All acknowledgement and no action for Indigenous people
The status of Aboriginal Australians doesn’t differ from that of the Berbers who have been given no such Acknowledgement, writes Berber woman Massilia Aili. An apartheid of identity is a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination targeted at the individual characteristics and beliefs of a particular group of people. Or, to put it simply, it’s the belief that because a group of people, whose traditions, customs or personal beliefs may differ from your own, you are somehow instinctively superior. It is when Aboriginal people were subjected to martial law, when they were massacred for defending their land and protesting their rights.
The Berber community of North Africa has endured a long, hard and sometimes bitter struggle to preserve its identity. Originally spread across the south of the Mediterranean, the majority of the so-called Berbers have lived in Algeria and Morocco for thousands of years. Yet they have been denied the right to inhabit their culture and speak their language for centuries. And while these issues remain hotly debated between the people concerned and those who wield power, it must be acknowledged that meaningful progress has been made. The Amazighs claim a physical presence in the Maghreb that is more than five thousand years old.
WHO ARE THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF NORTH AFRICA?
The indigenous peoples of North Africa are Amazigh or Imazighn, often known as “Berbers”. They differ from other populations of North Africa by their culture and their language – Tamazight – which has its own ancient alphabet, Tifinagh.
Amazigh people have diverse dialects and are spread right across the North-West Africa region all the way to Egypt. In Morocco, the Amazigh associations estimate that represent between 65% and 70% of the national population.
They share a common heritage and linguistic origin with many dialects such as Tachelhit-tamazight- tarifit- taqbaylit- tamacheqt. Among the different Amazigh ethnic groups are the Tuareg nomads of the southern region. The country is known as Al-Jaza’ir, which is short for Al-Jumhuriyal Al-Jaza’iriyah ad-dimuqratiyah ash-sha’biyah.
The Amazigh people could count more than 30 million people in North Africa, representing a significant portion of the populations of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. There is also a large population Tuareg south of Libya and Amazigh in Egypt, especially in the western oasis. There is a large Amazigh population in the Diaspora, especially in Europe but also in the Caribbean Islands, North America and Latin America. Algerian indigenous rights associations evaluate the National Amazigh population to 11 million people, one third of the total population.
Ethnic identity can be a funny thing. Yes, it’s partly a matter of genetics, based on where your ancestors are from and which phenotypic traits were passed on. On the other hand, it’s a matter of choice. How people choose to remember their ancestry and what they do with that information is just as important. One place where we can really see this is Algeria, a North African nation along the Mediterranean. Depending on who you ask, Algeria is either one of the most ethnically homogeneous nations in the world, or a pretty diverse one. Identity can be funny that way.
A history of discrimination
Tamazight languages were originally spoken from the Canary Islands to Western Egypt (a region called Tamazgha by the Amazighs). Estimates of current Tamazight speakers in Algeria vary significantly, from 17 per cent to 45–55 per cent of the population (taking into account bi- and trilingual speakers) with some regions being heavily Tamazigh-speaking, such as Kabyle. Varieties of Tamazight are often mutually intelligible, and numbers of speakers vary considerably according to the community: in Algeria, Taqbaylit (the Kabyle variety) has millions of speakers, while Chenoua has dozens of thousands of speakers.
The Amazighs are the oldest inhabitants of North Africa, a proof of that is their mention in the oldest hieroglyphs ever dicovered. These hieroglyphs are found in the temple of Amun at Thebes in Egypt. These autochtonous people, nevertheless, prefer to be called the Amazighs, the “free and noble men”, rather than the Berbers, a Greco-Roman appellation meaning “barbarians” which, in principle, designates any population outside of the axis romanus. The Berbers are descendants of pre-Arab populations across North Africa, from the extreme west of Egypt to the countries of the Maghreb. The Berbers, who refer to themselves as the Amazigh meaning “free man”, have long fought for greater recognition for their ancient ethnic group, their culture and language.
The Kabyle people (Kabyle:
Izwawen or Leqbayel or Iqbayliyen, pronounced [iqβæjlijən]) are a Berberethnic group indigenous to Kabylia in the north of Algeria, spread across the Atlas Mountains, one hundred miles east of Algiers. They represent the largest Berber-speaking population of Algeria and the second largest in North Africa. The geography of the Kabyle region played an important role in the people’s history. The difficult mountainous landscape of the Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia provinces served as a refuge, to which most of the Kabyle people retreated when under pressure or occupation. They were able to preserve their cultural heritage in such isolation from other cultural influences.
Amazigh territory stretches across North African national borders and is not a nationality but a symbolic regional identity in many countries. Film in this region works as a nationalizing force that transcends borders. When we talk about Amazigh film, the distinction between Amazigh film in Morocco and in Algeria comes into play. The phrasing must be precise: It is not about Moroccan or Algerian Amazigh film, but about Amazigh film in Morocco or Algeria. The arena of Tamazgha film (Berberity, according to European terminology) covers a territory that stretches from the Siwa desert in Egypt to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, all along the Mediterranean coast and the Saharan Sahel. Amazigh cinema exists everywhere that Amazigh populations exist, as soon as a movie is produced in this language.
Delving into Amazigh Identity in Morocco and Algeria
The Amazighs claim a physical presence in the Maghreb that is more than five thousand years old. Their community covers almost five million square kilometers, from the Egyptian-Libyan border to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean coasts to Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Their culture, identity and civilization have long been despised and ignored by Arab governments of the region in the past, their rightful cultural claims have first being assimilated to the “colonial party”, then later interpreted as a blatant form of secessionism. But with the crisis of Arab ideologies during the Arab Spring and the beginning of the ebb of radical Islamism, these important factors favored the recognition of ethnic and cultural particularisms in North Africa and led to a renaissance of the Amazigh movement, especially in Morocco and Algeria.
Indigenous Peoples Literature 