BOOK REVIEW
by Helene E. Hagan
The Berbers (The People of Africa)
Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress-Blackwell Publishers 1998

Presented as a collaboration between an archaeologist and a historian, (Fentress and Brett respectively), this book is an overview of the history of the Amazigh people of North Africa, known as Berbers. The authors precede their review of this history with the comment that no such "general book on the Berbers is available in English, "and a peculiar observation on page 7 of their introduction that "the role of Berbers as protagonists in their own history has been lost in the process." This remark prompted the incorporation of biographical details of my own story as a Berber scholar which are essential to the question of a Berber voice in history and anthropology.

The general review of materials relative to Berber culture is, in my opinion, the overwhelming value of the book's contribution. The presentation is an overview of the existing literature on a group of people ignored by most British and American anthropologists and historians. Most of their references in the extensive bibliography are French.

As a Berber of Kabyle (Algerian) ancestry, born and raised in the interior of Morocco around the time of World War II, I found myself soundly dissuaded from pursuing a Berber Project at Stanford University when studying for my doctorate degree. It seemed no one on my Ph.D. Committee, (or in the whole anthropology department of this major American university), knew anything about Berber people. My 1981 Spring Paper, which was supposed to precede my dissertation, was entitled Tazz’unt: Ritual, Ecology, and Social Order in a Valley of the High Atlas of Morocco. In my paper I explained that the Berbers were a sizeable indigenous population of North Africa and that they exist in segmentary tribal structures as a politically important maraboutic cult. I explained that the Berbers are an important group as they act as a powerful factor in preventing tyrannical rule and maintaining order in the tribal context. My spring paper additionally addressed the Spring Berber ritual of the region (Tazz’unt) as one specific instance of a rich context of living Berber traditions. This element, interestingly, was not found in the book, The Berbers by Brett and Fentress.

My own research paper was skeptically reviewed and dissmissed by commentators who admitted their ignorance of some of the same issues presented in it. By their own admission, the reviewers of my Spring Paper declared they could not weigh the value of such works as the History of Ibn Khaldun, the theory of checks and balances advanced by Robert Montagne, or other numerous French and North African reputable sources which I amply presented (all used, incidentally, by Brett and Fentress). There was even a suggestion, to my intense dismay, that I could have invented some of the symbolic aspects of this tradition as my reviewers could not check the inside view of the ritual presented which involved Berber informants of the High Atlas village (Hassan Jouad and others). I was advised to contribute to American Anthropology through other research.

In Morocco, during preliminary fieldwork, I encountered deep antagonism on the part of the representative of the Moroccan Minister of Culture to whom I introduced myself in 1981. The message he conveyed to me in clear language was that there were no longer any Berbers in Morocco and that I had been misinformed. Of course, the Arabic gentleman knew nothing of my birthplace or genealogy, and of my personal ties to the Berber community. Upon my remark that I would rent a car and travel through the High Atlas of Morocco to see for myself, he replied that I would be kept under surveillance, and if I tried to do that, I would have the option between imprisonment or deportation. These unveiled threats were made in the privacy of our interview in his office of Assistant Minister of Culture in Rabat, and I can still vividly recall the glacial stare of that Arab across his desk. I spent the summer of 1981 in Casablanca in the relative safety of my brother's home (it was a time of riots in five Moroccan cities), learning from friends, chance encounters and the majority of taxi drivers (all Berbers) that they were indeed very much alive but denied official existence by stringent politics of Arabization. Upon my return to Stanford, I switched specialization and worked thereafter with Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. While never forgetting my life-long determination of keeping alive the flame of my Berber culture, I submitted a paper on the Oral Tradition of the Lakota for a Master's Degree, knowing that a doctorate dissertation focused on my Berber culture was doomed, despite the fact that all other academic requirements for a Ph.D. degree had been met.

After devoting a number of years to the work of human rights, ecological and social issues of American Indians in South Dakota and California (I served as Historic Preservation Officer for the Federated Coast Miwok of Marin and Sonoma Counties for a few years), the computer and the internet broadened my horizon and furnished me with the exhilarating experience of linking with a network of Berber activists and the International Berber Movement. The Movement was founded in Europe by a majority of Algerian Kabyles, at the very moment I was walking the beloved mountains of my native land again. This time I proceeded on my own and went with video camera in hand to record landscapes, music, and people of the High Atlas and the pre-Sahara regions of Morocco-without the academic obligation to notifiy the Moroccan authorities of my whereabouts or my work.

I am now an active member of the Amazigh Cultural Association in America, joining my brothers and sisters, Kabyles, Shawya, Chleuhs, Riffi, Tuareg, Canarians, Siwans, and others grouped in cultural associations springing throughout Tamazgha from Egypt to the Canary Islands of the Atlantic Ocean. This Berber territory of North Africa is the topic of the book under review.

Let me say that, as a Berber woman and an anthropologist, I have mixed feelings about this book. Indeed, I find it valuable for an introductory class on Amazigh culture. I would not hesitate to make it a basic requirement for such a course in the U.S. However, I would have to correct some information, and add a great deal. Certain key elements are completely missing. There are, to name but a few:

a.) The pre-historical or proto-historical period presented by the authors lacks depth and ignores some of the latest findings. On page 25, for instance, the authors write that as early as the end of the fourth century we begin to hear of Libyan "kings" such as Aelymas. As such kingdoms emerged throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic age, the Berbers followed suit. Recent research and published findings have demonstrated the presence of great Libyan Kings and dynasties preceding the advent of the Egyptian Pharaonic era, which has been set at about 3,000 B.C. The discovery of the Libyan Stone, presently called The Palermo Stone (from the name of the museum where it is preserved), helped change the horizon of researchers: this stone lists a lineage of fifty Libyan Kings antecedent to the Pharaonic line. These Libyan Kingdoms extended to the Nile, the Fayum area west of the Nile and the Western region of the Delta. The presence of Libyco-Berber populations from the Sahara desert to the Maghreb in the West and to the Delta and the Fayum Lake in the East are documented as far as 4,500 B.C., with pottery, agriculture, and domestication of cattle present from the regions of the Fezzan to the banks of the Nile. Indeed, there are indications that the first King who unified Egypt was a descendant from this Libyan (Libyco-Berber) lineage. Pages 27 to 31 attempt to address the matter of burial complexes and funerary practices, but the infomation is subtantially thin and at times misleading. An excellent study of Berber funerary monuments in the south of Morocco and pre-Sahara. and their physical and semantic relationship to funerary practices of the pyramidal age of Egypt was published by Mohammed Chafik of the Royal Academy of Morocco in 1997. Brett and Fentress do mention the extent of archaeological data such as the 60,000 tombs located in the Fezzan area of the Sahara desert, but do not expand on their data. They instead concentrate on funerary monuments of a much later period, which indicate Hellenistic influence, and conclude that this type of monument was modeled after the "Greek Heroon" or heros monument. No evidence is put forward to present the rich data of funerary practices of the Berbers from the Sahara to the banks of the Nile prior to that era, except in isolated statements which are not followed by pertinent information of a precise nature. On page 33, we find a rare isolated remark on the practice of incubation related to the cult of ancestors (pre Graeco-Roman): As Camps has shown, provision of chambers for this practice is a standard trait of Berber tombs, from prehistory onwards. And, a little further, unexplicably since pertinent data has been omitted, the concluding remark: It is not surprising that tombs are the major monuments left by the Berber Kings. Although their form is Hellenistic, their massive size suggests that the dead kings occupied a role as super ancestors. Such a statement ignores the entire body of data preceding the arrival of the Greeks and Romans in North Africa which is attached to the very African cult of ancestors. It again stresses the Hellenistic aspect of the architecture of a tomb or two instead of the probable continuity of archaic general practice through the times of colonization of Africa. Berber funerary practices seem to have extended from the Atlantic ocean to the banks of the Nile consistently, and might have given rise to the later "Egyptian" funerary rites and the whole pyramidal complex (Cf. Mohammed Chafik, Revue Tifinagh, No. 11-12, 1997, pages 89-98: Elements lexicaux Berberes pouvant apporter un eclairage dans la recherche des origines prehistoriques des pyramides). Such research, stemming from North African scholars, seems to be unavailable to the authors of the book.

b.) The Jewish Berber population has been grossly ignored. I am not referring to the late exodus of Jews from Spain during the time of Inquisition, which was not essentially Berber, even though it must be stressed that a substantial component of the Iberian Peninsula population had indeed been "berberized" from the time of Berber military occupation from the eighth century onward. There was conversion of entire Berber tribes to Judaism before Christianity or Islam reached North Africa. There is ample evidence of very ancient Judaic societies in villages of the Anti Atlas and the pre Sahara region in particular, but also in the Middle Atlas region of Morocco. I am not so familiar with the Algerian and Tunisian components of Tamazgha, but similar pockets of Jewish Berber people existed in those regions.

c.) There is no mention at all by Brett and Fentress of The Canary Islands as originally peopled by Berbers, and of the archaeology, music, whistled language, and customs still in evidence today in those islands, situating the several Canary Islands, with topographical names still entirely Berber, squarely in the Berber territory of Tamazgha. In the linguistic map showing this territory, the Canary Islands are not included by Brett and Fentress, which is not entirely correct, for if the language is no longer spoken there, the topography definitely reflects Berber terminology. Also, there is a strong Canary Island component to the present-day Berber cultural movement, and efforts at revitalizing the Tamazight language is lost on the islands, following the model of the revitalization of Hebrew in Israel. The omission of the Canary Islands in the history of Berbers is a glaring one.

d.) There is no mention in the book of the important figure of Ma El Ainin, a charismatic Holy Man, Prophet and Warrior who galvanized the south of Morocco against foreign invasion in the early part of the twentieth century. His tomb in Tiznit (Anti-Atlas region of Morocco) is revered and attended strictly by women. He has direct descendants alive today with great "baraka" (power of sanctity.) The omission of Ma El Ainin and his founding of Samara, the city of brotherhood constructed and managed according to the values of the desert, that was ransacked in the first entry of Europeans in the south of Morocco, is a notable one, in my view, for the history under review. Ma El Ainin had a profound historical impact in the entire region. It could be that the collective memory of Ma-El-Ainin is mostly an oral one, ignored in the European literature which seems to be the primary source of information for Brett and Fentress.

The history presented by Brett and Fentress is not only omitting some crucial elements to Berber culture, but suffers from its bookish origins, leaving this reader with a feeling of being subjected at times to opinions gathered somewhere else and presented as facts. This can be serious. For instance, I lived in Morocco during the years of turmoil during Independence. We knew, family and friends, that Morocco was never "pacified" by General Lyautey as the French official story would advance. Inland Berbers (Imazighen) never submitted. The depiction of the role of Thami El Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakesh, in this process, seems far too thin, and his hasty dismissal from the historical scene plainly arrogant. The Berber leader was a very controversial figure of the era, and yielded great power indeed. He was directly instrumental to the return of Sultan Mohammed V from his exile in Madagascar, where he had been banished by French politicians with The Glaoui's assent. The text reads, page 191:

Thami El Glaoui ..."was exposed as a man of straw, his empire in the south a hollow mockery of his power in the past..." a quotation said to arise from the reading of Maroc authored by Julien. Such an extrapolation and cavalier evaluation is, in the face of ample documentation on the Glaoui family, a distortion of history. Berber historians will no doubt review the complex role and personality of this towering figure of the twentieth century. He was no man of straw, by any standard, before, after, or during his planned and public submission to the throne. His powerful alliances and astute politics need to be weighed far more subtlety in the context of the French colonization period. This formidable Berber warrior, politician, and leader, who steered the politics of Morocco for over half a century, consciously made a decision for the benefit of all Moroccans as a very old man on the brink of death. Morocco and its freedom from the yoke of Europe was his goal. He knew that by asking the French allies to return the Sultan from exile, this Sultan would follow age-old practices of eliminating him, the Glaoui, and his family from positions of power in Morocco, and that his vast holdings would be confiscated. Thami El Glaoui may have been a controversial figure, but he was not the fool the authors of this book present to the readers without any explanatory detail to demonstrate why he is called a "man of straw". Such a travesty of history is not permissible in a scholarly work. It is here that I must express perhaps my most severe comments. In this particular page of history which is well known to me, personally, as well as in scholarly terms. I read with grave concern the following text:

"Just as the Berbers had been invented by the Arabs for the purpose of the Arab conquest and the Arab empire, so now they were finally resurrected by the French as a subject race to be kept apart from their Arab neighbors in the interest of French hegemony. A hundred years after the process began in Algeria, it was brought to conclusion in Morocco with the creation of what Berque called a national park whose inhabitants were so many sequoias. A protected species on which the French hoped to rely in their dealings with the untrustworthy Arabs of the plains and the cities". (Note: J. Berque, French North Africa, London 1967, page 219.) For more than in Algeria, they turned ironically to the old Kabyles, those ancient enemies of direct rule, to buttress their government of the country as a whole". (Note: Cf. Bidwell, Morocco under Colonial Rule, pages 293-301.)

What we have in this paragraph is some opinion emitted by Brett mirroring other opinions emitted by Berque and Bidwell. The thought advanced in this language that the Berbers were invented by the Arabs for the purpose of their conquest is refuted by the documented presence of Berbers in North Africa for centuries before the arrival of the Arabs. Such a statement has been paralleled by the assertion that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, as if American Indians had not been conscious of their existence and the territory they occupied before his arrival. In the case of Berbers, the assertion is even more ludicrous as there is ample history recorded of the flourishing tribes and kingdoms of North Africa, long before Arabs reached that part of the world, around 700 A.D. Secondly, the Berbers - Imazighen or Free Human Beings - did not wait for the French to be "resurrected", as the French troops learned in their military encounters with a country-wide resistance. The entire tribal territory of Morocco was called to unite under total alliance against the external threat represented by the French troops, a traditional and formal Berber War Alliance called "leff". The French had been called to intervene in the affairs of Morocco by the Sultan of Morocco at the turn of the twentieth century because the reigning Arabic monarch was unable to impose his will on the numerous Berber tribes of the interior mountains. French troops came in with heavy artillery and powerful guns, leaving a bloody trail which testified to the passion and fierce opposition of the Berber people. The French did not "resurrect" the Berbers but massacred them by tens of thousands, buying some, manipulating the politics of their leaders, often setting one leader against another (a well-known policy of dividing in order to conquer) and nearly destroyed the delicate fabric of Berber societies. Any Berber knows that trail of blood. To speak of resurrection is a blasphemy, even if - and certainly it is not specified in the text by Brett - it is meant to refer to the "Dahir Berbere", (French Decree which recognized the precedence of Tribal Law) and which granted tribal Berbers customary law as opposed to the Khoranic Law which was observed in the Arabic coastal areas and cities of Morocco. It was a temporary political strategy rather than a granting of life on the part of the inept French generals and politicians who succeeded each other rapidly in that period called the Protectorate of Morocco. Moroccans, Arabs and Berbers, always knew for a fact that there was never a "pacification" of Morocco, even if that term sounded good in official speeches and in French reports.

Clear as it may be, it must be emphasized that in order to be resurrected, one must die first, and to characterize the Berber populations of Morocco or their traditions as dead before the arrival of the French is nonsensical, particularly in the light of affirming that the Dahir Berbere legitimized their de facto existing traditional Law. The French benefited from upholding these practices in their overall politics in the region. They entered into multiple diplomatic alliances with powerful Berber leaders of the Middle Atlas, of the Ait Atta formidable Confederacy, and others who had large holdings of land, immense resources, and extensive tribal groups throughout the southern lands, in order to maintain a militarily established control over the territory of Morocco. It is true that the Commander of the troops, General Lyautey, seemed to have been surprised and impressed by the extent of Berber traditions, but such factor would only go to reinforce the fact that Berber cultures were indeed there to surprise and impress him.

Finally, I do not even understand the last sentence of that paragraph: "For more than in Algeria, they turned ironically to the old Kabyles, those old enemies of direct rule, to buttress their government of the country as a whole." Who are the old Kabyles of Morocco the French turn to? Could the unfortunate mistaken use of the word "Kabyles" mean the various powers, Caids and Pashas of Berber confederacies just mentioned? Kabylia is in Algeria, and apart from very few Kabyle individuals like my grandfather who emigrated to a Moroccan city with his family in 1920, there are no Kabyle groups in any part of the land of Morocco the French could turn to in order to reinforce their rule. There is a definite misunderstanding or error of terms which slipped in at the conclusion of this strange paragraph.

While acknowledging again that this book is a worthy effort in a vacuum of information about Amazigh culture in the Anglo-Saxon world, I must reiterate that my mixed feelings of both elated recognition of the subject matter of this book, and uneasiness bordering at times toward estrangement from the perspective of its authors, persisted and even amplified at a second reading.

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