneity movement, the drafters of the conference’s conceptual framework wrote that “the lands of Indigenous communities have been confiscated and continue to be confiscated in cahoots with governments that no longer serve the people but are at the service of savage global capital and international banks.” Amazigh discourse has evolved from local to global concerns.

This internationalization of Amazigh activism earlier materialized in the 1995 founding of the Amazigh World Congress (AWC). As a supranational organization, the AWC has transcended national boundaries and created a trans-Amazigh spirit. This is the clearest indication of the transformation of Amazigh activism from its initial local advocacy for linguistic and cultural rights into a larger enterprise that encompasses diasporic concerns. Although the AWC has no means or authority to enforce its decisions, it does have enough moral legitimacy to shape how Imazighen think about themselves.

This type of long-term influence can be noticed in the 2011 adoption of ⵜⴰⵢⵙⴰ ⵏ ⵜⵎⴰⵣⵖⴰ: ⵉ ⵜⴽⵓⵏⴼⵉⴷⵉⵔⴰⵍⵉⵜ ⵜⴰⴳⴷⵓⴷⴰⵏⵜ ⴷ ⵜⴰⵏⴰⵎⵓⵏⵜ ⵉⵜⴱⴱⵉⵏ ⵉⴳⵓⵜⴰ, ⵉⵙⴽⵡⴰⵏ ⵅⴼ ⵓⵣⵔⴼ ⵓⵏⴱⴰⴹ ⵓⵥⵍⵉⴳ ⵉ ⵜⵙⴳⴳⵉⵡⵉⵏ (The Manifesto of Tamazgha: For a Democratic, Social, and Cross-Border Confederation, Based on the Right to Autonomy of the Regions). The manifesto contains cutting-edge formulations of citizenship, mobility, and sociocultural and economic rights, undergirded by the 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It invokes some crucial ideas that could potentially transform the entire region and contribute to building future unity based on shared Amazigh identity. Realistically, it is one step forward on the long path toward doing away with the false Arab-nationalist consciousness of many Imazighen.

The effort to anchor an imagined Tamazghan citizenship proceeds in tandem with the endeavor to rewrite Tamazgha’s history. Amazigh intellectuals have cast doubt on the veracity of Arab-Islamic-centric histories of Tamazgha, calling for a new Amazigh-centric version of their homeland’s past. Mohamed El Kably, a Moroccan authority on medieval history, has underlined the silences of Arabic historiography about the resistance Imazighen waged against Arab invaders. Amazigh professional and amateur historians have been producing narratives that do not conform to the Arab-Islamic tradition, asking questions related to indigeneity that were not of interest to the previous generation of historians.

Undoing Arab-Francophone hegemony in the realm of culture, Amazigh activists also spurred the production of contemporary literature as a vital means of preserving and disseminating the Amazigh indigenous worldview. This multidecade enterprise aimed to give visibility to Imazighen and make them conscious of their alienation from their own culture. Amazigh intellectuals led writing and publishing workshops to collectively curate this new literature and remap national culture. Their efforts have triggered one of the fastest-growing indigenous literatures in the world. Many plays, novels, poetry books, and short story collections have been published in Morocco and Algeria alone. Tamazight went from being classified by UNESCO in 1996 as a language on the verge of extinction to becoming key to the Tamazghan cultural scene.

But this Amazigh indigenous revolution has yet to be fully acknowledged by the subfield of Anglophone academia focused on the study of Tamazgha. This subfield still uses the terms “the Maghreb” and “North Africa,” disregarding the indigenous remapping of the Amazigh homeland. ACM activists renamed this expansive territory Tamazgha because they found the existing names to be part of the hegemonic cultural and political structure that dispossessed them.

This ignorance of the ACM’s innovations in nomenclature and toponymy extends to the absence of anything Amazigh in the curricular and programmatic offerings of Anglophone universities. Linguistically, the field of Maghreb/North African studies continues to operate as though only Arabic and French were used to produce knowledge in the region. Since Amazigh languages are not being taught, Amazigh cultural production has yet to find its place in syllabi.

Academic departments have de facto participated in the erasure of language and culture, training generations of students who have continued to reproduce the obsolete postcolonial model that centered Arabic and French. The only way to change this situation is by recruiting professors who can teach Tamazight and Amazigh studies and whose work can broaden the curriculum to be inclusive of Imazighen and their thought, literature, and media. This can only happen if Anglophone academics focused on Tamazgha question their own positionality and shift attention to Amazigh indigeneity and postcoloniality.

The Amazigh indigenous revolution has transformed states and societies in Tamazgha. Although it might take a few more years for Tamazight to be treated on an equal footing with Arabic and French, Imazighen have made major strides in other areas, particularly in the production of literature and film and in the transformation of the public sphere. What Imazighen have achieved in the span of six decades is enormous, but pockets of resistance within state bureaucracies and legislatures have slowed the speed of change, delaying decisions favorable to Amazigh language and culture. Yet only those who live in a state of denial will continue to refuse any adjustment to the new era of Imazighen’s indigenous consciousness and postcoloniality within their own homeland and nation-states.