An exuberant awakening for Libya’s Berbers

(Alice Fordham/ The Washington Post ) - Children carrying the Libyan flag and the emblem of the Amazigh people of Western Libya walk to the women's section of a festival in Kabaw, Libya to celebrate Amazigh culture marginalized under Gaddafi.

By Alice Fordham, Tuesday, November 15, 6:46 AM

KABAW, Libya — Perched on a peak in the heart of Libya’s Nafusa Mountains, the ancient town of Kabaw was bathed in floodlight, rocked by music blaring from gigantic speakers and overwhelmed by thousands of people dancing in its steep streets.

As the party ebbed and flowed up the steps of a castle, around a mosque with a seemingly misplaced steeple and down the sides of the mountain, the revelers waved the red, black and green flag of Libya’s revolutionaries. But they also flaunted another flag, with green, blue and yellow stripes and a curious red symbol.

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“Azoul!” they shouted, before bursting into song in a language that is not Arabic. Kabaw is home to about 10,000 Amazigh people, also known as Berbers, who speak their own language, have their own customs and were intensely repressed by Libyan autocrat Moammar Gaddafi.

The town was among the first to join the western arm of the revolution, and the festivities were held to laud its war dead and mark glory in victory. They also celebrated the chance for the Amazigh to again express their culture after 42 years, as minorities across Libya call on the new government for recognition denied by Gaddafi.

“We never had freedom,” said Mustafa Ayoub, a doctor who addressed the crowds. “Every time we tried to rise up, we got squashed. Now we smell freedom, and we have to touch it and taste it.”

Jubilant men and women echoed his sentiments, delighted to speak Tamazight, a language illegal under Gaddafi, and to see a flag that is flown by Amazigh people all over northwest Africa but that many in Kabaw had never seen before the revolution.

“This is not just a flag,” said Khaled Sedaa, a biochemistry professor and native of the town. “This is a symbol of heritage.” The blue represents the sea, the green represents the mountains, and the yellow represents the desert, explained Ayoub. The symbol is a letter of the Tamazight alphabet.

Vestiges of Christianity

There are more than 15 million Amazigh who live in North Africa, and they generally refer to themselves as such, regarding Berber as a faintly disparaging term related to “barbarian.” Many consider themselves descendants of the original inhabitants of North Africa, a people who settled thousands of years ago and practiced Judaism and Christianity before Islam.

“This mosque used to be a church,” said Morad Makhlouf, a Kabaw businessman who fought with the revolutionaries. He led the way into the thick-walled building sunk into the side of the mountain, where young Muslim men were praying in a room with cross symbols scratched on the walls.

“Under Gaddafi, it was not allowed to pray in here,” said Makhlouf, explaining that local customs are still influenced by Christianity — harvested wheat is marked with a cross, and circumcisions and weddings take place on Sundays. Banning the use of the old church for prayer was, he thought, a way of obliterating a distinctive culture.

Under Gaddafi it was forbidden to speak, write or sing Tamazight, on pain of arrest or beating by security forces, who would also smash up shops displaying Tamazight script. Now, the first article of an interim constitution guarantees “the cultural rights for all components of the Libyan society” and deems all of Libya’s languages national ones.