Tamazight and the uses of recognition
The visibility/appearance of Amazigh in the public space has suffered recently, and will not be immune in the future from uses that impoverish its normative implication regarding the values it carries or should convey. Thus, it falls back into the relapses of unhealthy or demagogic practices that often aim to make people forget, that is, to obscure the requirements for its recognition or promotion. Therefore, there is a good use and a bad use depending on the user or manipulator of course. It depends on the point of view.
The process of struggle for the recognition of the Amazigh language has required many sacrifices and efforts as an important foundation of the North African identity, regardless of the regimes and forms. Its essence and content are what the Amazigh language questions. The existing authorities, whatever their form, whether monarchy or republic, are summoned and challenged by the Amazigh language to regain the status that was violently taken from them after the colonial tragedies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the 1930 Dahir and following the great struggles of those with rights, this Amazigh language began to have its share of visibility. But this visibility should not be reduced to museum symbolism (artifacts) nor should it be subject to political folklore through which each state tries to challenge the legitimacy of the other state that is demonized and stigmatized in the name of the antiquity of the Amazigh language or its roots that extend to one state rather than another.
This quarrel is nothing but a distortion of the message and mission of this identity recognition movement. A simple examination of the literature of the Amazigh cultural movement clearly shows that the justifications for its struggle are comprehensive and unifying, both internally for each people in North Africa and with its neighbors in the same North Africa. Everyone remembers the term “foundation” that describes Amazighity in its natural and geostrategic space. Unfortunately, it seems that what was stigmatized internally as causes of division and disagreement has also become causes of disagreement between states. The latter contribute to making Amazighity a sign of difference and hostility between states to transfer it to the international level, which jeopardizes the opportunities and potential for unity and solidarity in North Africa. Theorists and trained historians from both sides try to identify with official authoritarianism, this time using Amazigh handicrafts or archaeological artifacts. They make them a tool for division, fragmentation and war-mongering. These are paradoxes in the recognition of the Amazigh language: those who yesterday criticized the Amazigh language for being divided and fragmented, meaning that they were unifying and uniting, are the same ones who practice it today, because quite simply the easy road, if not the highway, has been opened for them.
One of the true manifestations of the Amazigh resistance is its struggle against divisions and its aspiration for unity in pluralism, freedom, justice, equity and dignity. These are values that have been deliberately obscured by some trainees who have recently tried to reconstruct a history that suits the requesting countries. Amazighness is above all the identity of the people, and if countries want to affiliate with it, which is not forbidden, they must make the requirements of this Amazighness actual, that is, make it a reality, and translate the normative system that this Amazighness requires into concrete terms. Everything else is folklore and empty boasting.
Written by: Professor Yufa Yan Yan
Source: websites