Reflections on Race and Ethnicity in North Africa Towards a Conceptual Critique of the Arab–Berber Divide

In this article, I outline a conceptual critique of the divide between Imazighen and Arabs, an ethnic and racial distinction that prevails in countries such as Algeria and Morocco. It is common but problematic to define the Imazighen as Berbers.¹ Most Imazighen define themselves as the indigenous population of North Africa. The French word “berberisme” is often used to describe this cultural claim of indigeneity as well as the political movements that stem from this claim. The notion of “Berberism” emerged from a schism in 1948 and 1949 between factions of the Algerian nationalist movement. Two conflicting definitions of the Algerian nation were then being opposed to one another: an Arab Algeria, on the one hand, and an Algerian Algeria, on the other. Kabyle nationalist activists were mostly responsible for advocating the latter definition of Algeria. The idea of an Algerian Algeria referred to a pluralist society in which Arab and Amazigh legacies deserved equal weight and acknowledgement.² Messali Hadj, one of the founding fathers of the Arab-first notion of Algerian nationalism, played a crucial role in this crisis. By strictly identifying Algeria with the Arab world, Hadj incensed the Kabyle revolutionary activists, goading them to formulate counter-definitions of who is properly called Algerian. For example, Rachid Ali-Yahia wrote:

Algeria is not Arab but Algerian. It is necessary to form a union of all Algerian Muslims who want to fight for national liberation, without distinction of Arab or Berber race. . . . We stand well above the racial problem. . . . For some time we have read in newspaper articles and certain leaders have been saying that Algeria is Arab. This statement not only is not true but it expresses ideas that are clearly racist, even imperialist.³

Ali-Yahia's response is interesting in many ways. First, it indicates that the concept of Algeria deployed by Kabyle activists of the 1940s is neither culturalist nor identitarian. The exclusivist idea of Algeria's Arabness is questioned on grounds of an anti-colonial project of liberation. The Kabyle activists represented their idea of an Algerian Algeria as a radically democratic refusal of both the centralization and the personification of power. It rejects neither Arabness nor Islam but instead extols a pluralistic “union of all Algerian Muslims