Exclusive file on Tamazgha. When memory redraws geopolitics
During the week of April 19 to 23, ADN-Med publishes an exclusive dossier forty-three years after the Berber Spring; an event that was to upset the Algerian scene before winning over the whole peri-Saharan world, a space designated since by the name of Tamazgha where now floats the emblem that brings together peoples that the turbulence of history have long separated.
Little commented on by think-tanks and chancelleries, the reappropriation of the Amazigh fact is nevertheless one of the most determining phenomena in the contemporary history of North Africa and the Sahel. Often the object of museographical studies, folkloric interests or political manipulations in the colonial era as after independence, Amazighity will be violently fought by all the States resulting from decolonization.
It took the slow and patient investment of virtuous intellectuals like Jean Lmuhub Amrouche, Mouloud Mammeri, Kateb Yacine, Driss Chraïbi who, far from the wars of power and pageantry, passed on to the post-war generation the information that leads at the sources of a civilization – this term is to be taken in the sense of the capacity to cultivate the value of oneself and of the other – which miraculously resisted invasions and survived the alienation attempts of the occupants.
If the message of April 20, 80 infused so rapidly into societies isolated from each other and subjected by hostile States, it was because it met the expectations of History.
The popularity of this cause has cornered powers governed by authoritarianism and/or Arab-Islamism to concede the integration of Amazighity into institutional frameworks. Recognition, often artificial, induced a form of demobilization in the ranks of the leaders of the movement whose performance was essentially due to the fact that they had registered their fight in social life. This pause, which dates back to the beginning of the 2000s, has seen various manifestations ranging from community withdrawal to the temptation to transplant the Amazigh question onto the Islamist wave; the two postures sublimating the protesting or even sacrificial dimension of the movement to the detriment of what made it its nourishing sap:
In recent years, reflection has regained its rights. Historical activists are rethinking the reconstruction of the Amazigh matrix in the light of geopolitical and technological upheavals and new generations, imbued with the spirit of April 80, are investing the digital space to produce and put at the service of Amazigh the instruments of a development which the States refuse to him. Decided separately, these two approaches are gradually converging to become a dynamic transcending linguistic “islandization” and backward-looking nostalgia in order to open up political thinking and action on Tamazgha. A space that assumes its Amazigh substrate as a base on which a destiny can be realized, absorbing all the ingredients that have sedimented in our times and our lands.
The Amazigh has integrated all the contributions that History has bequeathed to it without ever losing its soul. The awareness of belonging to a vast territory matured with the advent of the Amazigh spring. Assuming the political implications is the new challenge.
It is on this project that the actors from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya who have agreed to participate in this dossier, which will call for others, are invited to reflect.
Source : websites