The 20th edition of Tangier’s Thwiza Festival honored Rif Amazigh singer Walid Mimoun, recognizing a career that helped shape modern committed Amazigh song in northern Morocco.
The tribute took place on August 20 at Bab Marsa Square, according to Moroccan Rif outlets that covered the ceremony. Organizers presented the honor as a gesture of loyalty to an artist whose work has carried themes of land, language, identity and human dignity across decades.
Mimoun is widely associated with the modernization of Rif Amazigh music. Reports on the tribute emphasized his role in combining traditional Amazigh musical identity with more contemporary instruments and arrangements, while keeping the poetic force of Tarifit song at the center of his work. Songs such as “Dchar Ino” remain strongly tied to collective memory in the Rif and among diaspora listeners.
The recognition also matters because Thwiza has long served as a major Amazigh cultural platform in Tangier. Its 2026 program, framed around love against hate, has mixed concerts, debates and public cultural programming. Honoring Mimoun inside that setting connected a veteran artist’s career to a wider conversation about cultural memory, public space and Amazigh artistic continuity.
For Amazigh audiences, Mimoun’s work has never been only entertainment. His songs have often functioned as testimony, speaking for rural life, migration, social injustice and the emotional geography of the Rif. The Tangier tribute therefore marked both an artistic celebration and a public acknowledgment of Amazigh music as a record of lived history.