Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video

1. The Berber Spring

1 The Berber Spring L’existence de plusieurs mouvements de jeunes risque d’aboutir à des orientations contraires et pas toujours conformes à la ligne du parti. La jeunesse algérienne brassée pendant la guerre de libération doit rompre aujourd’hui tout cloisonnement et être organisée dans un rassemblement national sous une direction unique et sous l’impulsion du parti. —La Charte d’Alger, 1964, Part III, Chapter 1, Article 22 [The existence of multiple youth movements risks producing opposing orientations that may not always conform to the party line. Algerian youth, stirred up during the war, must today break with all forms of compartmentalization and organize itself in a national union moving in a single direction and under the impetus of the Party. —The 1964 Charter of Algiers, Part III, Chapter 1, Article 22] April 20, 1980. One o’clock in the morning. Operation Mizrana has been launched, the forces of repression invade all the sites that are being occupied [by striking Kabyle students, hospital personnel, and factory employees]. Students, surprised in their sleep, are assaulted in their beds; dogs are let loose on those who ®ee. Students leave their dormitory rooms in their underwear. Professors are arrested in their homes. All the personnel of the hospital, doctors and nurses, are arrested and replaced by military doctors. A spontaneous general strike is begun by the population of Tizi Ouzou. Kabylia is cut off from the world; access is forbidden to everyone and in particular to journalists. The above account is drawn from a history of the Berber identity movement produced on six hand-lettered posters by the Tafrara Cultural Association. Entitled “Chronology of the Contemporary Berber Struggle,” the posters graced the walls of the Mouloud Mammeri Cultural Center during the week of April 20, 1993, in what has become an annual commemoration of the 1980 Berber Spring. I sat in front of the posters, copying by hand their account of what transpired .1 The chronology begins on March 10, 1980, when Kabyle scholar and activist Mouloud Mammeri (1917–1989) was to give a public lecture on the role of poetry in traditional Kabyle society, the subject of his newly published book Poèmes kabyles anciens (Old Kabyle Poems). The talk was to take place at Hasnaoua University in the city of Tizi Ouzou,the intellectual and commercial center of the Kabyle Berber region. A crowd of more than one thousand had gathered ,but Mammeri never arrived.He was stopped at a police roadblock,brought before the region’s governor (wali), and informed that the event had been canceled . The reason: “risk of disturbing the public order.” The cancellation sparked demonstrations and strikes at schools, universities, and businesses that would rock the Kabyle region for more than two months. Matters came to a head on April 20 when, at 4:15 in the morning, riot police stormed university dormitories , a factory, and the local hospital. Armed with tear gas and clubs, they arrested hundreds and wounded many more. Subsequent demonstrations, often violent, swept the region. Echoes were felt as far away as Paris, where some 600 demonstrated on April 25 at the Algerian embassy, against the orders of French authorities.2 Widely commented on in the French press,3 the events were reported to human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the International League of Human Rights.Mammeri hoped his book would “serve as an instrument in the transmission of Berber culture” (Mammeri 1980: 47), but he could hardly have foreseen the catalytic impact of his canceled lecture. For while the period of violence resolved within several months, its memory mushroomed. The Berber Spring (Tafsut Imazighen, or simply Tafsut), as April 20 is now called, is commemorated unof¤cially each year in Algeria as well as in the Berber diaspora in Europe and North America. Tafsut is now one of the key sites through which a discourse on Amazigh identity circulates. Before April 1980, such a discourse was not widely available. Consider Bachir’s story. He had ¤rst heard the word “Amazigh” in 1976, at the age of 10, when Idir’s new song Muqleγ (“I See”) was played on the Kabyle radio station (Idir 1976b). The song’s refrain goes like this: Muqleγ tamurt umaziγ I see the Amazigh land Yugurten waleγ udem-ik. Yugurtha,4 I see your face. “What was this Amazigh?” Bachir remembered wondering. For while the term “Amazigh”—used to signify a pan-Maghreb history, culture, and linguistic identity—circulated among intellectuals, it was...