[dropcap]A[/dropcap]mazigh people (Berbers according to Romans) are the aboriginals of North Africa from The Siwa Oasis in Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean including Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. Despite all the different attempts from different invaders to exterminate Amazigh identity from North Africa, the natives still preserve their own culture and language, with all its dialects to the present time. Arabization is a new form of oppression they still resist. Oppressing people differs from country to another. Tamazight, which includes all the dialects of the Amazigh language, was also repressed and even banned from use in institutions and in public spaces. In the past seven years, the Moroccan constitution was the first to acknowledge the Amazigh language in North Africa. Yet, it is still not really in use in official documents, on signs and so forth, the situation is even worse in other countries.

As for Amazigh music, diverse Amazigh musicians can be found performing worldwide. Bombino band and Tinariwen from Mali, who belong to Tuaregs, the nomadic Amazigh in the Desert are few well-known examples. Their music is a mixture of African rhythms and sounds influenced by rock-and-roll and blues. However, when it comes to North Africa mainly Morocco, we find that Izenzaren band contributed a lot to this music by embracing universal rhythms and topics.

Izenzaren was able to be one of the leading bands of Amazigh music thanks to its revolutionary rhythms in which the moans and the groans of the wretched are voiced out. Its power is of three dimensions: the first is voicing out the suffering of the marginalized people, the second is the authentic rhythms, and the third is the spirit of the period (early 1970s) which was influenced by the Beatles. Izenzaren has a sense of adventure toward the unknown due to identity crisis which was an outcome of egocentric dominance of the State vis-à-vis the natives of Morocco and their identity. A wound that gave birth to a challenge which the traditional Amazigh poets articulated its layers, express its content, and passed it to young musicians who beautifully transformed it to touching rhythms using different instruments.

As new experience, Izenzaren came to link the youth with their Amazigh roots but without imprisoning one’s self in the past. It also came to put Amazigh identity to question. The latter was and still is at the center of its experience. Izenzaren strongly asserted the existence of Amazigh identity. By so doing, Izenzaren incorporated many different instruments such as banjo, violin, drum, guenbri or hajhouj, and qarqaba.

Amazigh music addresses all elements of life and human experience. Its major constituents are the romantic, the social, and the political. Because Izenzaren is a committed, intellectual and philosophical tongue, it was very normal that the band was elected to be the voice of the wretched in the world in general and in Morocco in particular. It called for the purification of the self and social justice.

One should note that Izenzaren members are students of the traditional school of Amazigh poets and musicians whose talents were shaped by Amazigh oral culture in North Africa. On the other hand, Izenzaren was able to transcend the traditional school and create a whole new phenomenon called “taznzart”, a transition that put them on the top of the modern Amazigh music.

Abdelhadi Igout, the head of the band, has embraced many musical instruments including banjo and violin since childhood. Instruments that he made with his own hands using simple tools, he kept telling these instruments his secrets by the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and in his neighborhood. This led him to meet many talented people who shared the same sufferings and hopes and who later formed the band which was an exception in North Africa in general and in Morocco in particular.

This experience was a clear answer to a new generation of youth in early 70s, who migrated from rural areas of morocco to big cities, and whose language was Tamazight. That youth could no longer find their prey in the traditional school because they neither shared the same symbolic code with the traditional musicians nor did they share the same vision toward the world, and probably the same was happening in Algeria at that particular time especially in Kabyle region, the area that gave birth to the international Amazigh singer named Idir.

Izenzaren is ground-breaking phenomenon that played a great role in promoting Amazigh culture and Moroccan music by embracing world rhythms and by implementing many musical instruments. The echoes of Izenzaren, the Beatles of Morocco, reached Europe and pushed them to participate in many international festivals in which they proved their outstanding talents. This explains the fact that Amazigh artists don’t lack the talent to give to the world. What they really lack is financial support as well as the institutional encouragement. Izenzaren fertilized Amazigh music and its music will surely be tattooed in the Moroccan memory for ever and ever.

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.

[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.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hree years ago on February 14th, Ammouri Mbarek , better known as the renovator of the Amazigh Music, lost his battle with cancer at the age of 64. A tribute to Mbarek’s life will be held Sunday, February 14th, 2017 at his hometown village of Imezghalen in Taroudant.

Ammouri Mbarek is a Moroccan Amazigh artist born in the village of Irguiten, situated in the heights of the Atlas Mountains in Troudant, in 1951. As a child, he was a shepherd who used to hum different songs while grazing the family herd in the fields. At the age of 8 years old, the brutal death of his parents led him to the nearby orphanage of Taroudant. He continued his studies in Arabic and French, loosing the fluency of his native Berber dialect.

In 1969, Ammouri founded a musical group called ‘the Birds’ along with his high school friends who were influenced by Anglo-Saxon music. The group performed mainly in French. At the beginning of the 1970’s, he left to Agadir city to look for a job. In the same era, the famous group ‘Nass el Ghiwane’ was prominent and greatly respected as a professional group on the scene of the pop music. [ads2]

Later on, Ammouri joined another musical band and together they founded a new group in the town of Tiznit, called ‘the Souss Five’. They sang mainly in Arabic. Nevertheless, encouraged by a member of the AMREC, an organization of Amazigh music renovation based in Rabat, he moved to Rabat for the purpose of music researching for the Amazigh research and heritage preservation.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZyRhvvZhDk[/embedyt]

The group ‘Ousman’ was founded in 1973. However, after five years of success and performances in different European cities such as Paris, Bruxelles, and Lyon, the group broke up in 1978. In 1985, Ammouri won the third award in the Muhammadia Music festival in 1985 for the song of Ali Azaykou: ‘Gennevilliers’.

Ammouri, then went solo and released his first solo album ‘Tazwit nera nek dim a nmun’, translated in English as ‘Bee I Wanna be your Company on your Way’. The album was composed by Mohamed Mestaoui. Ammouri continued innovating the Amazigh music and digging deep in its heritage. He performed the texts of most Amazigh lyricists such as Azayko, Moustaoui, Akhiyyat. In his songs he evokes love, exile, and lost identity.

‘This is a clip from Yesterday’s concert. Performing Tabla, Izenzaren song. Thank you all for supporting this group of students who put in time and energy to learn Tamazight music. They honored and valued Tamazight heritage and Imazighen in general. These are not professional musicians, they all have their jobs and careers. They put that aside from time to time to embrace diversity. I am humbled by of their dedication and by your support in this community and elsewhere.”

Fattah Abbou