Our ancestors, the Berbers…

What if schoolchildren across the Maghreb had been taught that their common ancestors were the Berbers?

This article begins with that simple question. It invites us to look again at North African history from a different angle, and to understand how the Berber — or Amazigh — identity, long neglected or underestimated, could have become a powerful source of cultural unity across the region.

From the ancient origins of the Berbers to their living legacy in languages, traditions and ways of life, this is a return to the source: a way to see how shared memory can help shape the future of the Maghreb.

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Had this simple phrase echoed in the minds of Moroccan schoolchildren throughout their years at school — as “our ancestors, the Gauls” once did for French children — the face of Morocco might have been changed.

And if, alongside them, young Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans and so many others across North Africa had learned the same refrain — our ancestors, the Berbers — the face of the world itself might have been different.

Imagine this small tune passing through the minds of children, generation after generation. The peoples of the Maghreb might today have understood themselves, naturally and historically, as belonging to one shared national and cultural space.

Better still, the North African origin of anyone living or travelling in Europe might have been immediately understood as part of a Berber identity. More than any visa, it could have become a true passport — a way of moving freely through the world.

Of course, this is fiction. Today, it belongs only to the realm of impossible utopia.

The populations of the southern Mediterranean were, from a very early stage, exposed to inevitable mixtures with peoples coming from every horizon. Some territories, because of their position, became crossroads more than others. Morocco, at the junction of two continents, is one of them.

Here, the cultural traces left by successive waves of human movement were engraved more deeply than elsewhere.

The identity of peoples, between alchemy and narrative

In reality, the process through which countries build their identity has little to do with the genealogy of peoples. It is often more a matter of dialectic than of history.

The aim is not only to tell the history of a people, but to construct its narrative. The strict historicity of such identity narratives is often secondary.

In the end, it is almost always a kind of alchemy. Human diversities are melted together, fused and recomposed until they emerge as a third, synthetic unity — the unity that allows a nation, at a given moment in its history, to become a body and to exist.

This is the very process through which Morocco, in the preamble to its 2011 Constitution, stated that its unity, forged by the convergence of its Arab-Islamic, Amazigh and Saharan-Hassani components, had been nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebrew and Mediterranean tributaries.

Everywhere, in a once-shared past, there is the Berber

Whatever narrative is being built, whatever human diversities are being brought into alliance, the makers of national identity always work with elementary materials, with primal components.

And everywhere in northern Africa, in a past once shared by all, there is the Berber.

Wherever one stands between the eastern and western edges of Africa, there has always been this same human substratum, born of a deep past common to all the territories concerned.

This is a factual reality. It is indelible, despite the many attempts to erase it over the centuries. It remains undeniable, despite the ambiguity carried by this enigmatic name: Berber / Amazigh.

The Berber human presence is now widely recognised as the oldest common denominator linking so many peoples and nations. Yet one fact stands out: these peoples and nations were unable to claim this common ancestor, and therefore unable to share him.

The Berber paradox through time

The mystery attached to the word “Berber” partly explains the difficulties that emerged, century after century, in building a Berber identity capable of gaining broad recognition.

Gabriel Camps, one of the major specialists on the subject, expressed what could be called the Berber paradox with striking clarity:

The historian does not try to resolve the paradox. Faithful to the rigour of his discipline, he notes that the ancient Berbers may not have shared one truly common language, but they did possess …

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This writing system, Libyco-Berber, survives today in the Tifinagh alphabet of the Tuareg, the Amazigh community that has preserved some of the deepest foundations of Berber origin.

But very early on, Punic writing, then Latin, and finally Arabic, took over among these peoples. Linguistic Arabisation eventually became socio-cultural Arabisation, to the point that, in some countries, almost entire populations came to say they were Arab, to believe they were Arab, and therefore, in social and cultural terms, to become Arab.

And yet, Gabriel Camps expressed this paradox in particularly striking terms:

The paradox is clear.

Across North Africa, without interruption over time, a powerful mixture took place through successive Punic, Jewish, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Turkish and finally European impulses.

Yet everywhere, a local identity remained alive. It endured despite the accumulation of external contributions. Very early on, this raised a question: what was this Berber presence that could absorb the foreign newcomer while still preserving its own continuity?

This mystery troubled the minds of successive arrivals. It led them, again and again, to make the Berber foreign to the very lands they had just discovered — to imagine him, like themselves, as someone who had come from elsewhere, from some distant place, rather than simply from here.

The Berber, the “other” who had to come from elsewhere

In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus was among the first to describe the peoples living west of Egypt. He called them Libyans, distinguishing between those who lived as nomads by the sea and those who were farmers, settled in houses among mountainous and wooded landscapes — clearly the regions of the Atlas — whom he called the Maxyes.

Several centuries later, his Roman counterpart Sallust refined this portrait of the indigenous populations. The nomadic group would later be associated with the name Gaetulians, while the sedentary group retained the name Libyans. According to Sallust, together they represented the humans present in these territories since prehistoric times: primitive hunter-gatherers whom he described as…

Unsurprisingly, the Roman historian imagined them as having been civilised by peoples from the East — more precisely the Medes and Persians — who were said to have settled there.

Gabriel Camps explains that the term Maxyes is the Greek rendering of Imazighen, the plural of Amazigh, used by indigenous groups to identify themselves as a community.

In this way, all the foreigners who came to the territories between Egypt and the Atlantic Ocean named the local populations according to their own phonetic understanding of this ancient name of identity: Meshwesh for the Egyptians, Mazices or Madices for the Romans, Mazigh for the Arabs.

Camps developed the theory that the appearance, in ancient accounts, of Mede tribes supposedly coming from the East may in fact have resulted from a distortion of the Roman name Madices — that is, the Imazighen encountered locally.

This linguistic distortion would have been driven by a difficulty: the difficulty of imagining that non-Romanised indigenous populations could possess their own cultural and civilisational qualities.

In search of an impossible origin

Imazighen, Maxyes, Madices, Medes… This litany of names designating the Berber would later be synthesised under the generic term Moors, used to describe non-Latinised North Africans.

Yet throughout the centuries, observers continued to give the Berber an ancestry external to the land in which he lived. There remained a persistent tendency to connect this mysterious Berber, although clearly present there, to some distant root.

The Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea argued for a Phoenician origin. Saint Augustine, from his city of Hippo near Carthage, saw Canaanite roots in his compatriots. Another Greek historian, Strabo, saw nothing less than Indians behind the Moors.

Herodotus claimed that the Imazighen were descended from the Trojans, while Plutarch described the great Greek hero Heracles leading Mycenaean communities towards Mauretania Tingitana — northern Morocco — around 1500 BC.

In the 14th century, the famous geographer Ibn Khaldun was even more categorical:

European historians of the 19th century continued this frantic search for Berber origins. Here and there, they gave credit to Oriental or Indian theories, even going so far as to attribute the dolmens and other megalithic monuments discovered in Algeria to Celtic, Gallic — and therefore French — or more broadly Nordic origins.

This “stranger”, indigenous for 9,000 years

Anthropological research paints a very different picture, one detached from free from ideological bias.

Of course, human presence in North Africa, and in the Maghreb in particular, goes back to very ancient times.

It is now accepted that the different human representatives identified in the Maghreb — from the early Homo sapiens of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, through the Aterian humans of Dar es-Soltane, to the Mechta-Afalou type represented at Afalou Bou Rhummel in Algeria — evolved locally, each in their own period, without needing to be explained by an external origin, and in parallel with other human developments elsewhere in the world.

One must then wait until around 9000 BC for a new human type, coming from the Near East, to settle in large numbers as far as the ocean. This type would be called Proto-Mediterranean and became known through the rise of the Capsian culture.

This newcomer developed along different branches, each carrying specific morphological characteristics. Two major tendencies can be distinguished: on one side, more robust types; on the other, more gracile types, with the whole range, as always, expressed through infinite nuances.

Over the millennia, these Proto-Mediterraneans spread across a large part of the Mediterranean world, from Libya to Italy.

And so Gabriel Camps was able to confirm:

The unfolding of the Berber tree

The Berber thus anchored his genealogical root firmly in the very lands of his development: the Maghreb.

And in the same broad movement as other human groups across the planet, he entered the radical transformations of the Neolithic period, with settled life, agriculture and animal husbandry.

He would continuously receive and assimilate human and cultural contributions from the East, from the Sahara and from the European continent through Spain. Some of these contributions would prove more influential than others, especially the Bedouin migrations of the 11th century, which sealed the Arabisation of the populations.

But in every era, these Maghreb territories and their human communities acted as powerful civilisational crucibles. From them emerged peoples, cultures, kingdoms and, much later, nations.

Across the millennia, this original Berber would thus become an actor in the wider course of human evolution.

He would be the bovidian herder whose presence is found in rock art. He would be the chariot driver of the equidian period, crossing the vast expanses of the Sahara armed with his javelin.

Having become a horseman, he would be the Gaetulian observed by the Roman conquerors, and then the Garamantian nomad, true ancestor of the Tuareg, a proud warrior carrying his long sword.

Before that, he would have been the Libyan described by Herodotus, or the Maxyes.

He would become the Numidian of the great Masaesylian and Massylian kingdoms, with King Massinissa.

Finally, the Berber would cross the centuries under the name of Moor, from the westernmost lands of the continent to Andalusia.

Under the gaze of Ibn Khaldun, the Berber would unfold not as a set of localised peoples, but as a tribal lineage.

He would be the Sanhaja, son of Znag, the camel-driving nomad. He would also be the Zenata, among the first to undergo deep Arabisation.

Both would found major dynasties: the Almoravids, from whom a vast empire would emerge, and the Marinids.

He would also be the Berber of the Masmuda tribe, from which the great Almohad dynasty would flourish — a power whose reach would reunite all the original territories of its Proto-Mediterranean ancestor.

The mosaic of a borderless story

The Berber — the Amazigh of ancient times — would not only unfold through tribes, peoples, cities and kingdoms. He would also give rise to many powerful and radiant figures, whose names would be engraved on the pages of a borderless story, truly shared by all of North Africa.

He would be Sheshonq I, Pharaoh of Egypt in 950 BC and founder of the 22nd Dynasty; the famous King Massinissa, who contributed to Rome’s victory over Carthage in 202 BC; and also Jugurtha, king of Numidia, Juba II, Ptolemy of Mauretania and Masuna, king of the Kingdom of the Moors and Romans at the beginning of the 6th century.

Over the centuries, the Berber would carry countless destinies: that of Dihya, the Zenata Berber queen; that of Tin Hinan, born in Tafilalet and queen of the Tuareg of Hoggar; that of Augustin, bishop of Hippo; Arius, priest of Alexandria; Donatus Magnus, bishop of Africa; Tertullian, Father of the Church of Rome; and Macrinus, Diadumenian, Caracalla and Aemilian, all Roman emperors.

He becomes Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Umayyad general who set out to conquer the Iberian Peninsula in 711. He travels through unknown lands under the name of Ibn Battuta, one of the greatest explorers of the Middle Ages.

He expresses his thirst for freedom under the names of Lalla Fadhma N’Soumer, Abdelkrim el-Khattabi and Assou Oubasslam, military leader of the Moroccan resistance to French colonialism.

He develops all his talents in the figures of Mohand Ou Lhocine, Kabyle poet and mystic; Si Mohand Ou Mhand; Muhammad Awzal; the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine; Mohamed Choukri; Mouloud Mammeri; Jean Amrouche; the singer Idir — and so many others, men and women of every time and every land, crossed and brought together by this unfathomable, unalterable thread of Amazigh origin.

The conclusion is unequivocal: on these lands of North Africa, from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean, the Berber stands at the heart of the history unfolding there. He has been both the ink and the paper of a story without author and without title. And yet his spirit remains present and alive, proud and free, where he settled, took root, and then became a tree of existences, 9,000 years ago.

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