Berbers

From the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the oases of western Egypt, the Imazighen (singular Amazigh) have lived in North Africa since long before written history, and their shared languages still bind together millions of people. They live across Morocco, Algeria and Libya, in smaller numbers in Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt's Siwa Oasis, and, as the Tuareg, in the Sahara and Sahel. In English they are often called Berbers, but that name is an exonym, traced through Arabic to the Latin barbari, and many Imazighen regard it as pejorative. The name Amazigh itself dates back to antiquity.

People have lived in the Maghreb since prehistoric times, and rock paintings at Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria and Tadrart Acacus in Libya record a Neolithic world of herders and early farmers between about 6000 and 2000 BC. Linguists think the Amazigh languages, a branch of the Afroasiatic family, spread west from the Nile Valley across the northern Sahara from around 2000 BC. Ancient Egyptian writings are the first to mention them, and Greek and Roman writers later named the Mauri in the far west, the Numidians nearer Carthage and the more pastoral Gaetulians on the desert edge.

Amazigh peoples lived beside Phoenician colonies, above all Carthage. Numidia rose in what is now Algeria and Tunisia: its king Masinissa sided with Rome in 206 BC during the Second Punic War, and by his death in 148 BC his realm almost encircled Carthage. His grandson Jugurtha later fought a long war against Rome. To the west lay Mauretania, which became a Roman client state in 33 BC and a province in AD 40. Later, the Christian Mauro-Roman kingdom of Altava ruled much of the interior.

Arab armies entered the Maghreb from 642. Amazigh leaders resisted, among them Kusaila and the woman leader Dihya, whose coalition was defeated in 703, and by 711 the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb was complete. The army that invaded Iberia in 711 was mainly Amazigh and was led by an Amazigh commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad. Discontent with heavy taxes and unequal treatment fuelled a great revolt in 739–740, inspired by the egalitarian teachings of Ibadi Islam. In the following centuries Amazigh dynasties came to rule North Africa and al-Andalus: the Zirids and Hammadids, the Almoravids of the Sanhaja, the Almohads, and their successors the Marinids, Zayyanids and Hafsids, who lasted into the sixteenth century. Medieval historians divided the Amazigh into two great branches, the Butr and the Baranis, and Ibn Khaldun traced their descent to a legendary ancestor named Mazigh.

Arabic language and culture spread slowly, first around the cities and then, after the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym migrated west in the eleventh century, across the plains and steppes. Over centuries many Amazigh communities adopted Arabic, while the languages survived most strongly in mountain and desert regions such as Kabylia, the Aurès, the Atlas, the Rif and the Sahara.

A revolt that began in Kabylia in 1871 spread across much of French Algeria. In northern Morocco, Rif fighters under Abd el-Krim routed a Spanish army at Annual in 1921; Spain may have lost up to 22,000 soldiers there and in the fighting that followed.

Estimates vary widely: Imazighen are thought to make up 35–60 per cent of the population of Morocco and 15–25 per cent of Algeria's, and Amazigh languages have some 14 to 16 million speakers. Major groups include the Shilha of the Atlas and Sous, about eight million, the Kabyles, about six million, the Rifians, Chaouis and Nafusis, and the Tuareg of Mali and Niger. Most are Sunni Muslims, while the Mozabites and some Libyan communities follow Ibadi Islam; a Jewish Amazigh minority in Morocco was large until the 1960s. Since the late twentieth century a movement for Amazigh identity has sought wider recognition. Amazigh became an official language in Morocco in 2011 and in Algeria in 2016, and is now taught in Moroccan schools.

Our 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE maps draw "Berbers" across the Maghreb, beside the Celtiberians in Iberia. The 900 and 1200 maps place Berber groups in the western Sahara, near Ghana and the Tuareg. The outlines are approximate; Amazigh communities spread far more widely.