Although today, the tradition of tattoos among the Amazigh community has almost neared its end with the death of the community’s elders, however, we, as Amazigh, we have way too many other means of telling the world our stories.

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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]

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A bronze-made sculpture of Ibn Battuta —known as the greatest Amazigh Traveller, geographer and botanist of premodern times— has been unveiled and inaugurated in Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art located in Fujian Province in China, to pay tribute to his everlasting impact on China’s history.

Ibn Battuta started on his travels from his hometown Tangier when he was 21 years old in 1325. is known as the greatest traveller of premodern times. Leaving his homeland to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, he performed a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him as far away as India and China, but also to the Volga River valley and south to Tanzania.

The narrative of his travels is a unique account on medieval history that was placed by the historians within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of the history of the medieval world.

Ibn Battuta is undoubtedly one of the world’s most respected and recognized icon but despite his incredible achievements, he remains largely unknown and still unrecognized in his original country of Morocco simply because he was not of Arab ancestry!!

The history of the Berber people in northern Africa is extensive and diverse. The Berbers are a large group of non-Arabic tribes, related by language and culture, inhabiting areas stretching from Egypt to the Canary Islands as well as regions south of the Sahara such as Niger and Mali. Archaeologists have traced their origins to the Caspian culture, a North African civilization that dates back more than 10,000 years. Berber-speaking people have lived in North Africa since the earliest times and are first referenced by the Egyptians in 3,000 BC under the name Temehu. Phoenician, Greeks and Roman texts also make reference to them. Since prehistoric times, Berber lands have been a crossroad of peoples from Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, French, and Italians have invaded and ruled portions of the Berber homeland. The Berbers have never experienced a unified political identity. There have been many Berber kingdoms and cultures existing alongside one another in various regions of North Africa and Spain, but never a unified “Berber empire”. Throughout the centuries, Berbers have mixed with many ethnic groups, including Arabs, and because of this, they have come to be identified more by linguistics instead race. Their language is one of the oldest in the world and belongs to the African branch of the Afro-Asian language family, along with ancient Egyptian.

Although never formalized beyond local cults, the Berbers had a rich mythology and belief system structured around a pantheon of gods. Many of their beliefs were developed locally while some were imported or later influenced by contact with other African mythologies, such as the Egyptian religion along with Phoenician mythology, Judaism, Iberian mythology, and the Hellenistic religion during antiquity. The most recent influence came from Arab mythology, when the Berbers were converted to Islam during the ninth century. Today, some of the traditional, ancient, pagan Berber beliefs still exist within the culture and tradition, especially in Algeria, where older cults survive to varying extents.

Many prehistoric peoples considered rocks to be holy, including the Berbers. Second century Latin writer Apuleius, along with Saint Augustine, bishop of the Hippo Regius (ancient name of the modern city of Annaba, in Algeria), both remarked on rock-worship among North Africans. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote of their sacrifices:

They begin with the ear of the victim, which they cut off and throw over their house: this done, they kill the animal by twisting the neck. They sacrifice to the Sun and Moon, but not to any other god.

The megalithic culture may have been part of a cult of the dead or of star-worship. The best known rock monument in Northwest Africa is Mzora (or Msoura). It is composed of a circle of megaliths surrounding a tumulus. The highest megalith is longer than 5 meters (16 feet). According to legend, it is the resting place of the mythic Berber king Antaeus. Another megalithic monument was discovered in 1926, south of Casablanca and was engraved with funerary inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber script known as Tifinagh.

The tombs of the early Berbers and their ancestors (the Caspian’s and Ibero-Mauresians) indicate that they believed in the afterlife. The prehistoric men of the region of northwest Africa buried their bodies in the ground. Later, they buried the dead in caves, tumuli (burial mounds), and tombs cut into rock. These tombs evolved from primitive structures to more elaborate ones, such as the pyramidal tombs that spread throughout North Africa. The best known Berber pyramids are the 19 meter (62 ft) pre-Roman Numidian pyramid of Medracen and the 30-meter (98 ft) ancient Mauritanian pyramid located in modern-day Algeria.

Among ancient Berber and Egyptian mythology there are similar, overlapping deities. The Berbers were neighbors of the Egyptians, originally inhabiting the lands of Libya for thousands of years, before the beginning of human records in Ancient Egypt. It is thought that some Ancient Egyptians deities, such as Isis and Set, were originally worshipped by the Berbers. Osiris was one of the Egyptian deities’ paid homage to in Libya. Some scholars believe Osiris was originally a Libyan god. Berbers supposedly did not eat the swine’s flesh, because it was associated with Set, and they did not eat the cow’s flesh, because it was associated with Isis. This was reported by Herodotus: Cow’s flesh, however, none of these [Libyan] tribes ever taste, but abstain from it for the same reason as the Egyptians, neither do they any of them breed swine. Even at Cyrene, the women think it wrong to eat the flesh of the cow, honoring in this Isis, the Egyptian goddess, whom they worship both with fasts and festivals. The Barcaean women abstain, not from cow’s flesh only, but also from the flesh of swine Another one of their deities the Egyptians considered to have a Libyan origin, was Neith who is said to have emigrated from Libya to establish her temple at Sais in the Nile Delta. Some legends tell that Neith was born around Lake Tritons or modern Tunisia. It is notable that some Egyptian deities were depicted with Berber (ancient Libyan) characters, such as “Ament” who was depicted with two feathers, which were the normal ornaments of the Ancient Libyans as shown by the Ancient Egyptians.

The most remarkable common god between Egyptian and Berber culture was Amon. King of the gods and god of the wind, he was adopted by the Ancient Egyptians as Amen-Ra, by the Greeks as Zeus-Amon, and by the Phoenicians as Baal-Amon. Represented in human form, sometimes with a ram’s head, early depictions of rams have been found across North Africa dating to 9600 BC and 7500 BC. The most famous temple of Ammon in Ancient Libya was the augural temple at Siwa in Egypt, an oasis still inhabited by the Berbers. Although most modern sources ignore the existence of Ammon in Berber mythology, he was honored by the Ancient Greeks in Cyrenaica, and was united with the Phoenician god Baal due to Libyan influence.

Source: www.ancient-origins.net

SwiftKey, the company behind Android’s most popular keyboard— Microsoft’s $250 million acquisition—has announced the implementation of Tifinagh script into its latest beta release of SwiftKey.

The company also announced that the platform will rely on Amazigh scholar’s feedback to improve the technology for Tifinagh to incorporate it in a more stable version.

Click here  to download the app to begin writing Tamazight language using it’s original script Tifinagh.

While wandering in local forest woods in Khenifra region, a group of young people from Krouchen town —50 miles from Khenifra — rescued an injured rare big eagle with injured wing believed were because of indiscriminate hunting.

Witness said after the eagle’s rescue they contacted the local authorities as well as some local wildlife organizations. Both have made arrangements with the nearest clinic to care for the bird and return him to his natural space.