The Historicity of Berber Women’s Agency

Abstract

My very first Moroccan history lesson is still vivid in my memory. I was a pupil in Sidi Ali Tamkart school in the Berber Rifian town of Nador (northeastern Morocco). We were to read and memorize a text in Arabic which started: sukkan al-maghrib al-ʔawwalun hum al-amazigh -abnaaʔu Mazigh (The first inhabitants of Morocco were The Amazighs—sons of Mazigh). The rest of the text, and indeed the rest of the year’s syllabus and beyond, were about the coming of Islam and the glory of the Moroccan royal dynasties in entrenching the Arab-Islamic civilization in Morocco. It was only decades later that I learnt (outside school) that some of these dynasties, the strongest in fact, were Berber. That first sentence stuck in my mind like glue. I did not know what to do with it: it filled me with both awe and deep frustration! Coming from a Berber family that migrated from a rural Berber village to the “urban world,” I secretly prided myself on speaking Berber at home and Moroccan Arabic outside home. I thought I was “privileged.” My father, in particular, took visible pride in this; his own father, who would come to live with us for a month or so every year used to fill my imagination and that of my siblings with heroic stories of Berbers in the village, the Ayt Hssan tribe, and beyond.