Who are the Amazigh (Berbers)?

Imazighen, the plural of Amazigh, stretch from the Siwa Oasis of Egypt to the Atlantic, and south to the Tuareg of the Sahara — a mosaic of peoples speaking related languages: Tarifit in the Rif, Tamazight in the Middle Atlas, Tashelhiyt in the Souss, written in the ancient Tifinagh script. Long marginalized by post-independence Arabization, the Amazigh movement won its breakthrough in 2011, when the new constitution made Tamazight an official language alongside Arabic.

The people who call themselves Imazighen, the plural of Amazigh, live across an immense arc of North Africa: from the Siwa Oasis in Egypt in the east, across Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, to the Atlantic coast in the west, and south across the Sahara to the Tuareg peoples of Mali, Niger, and beyond. They are not a single tribe or a single nation, but a family of peoples bound by related languages, shared histories, and a common sense of belonging to the land they have inhabited for thousands of years.

The word Amazigh is often translated as free people or noble people, though scholars debate the precise original sense. The better-known word Berber comes from outside: it descends from the Greek barbaroi, a term the Greeks applied to peoples who did not speak Greek, which passed into Latin and Arabic usage. Many Amazigh today regard Berber as an imposed label, and prefer Amazigh, and this page uses Amazigh except where the older term appears in historical names. The languages they speak, collectively called Tamazight, belong to the Afro-Asiatic family, and include Tarifit in the Rif, Tamazight in the Middle Atlas, Tashelhiyt in the Souss, Kabyle in Algeria, and Tamasheq among the Tuareg.

North Africa has been inhabited since deep prehistory, and the ancestors of the Amazigh were already settled across the region when the great powers of the ancient Mediterranean began to arrive. Egyptian records mention Libyan peoples to their west from the second millennium BCE. In the first millennium BCE, the Amazigh kingdom of Numidia, whose most famous king was Jugurtha, alternately allied with and fought against Rome, and the coastal cities of the region, above all Carthage, drew on Amazigh farmers, horsemen, and traders.

The Amazigh developed one of the ancient world's most distinctive scripts, Tifinagh, whose characters are still carved on rocks across the Sahara and, in a modern form, used to write Tamazight today. The script is one of the few ancient writing systems that never entirely died out, kept alive above all by Tuareg communities of the desert. Archaeology, language, and genetics all point to the same conclusion: the Amazigh are not newcomers to North Africa, but its oldest continuous population, with roots stretching back thousands of years before the arrival of Arabs, Romans, or Phoenicians.

The Amazigh did not merely endure the passage of empires; they built some of the greatest of them. In the eleventh century, the Almoravid movement, born among the Sanhaja peoples of the Sahara, conquered Morocco, founded Marrakech, and carried its rule across the Strait of Gibraltar into Muslim Spain. In the twelfth century, the Almohads, rising from the Atlas Mountains, built an empire that stretched from Libya to Andalusia and made Marrakech, Seville, and Rabat into great capitals. In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the Marinids, another Amazigh dynasty, ruled Morocco from Fez and raised its madrasas and gates.

Islam reached North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the Amazigh adopted it while keeping much of their language and customary law. The medieval historian Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, devoted long passages to the peoples of North Africa, describing their tribes, their dynasties, and their cycles of rise and fall. His work remains one of the richest early sources on Amazigh history, and one of the founding texts of historical sociology.

The twentieth century was hard on Amazigh identity. After independence, several North African states pursued Arabisation, promoting Arabic as the sole language of schools, administration, and public life, and treating Amazigh languages as dialects to be left behind. In response, Amazigh activists, writers, and scholars built a cultural movement that pressed for recognition of Tamazight in education and public life, and for the dignity of Amazigh history in national narratives.

Morocco moved first among the states of the region. In 2001, King Mohammed VI created the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, and in 2011, after the protest movements of that year, a new constitution made Tamazight an official language of the kingdom alongside Arabic. Tamazight is now taught in schools, used in public broadcasting, and written in Tifinagh on road signs across the country. The Amazigh new year, Yennayer, is celebrated widely across North Africa and by diaspora communities in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Amazigh music, from the desert blues of Tuareg guitarists to the ahwash dances of the Atlas, and Amazigh crafts, above all carpet weaving and silver jewellery, carry a culture that has outlasted every empire that tried to absorb it.

• Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM), Rabat.
• UNESCO, on Tamazight languages and intangible cultural heritage.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry on the Amazigh.
• British Museum, on North African history and the Tifinagh script.
• Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers, Blackwell.

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