Impact of the Amazigh Spring of April 80 on Morocco
In the historical trajectory of each people that aspires to its emancipation, there are moments that are references and founding landmarks. In North Africa, among the dates celebrated by almost all Imazighen, we can cite Iḍ n Yennayer and April 20. The first is the night of the Amazigh New Year and the second refers to the events experienced by Kabylia in 1980.
A deep but unstructured echo
The date of April 20 is a date celebrated by Imazighens everywhere in North Africa and in the diaspora. It is now registered in the historical annals of Amazigh under the name of Tafsut Imazighen (The Amazigh Spring). In Morocco as elsewhere, we know that this civic insurrection refers to the tragic events that Kabyle, a land fiercely attached to its freedom, experienced on April 20, 1980 following the banning of the conference on ancient Kabyle poetry that was to animate the cantor of Amazighity, Mouloud Mammeri.
This prohibition gave birth to a popular democratic movement which paid dearly for the cause it defended. We knew by hearsay that the power of Algiers had reacted violently against a peaceful movement and by proceeding in particular to arbitrary arrests among young people. For us young Amazighs of Morocco, this repression had only one objective: to muzzle the Amazigh voice which aspires to a true democracy. The movement met with immediate but discreet interest among the Amazighophone elites of the Kingdom, where the Amazigh question was evolving in a climate of permanent suspicion on the part of the authorities.
Then, and without anyone really knowing how or why, a general but unorganized echo of sympathy arose spontaneously in high schools and universities.
The events of the Amazigh Spring therefore had an important cultural and political resonance, not only in Algeria, but throughout Tamazgha and, therefore, in Morocco as well.
Since Morocco's independence in 1956, the country has been built on a substrate and an ideological duality based on Arabism and Islam, thus denying any Amazigh dimension. Arabization has greatly accelerated and has been supported through partisan links and state institutions.
The different constitutions having consecrated it, it was translated mechanically in school, administration, the media...
Power on the alert
In the aftermath of the Amazigh Spring events of 1980, there was a press conference held at the Royal Palace in Casablanca. A French journalist put a question to Hassan II on the Amazigh problem by asking if Morocco was not at risk of experiencing Kabyle demonstrations. The monarch's response was that this kind of event is unthinkable in Morocco because, he explained, Arabic-speaking and Berber-speaking Moroccans were united and they acquired their immunity against this kind of reaction since the dahir of May 16, 1930. (wrongly called Dahir Berber). The King then evoked the “Yemeni origin” of the Amazighs, which, he added, was proven “thanks to contemporary history books”. (See the magazine Renaissance d'une Nation, Volume XXV, 1980).
The same argument will be used by Chadli Bendjedid a year later. The magazine Tafsut, published by the Amazighe Cultural Movement, the MCB, some copies of which reached Morocco via the diaspora in particular, responded in an ironic but documented tone to these quibbles. Tafsut's reply, which puts an end to the controversy, had a certain echo in Morocco.
It should be known that the Amazigh fact has always been seen with a bad eye both by Rabat and by Algiers. The Amazighophobia of Hassan II is old and does not need to be demonstrated, many writings exist on this subject. Later, Amazighity will be a nightmare for him since it will be intimately linked to the two coup attempts of 1971 and 1972, which were carried out by soldiers, all Amazighs from the Rif and the Middle Atlas.
Decade 1980: years of lead
In the historical course of the Amazigh Movement in Morocco, this cultural and identity fact was criminalized and considered suspect during the 1980s. It was during this decade that the Amazigh magazine, launched by Ouzzine Aherdan, son of the famous Mahjoubi Aherdane, l he one of the few politicians to have assumed his Amazighity was banned.
The historian and poet Ali Sadki Azaykou, author of an article entitled "For a true definition of our national culture" published in an issue of this review, was arrested on June 9, 1982 and sentenced to one year in prison. In this article he presented a reading of the History of Morocco considered iconoclastic. Other people were also arrested in the “Amazigh affair”. This was the case of doctor Ousadden Abdelmalek, sociologist Ahmed Bouskoul, Messaadi Boukhalef… They will be released after days of interrogation. The lawyer Hassan Id Belqacen, a veteran Amazigh combat veteran, was also imprisoned in 1982 for a week for having written his name in Tifinagh on the plaque in his office. On April 19, 1981, the Amazigh academic linguist Boujamâa Habbaz was kidnapped. His fate remains unknown until now.
Also at the beginning of the 1980s, and in the city of Agadir, four hotels were scolded and punished with closure for having hung Tifinagh plaques on their fronts. The only Amazigh association active in the Souss during this period, namely the Summer University of Agadir, was banned from its annual session dedicated to Amazigh culture.
Tunnel exit
In the early 1990s it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The period is marked by the coming out of hibernation of the actors of the Amazigh movement and the supervision of society by an associative fabric which will know a dense anchoring and a rapid rooting at the national level, in particular after the signing of the charter of Agadir in 1991 where the linguistic and cultural demands of the Moroccan Amazigh movement were recorded.
Awareness of identity then begins to arise more acutely insofar as it was really carried by elites who were in tune with their society.
In the premises of the Amazigh associations, there were regular conferences and debates on the militant trajectory of the Amazigh struggle waged in Kabylia since the spring of 1980. Artistic figures (Idir, Ferhat Imazighen Imula, Lounes Matoub, Lounis Ayt Menguellat, Majid Soula , Djurjura, Malika Doumrane …) Are admired and listened to by a Moroccan youth thirsty for its culture and its identity. Famous Kabyle writers and intellectuals like Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, Salem Chaker, Saïd Sadi, Taher Djaout, Tassadit Yacine, Remdane Achab and others are read everywhere. I recalled before that clandestine magazines like Tafsut circulated massively thanks to photocopying. The broadcasts of radio channel II in Kabyle are followed in particular in the south-east of Morocco. So many examples, among others,
At the beginning of the 1990s, and with the birth of the Amazigh student movement in the universities of Meknes, Fez, Oujda, Agadir, Marrakech ..., the cultural weeks organized on university campuses relayed militant Amazigh literature through exhibitions of books from of Kabylia, photos of Kabyle singers are displayed in libraries or student rooms, their cassettes reach the rural world…. Student activists from the town of Er-Rachidia even went so far as to rename their university by calling it “Moouloud Mammeri University”.
Young Moroccan artists revisit and take up the musical repertoires of many of their Kabyle idols during musical evenings organized on university campuses. Every April 20 is celebrated in exhibitions or galas all over the country. Demonstrations are organized to commemorate this symbolic founding date perceived as a moment of rebirth of the modernity of the Amazigh world.
Supra national connection required
The cultural mixing and direct contacts with this rebellious land will also be made in the early 1990s with the visits of many actors of the Moroccan Amazigh Movement in Kabylie. The region of the south-east from where one could pick up the Kabyle radio will experience a more intense influence of the struggles carried out in this region. The American anthropologist Paul Silverstein has also devoted a study to this influence. It is published in “The journal of North Africa Studies”.
It is in solidarity with this inspiring Kabylie that a group of activists organized a sit-in in front of the Algerian embassy in Rabat during the events of the Black Spring of 2001 during which 127 young people were murdered and more than 3,000 others were injured by the security forces of the Algiers regime. This sit-in was violently repressed by the Moroccan police. And it was also out of solidarity that the MCB observed a sit-in in front of the Moroccan embassy in Algiers in 1994 to demand the release of Amazigh political prisoners; a group that has remained in the annals of the Moroccan Amazigh religious movement under the name of "detainees of the Tilelli de Goulmima associations".
The Amazigh movement in Kabylia in general and the events of April 20, 1980 in particular are essential political acts which contributed to the acceleration of the emergence and then the affirmation of the Amazigh Movement in Morocco. This is why certain voices, close to those in power, who are disturbed by the Amazigh revival, have risen up to call for the "dekabylization" of the Amazigh Movement in Morocco. These niches have understood that "when Kabylia is watered, it is all Tamazgha that harvests".
Yes, Kabylia, today mistreated, was the scene of an intellectual, cultural and political awakening which inspired and nourishes the debate around the democratic project of a North Africa which can and must recharge its batteries. amazigh.
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