Like Ulysses, all his life was a kind of journey which took him back after long detours to his native land after a time consuming search to reconciliate his spiritual affiliation with his people. He made peace with himself but also with the legends, the values, the convictions and the aspirations of his fellow imazighen from Kabylia whose cultural heritage has been forgotten and persecuted. He became an “amusnaw” or a man of knowledge whose words, written or spoken have a special meaning for a whole people. He realized very soon that his people have made him the carrier of a torch which burns for freedom and democracy in a country were rational talk must overcome obscurantism, hatred and indifference.

Early in his life, Mouloud Mammeri became very fascinated by Amazigh poetry. His first book “La colline Oubliée” or “The Forgotten Hill” was written in French. It was not any kind of hill he had in mind, since Mouloud Mammeri was born in Kabylia in 1917 in a village called Taourirt or The Hill.

In the 50s, Mouloud Mammeri was a professor of French literature at the University of Algiers. He knew that Amazigh culture has contributed a lot to the Mediterranean culture since, after all, it belongs to a region which is a crossroad of civilizations. His first essay “La Societé Berbère” or “The Berber Society” published in the magazine Aguedal in 1938 showed a vocation at its early stage.

He already had a lucid vision of hispeople: a critical witness of the Amazigh society that he wrote “persists butdoes not resist”. The place of the Amazigh culture in the modern world was one of his earliest concerns. While surrealism was predominant in his first writings, like in “The Forgotten Hill,” soon he was backto earth with “Le Sommeil du Juste,” “L’Opium et le Baton,” “Le Banquet,” “Le Foehn” and “La Traversée.” At the same time Mammeri published essays on Amazigh literature. The publication of “Chants Berbères de Kabylie” by Jean Amrouche in 1937 was so emotional for him that he tried to get the original text ofthe book in Tamazight; he will preface the re-edited version of the book published in 1989, a book that he will never see because by that time he had already left us.

After the independence of Algeria, he thought for some time that the end of the tunnel for the persecution of the Amazigh culture was near. He had new dreams. He tried to persuade the Department of Education to implement the teaching of Tamazight in the system. Once more, he was denied because according to some officials of the same department “Berber is an invention of the Pères Blancs” (as the French catholic priests were called in Algeria). The rebuttal of the language of his ancestors by these officials pushed Mammeri to a kind of crossing a desert. It was hard to swallow that while French, the language of French colonialism in Algeria for 130 years, can have free ride while Tamazight was denied existence. To add injury to prejudice, it was obvious that at the same time these same officials were celebrating the teaching of the language of Moliere to their children; in public they were showing a hate-relationship with French culture and French colonialism.

In the late 60s, Mouloud Mammeri developed a new transcription of Tamazight with Latin letters, a new approach different from the one introduced in 1894 by Professor S. A. Boulifa of the University of Algiers. Historically, Tamazight is one of the rare languages that has its own alphabet called Tifinagh; early scripts of Tifinagh were recorded in North Africa more than three thousand years ago. We can also add that there are speculations that Latin is a language of Egyptian origin and therefore of north African origin even if it has been subject to many modifications by the Greeks and the Etruscans.

With his new transcription of his mother tongue, Mammeri wrote a new grammar (Tajerrumt ) and elaborated a lexicon of modern words; both were published in France because Tamazight was forbidden from being even shown in public in Algeria. Around the same period, he contributed to the writing of the French-Touareg lexicon with Jean Marie Cortade.

In 1969, Mammeri published in Tamazight the celebrated “Les Isefra de Si Mohand” or “Poems of Si Mohand,” a folk hero and poet of Kabylia which will be re-published seven times.

Mammeri became director of the CRAPE (Centre de Recherche Anthropologic Prehistoric et Ethnographic), which became under his leadership an ideal research center for Algerian and foreign students. The CRAPE Transactions on Prehistoric era and Anthropology became an internationally recognized publication in academia. All the success of the CRAPE could not help it to survive when an article written on cultural anthropology in the same transactions became the target of the political system in place that is denying one more time the existence of Berber history. The CRAPE was shut down. It was a great loss. No center of that dimension has ever seen life in Algeria since the date of its closing.

Mammeri was a persecuted man and he always managed not to show it in public: after all, he was a “Free Man,” an Amazigh.

In the spring of 1980, while just anyone from the Middle-East or Europe canbe invited to Algeria to talk about almost anything, M. Mammeri was one more time denied the right to make a presentation on Kabyle poetry in the city of Tizi-Ouzou, the heart of the Kabylia region. The local population saw that as an outrageous act of censorship, and soon the whole region was in ebullition to vehemently denounce this act of denial of the existence of the Kabyl language. Such an act will have repercussions in the whole country for years to come. It was this incident that opened a window to the rest of Algeria, a sign of a new hope for a better life; a sign that mediocrity, intolerance, exclusions, lack of freedom should not have their place in modern Algeria.

Mammeri, the skeptical and independent humanist, the man who never made a judgment about anyone, found himself under fire from a certain media which used just any kind of tricks in order to discredit the man and his vision. Even his nationalism was questioned by certain “journalists,” hiding behind other causes, but who did not know the man, his activism in the MTLD (an underground political organization of the 50s which already was calling for the independence of Algeria), and his suffering during the French-Algerian war. He never talked about it. Only those who fought with him knew the facts. His open letter in the newspaper Le Monde to answer those who targeted him was a lesson on the dignity and commitments of the profession of journalist: “only truth should prevail in their articles, not lies”, he said.

In 1982, Mammeri found some kind of niche in France where, with some of his former students, he discussed the idea of creating a center of the same dimension as the CRAPE. However, it was in Paris at “La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales” that Mammeri received a cheerful welcome to continue his research. He founded with his good friend Pierre Bourdieu a center for research on the Amazigh culture known as “Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Amazighes” and together published the review Awal or word in Tamazight. He found an ideal place to do research on his own society and his people, something that never stopped burning in his heart.

He dedicated his time to revive the Amazigh culture fromits ashes. No, the fire will never stop burning. His “Poemes Kabyles Anciens” published in 1980 were a robust reference to North African culture which has often been a victim of biased historians. While the culturalidentity of the Imazighen from Kabylia was beautifully narrated in “Poemes Kabyles”, other books like “L’Ahellil du Gourara” about the Imazighen of the southern region of Oran and and “Les Dits de Ccix Muhend U Lhusin” confirmed one more time his love and dedication to traditional life in Algeria. All his publications were beautiful contributions to universal culture.

It is, in fact, this universal perspective that became the focus of another one of his books “Le Banquet ou la Mort Absurde des Azteques.” Mammeri had a passion for history and truth; he is the man who wentto visit the roman vestiges of Rome, looking for traces of Jugurtha, the amazigh king who valiantly fought the roman legions. He narrated: “After being defeated, Jugurtha was thrown in the Latonies, a kind of underground cell used as a prison in Rome. I visited it. I have read the name Jugurtha among other names of enemies of Rome of that time. They thought that Jugurtha was going to die from starvation but it was not the case, so they forced a slave to strangle him. I always wanted to write a play called Jugurtha because he was the most magnificent of our freedom fighters.”

Mouloud Mammeri never wrote this play because of a car accident. On his way back from Morocco where he drove to participate to a conference, he was, according to the official version, killed by a tree that fell across the road. We may never know what really happened the day of his farewell to the man who loved so much Tamazgha , the ancestral land of millions of Imazighen.

He left us at a time where all the ideals he fought for all his life started slowly to become reality in Algeria. He can leave now. His work will be the main reference for many generations to come and the fire that he started in our hearts will never stop burning. Qim di Talwit a Dda Lmulud.

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Claude Lefebure wrote that it was at the teacher’s college that “as if he came out of hypnosis, he suddenly felt “Amazigh.” According to Brahim Aqdim, the president of the Mohamed Kaïreddine Association, he was treated as a “dirty Arab” in the French school and as a “dirty Shluh” in the Moroccan Arabized school. Perhaps that explains his early and very passionate search for an identity.

After passing his baccalaureate as an independent candidate, he attended the Faculty of Letters and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (The Higher Teachers College) and in 1968 he graduated with a License in history and geography. He then taught for two years (1968-70) in a high school in Ra- bat before attending the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

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While in Paris he also attended Lionel Galand’s course on Tamazight at Langues’O. Back from Paris he started teaching at the Faculty of Letters and became an active member of the AMREC, an association devoted to the promotion of Amazigh culture.

Ali Sadki Azayku was an avid reader of history. He was interested in the true history of Tamazgha, not the one taught in Moroccan schools and which only starts at the advent of Islam. As he started to understand the true history of his land and his people, he also started to write. His writings were a key element in the identity awareness of the Moroccan Amazigh. He wrote in the newspapers and in the Amazigh magazine ran by Ouzzin Aherdane, the son of Mahdjoubi Aherdane, leader of the Peoples’ Party. It was one of his articles in this magazine titled “For a true approach to our national culture” that cost him 12 months in prison and made the Moroccan authorities close the magazine for good.

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Offered to retract his writings, Ali refused and became the first Amazigh activist to be thrown in prison. His stay in the Moroccan prison of Laalou helped Amazigh activists strengthen their resolve but most importantly, it had a great impact on the poet that he was. His poetry expressed the sorrow and hardship of life (his and that of his own people) and at the same time an immeasurable passion to live and fight. out of prison, with the help of his friends he regained his former job and continued to write about Amazigh culture .

In 1988, he published Timitar, a collection of 33 poems, followed by Izmullen in 1995 that he wrote entirely in prison. the reknown Ammouri Mbark and other Amazigh singers sang many to the board of IRCAM, where he was expected to continue his fight for the Amazigh identity.
Ali Sadki Azayku died on september 10th, 2004, and the Amazigh people and their cause lost in him one of the most respectable figures. he was 62, and he left two children, Tilila and Ziri.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]nternational Women’s Day is an annual celebration of the respect, honor and appreciation towards women across the world. In recent years, the annual event has gained decent recognition, giving a chance to celebrate achievements in the women’s movement and to inspire further progress through both local and international action.

On this occasion, the Amazigh World News team would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all women across the globe including the Amazigh women of Tamazgha/North Africa, to whom we owe so much.

We also want to assure that we will continue to defend Amazigh women’s rights, try to help them in their daily struggle for a better life, work to promote their role in society, and create a suitable platform that helps them to actively participate in civil society, political leadership and economic development.[ads1]

In 1947, he was assigned in Taourirt Moussa and became a school principal in 1952. Feraoun was one of the most prolific francophone writers of his generation. His works all describe Kabyle peasant life. Le Fils du pauvre (1950; “The Poor Man’s Son”) is a semiautobiographical story of a Berber-Amazigh youth struggling against poverty and hardship to achieve an education and self-advancement.

The portrayal of the simple life in the mountains is filled with nobility, human compassion, and a love of family and native soil. La Terre et le sang (1953; “Earth and Blood”) deals with an émigré whose life in France is burdened by the sequestration of his proud countrymen and with the importance of nif (“honour”), the basis of all traditional morality and the source of the sense of self-worth, dignity, pride, and community. Les Chemins qui montent (1957; “The Upward Roads”) carries forward in more bitter tones the themes of the resignation, resistance, and endurance of the fellah (peasant) faced with the realities of colonial society; it also deals with the strictures placed on the youth and the narrowness of choices available to them.

Feraoun’s devotion to Kabyle culture is also evident in a collection of portraits and sketches, in a translation of 19th-century Kabyle poetry, and in his journal. Through his works he achieved his goal of discovering the voice of “an indomitable people of flesh and blood.”

On 15 March 1962, Feraoun as well as five of his colleagues were assassinated by a commando of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), an extremist organization of the French settlers in Algeria.

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“Languages Matter!”

Tamazight language matters!

Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.

Among the list of recommendations made to the Member States by the declartion of this International day one reads:

(a) create the conditions for a social, intellectual and media environment of an international character which is conducive to linguistic pluralism;

(b) promote, through multilingual education, democratic access to knowledge for all citizens, whatever their mother tongue, and build linguistic pluralism; strategies to achieve these goals.

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The 21st of February is celebrated as World Mother Tongue Day. The UNESCO, which hopes to make people conscious of the importance of the mother tongue, declares in its latest publication Education in a Multilingual World (2003), that the most suitable language for teaching basic concepts to children is the mother tongue.

Indeed, the UNESCO declared this as early as 1953 in its report The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. Yet, as the world modernized, the smaller and weaker mother tongues started dying. The schooling system, the media and the jobs all demanded the languages of power – the languages used in the domains of power i.e. administration, government, military, commerce, education, media etc. – which had to be learned by people in their own interest. As globalization increases, languages die.

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The 21st of February reminds us that, despite this inequality of power between our mother tongues and the languages of power, we must not give up hope. We must be conscious of the significance of our mother tongues, which give us identity; which are repositories of culture and which, in the final analysis, make us what we are.

Another great success in Boston for hosting—on September 23rd at Tufts University—the ninth annual of the Amazigh Film Festival for the second year in a row, film festival dedicated to Amazigh films and documentaries made by Amazigh and international filmmakers.

The festival was hosted by the Amazigh Cultural Network in America (A.C.N.A.) in collaboration with the Tazzla Institute for Cultural Diversity. Sponsored by the the BMCE Bank Foundation.

The festival featured a wide variety of movies, short-films and documentaries that spanned various cultural, societal, historical, political and artistic themes. The audience was well receptive and activrely engaged, and the intermission allowed people from a round-the-world diversity to intermingle, share and connect.

The festival ended with a live panel discussion spiced up with interesting interventions from the audience, as well as a vivid live performance featuring famous tunes from Rif and Kabyle land.

Special thanks to the organizers, coordinators, host at Tufts University and to all of the talented and ambitious Amazigh and international filmmakers that were featured in this years festival including Kamal Hachkar, Anita lewton, Izza Genini, Mohamed Bouzaggou , Dounia Benjelloun Mezian and Tahar Houchi. We’re well on our way to make this a standard festival going forward with even bigger exposures and impact in the years to come.

[toggle title=”CONDEMNATION STATEMENT BY THE SUPPORT COMMITTEE OF THE RIF MOVEMENT IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA REGARDING THE CONTINUED REPRESSION IN RIF AND TAMAZGHA.” state=”open”]The Support Committee of Rif Movement in U.S.A which was recently formed in response to the recent tragic events Rif region is deeply concerned about recent actions taken by the Moroccan government in Al Hoceima and Rif region against peaceful protesters. It is for this purpose that we affirm the following:

-We affirm our longstanding support for the mission of the committee of people’s movement in Rif -We stand behind our Rif people’s right to democracy, to demonstrate peacefully and to freedom. The regime has to listen to the protesters, take them seriously and end brutal repression.

-We renew the call for a full-scale investigation into Mouhcine Fikri’s death and justice for all martyrs of the Amazigh cause, We demand, therefore, the punishment of all responsible for the killings of innocent citizens who receive minor to no punishment.

-We urge the Moroccan state to respond quickly and immediately to the legitimate demands of the committee of people’s movement in Rif. In the short term we urge the Moroccan Government to lift the heavy militarisation in the province of Al Hoceima, Nador and surrounding areas

At the same time, we would like to express our strong condemnation to the Moroccan government for: – The arbitrary arrest and disappearance of member of the people’s movement in Rif.

-Using military siege and other force as a strategy to bully, intimidate and tackle the protesters from freely moving across across the Rif region.

-We condemn the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators, and we urge Moroccan government to live up to it’s international obligation, including those regarding human rights.

-We condemn the Moroccan government for using ‘Thugs’ against Rifain peaceful protesters and we denounce their passive response toward the the burning of Amazigh flag which is a reckless act that undermines the respect of people’s feeling and encourage to more severely actions.

As a result of all of that and in order to provide the necessary and adequate protection for the peaceful protesters, and with the approval of the movement’s leaders In Morocoo , we affirm that will we issue an open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the US Congress as well as other international human rights advocacy organizations.

The Support Committee of Rif Movement in United States of America and the Amazigh Movement in US New York May, 26th, 2017[/toggle]

When:
May 23, 24 2017
Where:
Fundación Euroárabe de Altos Estudios
Calle San Jerónimo, 27, 18001 Granada, Spain
Event Website:
www.fundea.com

When:
June 23, 24 2017
Where:
Theatre De La Sucriere
Marseille
Event Website:
www.festivaltamazgha.org
Admission:
15€
Info:
06 95 51 04 72
Event Program:
Friday June 23th at 22h : Azal Belkadi & Ezza.
Saturday June 24th at 22h : Ait Menguellat