Romanizing the Berbers

In the long and at times very tiresome debate on Romanization during the last quarter-century North Africa occupies a particular place. Nowhere has the equation of Rome with modern imperialism been more obviously applied, both by the colonial powers and by the colonized. The post-colonial perspective turned the earlier, benign view on its head, as the violence of the Algerian war placed the occupiers in stark contrast to the colonized, and what elements of acculturation could be found in the Algeria of the 1960s could be read as deliberate choices on the part of the Algerians, rather than the blessings of an enlightened imperialism.¹ The debate on the nature of Romanization could with some justice be said to have begun with a memorable exchange between the late Yvon Thébert and Marcel Bénabou and Philippe Leveau.² The subject was Bénabou's ground-breaking work La Résistance africaine à la romanisation,³ which provided a reading of resistance to acculturation by Rome from the point of view of the indigenous North Africans. Thébert, in rebuttal, argued that rather than looking to ethnic groups or geography as essential determinants of the division between Roman and non-Roman we should examine the social formation of North Africa in the Roman period. The class structure would give a better basis for predicting the results of Romanization than any supposed division between mountain and plain. Romanization was for Thébert a matter of choice, seized on by the elites and ignored, at least initially, by the peasants. Bénabou replied with some justice that such an equation leaves the Romans out of the picture, that they did after all conquer North Africa, centuriate it and set up an administration. Further, the strictly Marxist approach left culture out of the picture, thereby oversimplifying it.

The debate has continued in terms that have not varied much. In a recent series of conferences⁴ much has been made of the competition for status and power among the provincial elite as the principal motor of Romanization,⁵ answered by the occasional dissenting voice to remind us that, say, few Indians in the nineteenth century would have regarded the encroachments of the British Empire simply as a pretext for learning English and choosing better Bond Street tailors than their neighbours.⁶ More recently, the focus has switched to identity and its expression, allowing discussion of agency outside the (very) narrow circle of people who could be defined as the elite.⁷ New models have come from other cultures, particularly Webster's use of 'creolization' rather than a one-way process of acculturation, emphasizing the choices made by the colonized at all levels, rather than merely those of the elites.⁸ Domestic form and religion provide rich fields for this sort of analysis, as, to a lesser extent, does material culture as a whole.

In general, less attention has been paid to the economic factors at work in the conquest. What I intend to do here is to return to Thébert's recommendation, and give a brief outline of the social preconditions for the Romanization of North Africa, concentrating on the social and economic realities of Africa in the centuries just before and just after the Roman conquest. In this way I hope to situate the specific effects of the Roman occupation in the longue durée of North African history. I intend to avoid a simple opposition between the Numidian, or indigenous, Berber peoples, and the Punic settlers who had gradually colonized the coast since the seventh century BC, with their capital at Carthage. Such an opposition fails to grasp the much more complex linkages between the two societies which characterized pre-conquest North Africa. After examining the urban and rural landscapes of the pre-Roman period, concentrating on the zone of the Tell, the hilly, well-watered area near Carthage, I shall outline a few of the transformations effected by the Roman occupation on those landscapes, and on the economy of...