THE BERBERS OF EASTERN ALGERIA

Le message d'aujourd'hui n'est pas un compte rendu comme tel, mais plutôt un exposé relatif à ce livre, une conférence donnée par l'auteur lors du meeting des membres de la Royal Geographical Society le 21 avril I941. Elle fut suivie d'une période de question.

Ceux qui ont lu ce livre savent déjà qu'il est dédié intégralement à la région aurésienne et qu'il contient, en plus des éléments anthropologiques, tous les aspects du mode de vie des amazighs de l'Aurès, icawiyen : la religion, le droit coutumier, la culture en terrasse et méthodes d'irrigation, l'élevage, la transhumance, les greniers collectifs, les moyens de transport de l'époque, la politique d'assimilation par la France coloniale, etc.
En outre, le livre est enrichi d'une dizaine de photos mémorisant à jamais nos paysages et villages : des photos de Menâa, Arris, Ghoufi, baniane, etc.

Pour ceux qui ne l'ont pas lu encore, je les laisse le découvrir à travers la lecture de cet exposé, cette conférence, qui est en fait un très bon résumé du livre.
Comme suggestion: lisez la période de question ou la discussion ainsi que les commentaires de l'auteur relativement à ses photos (même si ces dernières ne sont pas intégrées au message, il en demeure que les précisions de l'écrivain sont très instructives) .

Autrement dit, le message relatif à ce livre est composé de trois parties :

I- la conférence ou l'exposé ( les 15 notes de l'auteur sont très informatives)

II-les commentaires

III-la discussion

Sans tarder, je vous laisse à la lecture du partie principale: la conférence (les deux autres rubriques du message seront postées prochainement)

Bonne lecture.

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BOOK: The Berbers of Eastern Algeria

AUTHOR: George H. T. Kimble

-I-

The Aurès mountains of eastern Algeria constitute one of the most clearly defined cultural regions in the whole of North Africa. No part of Barbary possesses a more vigorous and distinctive personality, or reveals such astonishing contrasts.

As African mountains go, the lozenge-shaped massif of the Aurès is neither spectacular in size nor in elevation; only in the extreme north does it rise above 7000 feet and nowhere is it more than 100 miles in length or breadth. In their western half these fold mountains are aligned in a north east-south west direction and describe long rectilinear ranges. Towards the east the alignment is more latitudinal. The main axis of the system, Djebel Azreg, is an anticline of lower Cretaceous age with a Jurassic core which forms the northern rampart known as Chélia (Shelya), the highest peak of the Aures.

Everywhere the massif is deeply ravined by wads. Geographically the most important of these are the oued el Abiod and the oued Abdi engulfed between the Djebel Mahmel in the west and Ahmar Khaddou in the east. These multi-coloured calcareous formations are everywhere imposing, and when flushed by the rays of the setting sun they present a spectacle of rare beauty. The abrupt southern termination of the Aurès mountains is due to severe faulting ⁽¹⁾

For a massif of such modest dimensions, intermontane communication is surprisingly difficult and the isolation of the country ⁽²⁾, historically very acute, is still serious. Even today there is no good road through the Aurès. The track that styles itself Route Nationale has a high car-mortality rate. Although the Roman legions penetrated right into the heart of the country, I they did not succeed in building a single metalled highway: a tribute, partly at any rate, to the rough grain of the topography. Here in the heart of a French colony which is generously equipped on the whole with useful roads and railways, we can still observe the life of a people without communication other than the veriest tracks, and without motive power other than the feet of draught animals; for apart from a very limited motorbus service between Batna and Arris (the administrative centre) and Batna and Menaa (one of the largest villages), the only satisfactory method of travel is either by camel or mule. These animals have a longer expectation of life than most cars, and they may even prove faster. Whereas you may have to go 50 miles to get from one important village to another by car, the mule track over the mountains may be less than five ⁽³⁾.

In such a difficult terrain it is not surprising that the outside world has remained woefully ignorant of the Aurasian people. For several centuries after the time of the Romans nobody appears to have visited them at all; admittedly the Arabs prevailed upon them to accept the Muhammadan faith, but they never settled among them and, in common with the Romans, Vandals, and Byzantines before them, they were unable to impose their mode of life upon them. More recently the French have carried their authority into this territory, but the number of French people residing in the Aurès is very small ⁽⁴⁾.

Accordingly, the Aurasian population has undergone little, if any, ethnic change in modern times. As in the case of Kabylia, the only other conspicuous area of Berber culture in Algeria, the Aurès mountains have served as an asylum of primitive racial stocks, whose precise origin is unknown and probably unknowable ⁽⁵⁾. It is thought by some that they represent the end-product of a slow amalgamation of different Semitic peoples, such as the Getulians and Lybians: Masqueray regards them as a by-product of the Roman occupation (many Berbers pride themselves on their Roman origin); Ferand believes that some of the Chaouia (Shawiya) tribes (the name by which they are most generally called) are a mixture of autochthonous and Jewish-Christian refugees who fled to the mountains at the time of the Arab invasion ⁽⁶⁾ .Certainly there is little ethnic uniformity among the Chaouia tribes. Some are lightly pigmented, and of tall stature, strangely reminiscent of more northern types ⁽⁷⁾. Others are of a type akin to the Corsican and South Italian; yet others are of the broad-shouldered, slender-hipped type so widely spread over the basin of the Nile. ( Plusieurs écrivains comtemporains sont en désaccord avec les hypotheses et les analyses de ces 2 auteurs, car ils confondent souvent religion et race. Voir entre autres le livre de Fanny Colonna: Les versets de l'invincibilté, ndlr)

In religion the Chaouias follow Mohammed, without deep piety, but with a fanaticism which makes them the ready prey of the marabouts (i.e. the priestly caste from which the sheïks are recruited: all claim descent from the Prophet). Alongside the official religion they practise a second: a survival in composite form of animism, fetishism, zoolatry, and other pagan cults. Sacred spots, "high places," and groves abound. Certain rocks have miraculous properties: to these come men and women about to be married, and the women come again if they have been unsuccessful in giving birth to a son. In some areas, instead of rocks, trees, or even piles of dead wood are similarly invested; and no matter how hard up for fuel the Berber is, he would rather die than take a piece from such a heap, for perchance there lies buried beneath a marabout whose power for good and ill no native dares question.

Culturally, linguistically, and racially the Chaouias are closely related to the Kabyles, with whom they share somewhat similar historical experiences. If anything the Chaouia people are more rudimentary, but their language owes more to Arab influence than does Kabyle ( selon les travaux de S. Chaker c'est le contraire: le parler chawi est moins influencé, ndlr), because they live in closer contact with the nomadic caravan life of the Sahara. But, like the Kabyles, they are essentially men of the mountains; reference to a map showing the distribution of the two peoples elicits clearly the correlation between Berber settlement and altitude ^{( 8 )} . There are very few Kabyles, and still fewer Chaouias permanently domiciled beyond the physical limits of their respective massifs. However, within the Aurès, the Chaouia people are far more mobile than the Kabyles within the Djurdjuras; nor is this very surprising, for the climate conspires with the physique of the country to discourage the Chaouias from pursuing a purely sedentary manner of life.

Lying between the High Tell in the north and the Sahara in the south, the climate of the Aurès is far from uniform. A three-days' mule journey can provide you with almost every temperature gradation from Alpine cold to tropic heat, for the snow-burdened cedars of Mount Chélia are only 70 miles from the palms of Biskra. The rainfall, nowhere very abundant, decreases very rapidly towards the south. Weather stations are few and far between in the Aurès, but the approximate annual fall in the heart of the country, e.g. Menaa, is 16 inches, while on the Saharan fringe it is less than 6 inches and comes entirely in the winter months. Among other things this means that the wads are little more than a string of pools after the month of April, and that the southern half of the mountains, never lavishly endowed with pasture, is parched for the best part of the year.

Even in the central sector of the massif there are few plants which do not improve their yield with supplementary watering. Grain, chiefly winter wheat, is grown without irrigation around Arris and Menâa, but it is a poor man's gamble; the wealthier natives are always those with irrigated land. For the most, the land that cannot be commanded by a ditch is at a discount, providing a scanty diet for sheep and goats, and then only during the winter. Watered land, on the other hand, fetches up to 40,000 francs an acre ⁽⁹⁾, although I doubt whether many natives own even as much as half an acre of such land. For the privilege of drawing water for six hours from a single channel the size of an ordinary street gutter the Chaouias think nothing of paying 250 francs. The control of the channels is in the hands of the village council (djemaa) presided over by the civil head of the community, the amin, who is responsible to the French for the good management of the community. As these native deputies are paid only a nominal salary by the French Government, it is scarcely remarkable that most of them are open to bribery. If, as not infrequently happens, a native prevails upon the amin to allocate more water to him than he needs, he will then sub-let the surplus to one of his less well-situated neighbours, at a profit; however since most natives aspire at some time or other to the position of amin, they seldom dispute his decisions ⁽¹⁰⁾ .

Berber agricultural practice is simplicity itself. The wooden plough does little more than scratch the soil in spiral patterns. Straight furrows are almost non-existent. Mules which are commonly used for ploughing spend much of their lives roped to a pole in the middle of a threshing floor; as they walk round and round, the rope shortens so that the whole floor is threshed out. Perhaps it is for this reason that mules seem to prefer to start ploughing operations around the perimeter of the field and work spirally inwards. As it is customary to sow the crop on the ground before ploughing, a good proportion of the seed is not even covered over.

Apparently the Berber is not blind to the shortcomings of his arable economy, for at almost every turn he bolsters it up with the rites and ceremonies of his semi-pagan faith. To take only one instance: I arrived one spring afternoon at a village to find that all the men and boys had adjourned to an olive grove nearby for the purpose of "blessing the plough." There were a few ploughs there it is true (one man had carried his more than 2 miles in order to make certain of his blessing), but the most conspicuous feature of the gathering was the prodigious amount of food. Upon inquiry I learned that the whole village had clubbed together to buy two bullocks which were, at that very moment, being divided into equal portions-meat, fat, and entrails-among the whole company. In addition there were large wooden basins full of couscous, a mush of semolina smothered with a kind of vegetable soup. The latter was devoured on the spot, but the meat was taken home dangling on the end of a piece of string to provide a feast for the family. The man with the plough, which incidentally was sprinkled with blood by the sheïk during the proceedings, was asked if he knew the significance of the ritual: all he would say was that there would now be enough sunshine to bring his figs to maturity. As the village concerned was well up the mountain side near the normal cloud base, sunshine was by no means certain to ripen his figs.

Manurial treatment is rare, for dung is too useful in the house to be broadcast over the fields. Mixed with mud it enters into the manufacture of pitchers and pots, into the construction of the hearth and the home itself, while in its dried state it is widely used as cooking fuel. Simple rotations are followed on irrigated land, but they are almost impossible elsewhere as grain is the only crop to yield a harvest without the addition of water. Fallowing, as an alternative, does not appeal to the native if only because it seems to him to imply the waste of a whole year's rainfall.

In the heart of the country the chief irrigated crops are cereals, beans (yielding two crops a year quite often), figs, apricots, pomegranates, tomatoes, nuts, and dates. Yields are on the whole surprisingly good, but few natives find themselves with any marketable surplus. Indeed they are more accustomed to shortage than to surplus, a fact which helps to explain the precautions taken by them for the protection of the ripening fruit. To a man they build themselves rustic booths, sometimes on stilts, in which they pass their nights keeping guard with muskets of antique design. This they do for the greater part of May and June when figs and apricots, two of their most valuable foodstuffs, are coming to maturity. Nor is their vigil at an end when the last trees have been stripped, because the fruits have then to be laid out to dry on the flat roof of the owner's house, and Chaouia houses are so arranged that one man's roof is, more often than not, another man's roadway.

By about July and August this long invigilation ceases and there is little more to be done on the land until the winter rains set in. As the wads are now dry and pasture is unobtainable locally, these Berbers are compelled to drive their animals to the better-watered ranges of the northern Aures. In the extreme south, this seasonal migration begins as early as April, for irrigation water is scarcer and less reliable here and is used almost solely for grain crops; but whether early or late, it is essentially a communal affair. To those who have not seen it, this migration presents a spectacle difficult to conjure: it is the spectacle of a whole community, even a tribe, complete with arms, baggage, domestic animals, flocks, and children on the march: one might almost say, in flight. It is a sight at once impressive and pitiable; "the Bible come to life, or a menagerie on the move, according to the humour of the observer or the eye with which you regard it" (Georges Rozet). Some families take tents, some live in houses which are unoccupied except during the short summer season, while others live, like troglodytes, in caverns⁽¹¹⁾ hewn out of the mountain side. As the general elevation of the northern Aurès is between 4500 and 6000 feet, some of the land falls well below the tree-line and the limit of cultivation; in fact the pastures are characteristically interspersed with stands of pine, cedar, and scrub oak, and with patches of ploughed land. Those southerners who "own" cultivable land here usually come up in advance of the main body in order to get their grain crops in as soon as the snows have cleared ⁽¹²⁾

By October the Chaouias are ready to leave their "summer houses," cafes, and shops and return south. But their wanderings are not finished; in November they go off to the oases near Biskra to gather their crop of dates; every native likes to own at least a couple of palms in the desert.

What happens to the village while the Chaouias are away ?

Most of the houses are shut down and their contents removed to a communal storehouse known as the guelâa (qal'a) ⁽¹³⁾ . This is the architectural piece de resistance of Barbary. Built of mud, stone, and date-palm timbers, it is often three to four storeys high and occupies the most easily defended position in or near the village.

Many a guelâa is only accessible by scrambling up the face of a cliff, or by a really hazardous ascent of a rope ladder; for the storehouse, it should be noted, becomes the village castle in time of trouble. In this semi-arid country there are many hungry people who find it hard to resist the temptation of plundering the guelâa of an almost deserted village, and usually they are very well worth plundering. For instance the one at Baniane in the oued el Abiod ⁽¹⁴⁾ has fifty-five separate chambers, approximately one for each family in the village; in these chambers are stored the year's crop of fruit and grain, and in addition such household goods, e.g. carpets, as cannot conveniently be taken to the summer pastures. However he is a rash man who would burgle a guelâa single-handed. In the first place he would need to dispatch the armed guardians of the place, for the villagers never dream of leaving their storehouses unattended. Secondly, he would have to cope with fifty-five different locks, the keys of which are with their owners on the high pastures. By the time he had forced the doors he would be almost certain to find some one had contrived to close the one and only exit, and that his sole chance of escape was to trust himself and booty, if any, to the rope ladder.

The defence factor has also been at work in the planning of the Chaouia village, but man cannot live by defence alone; in the Aurès, as we have seen, he lives as much by irrigation. Yet the wads which from earliest times have given life to his crops have also given him the Roman, Vandal, and French invaders and the no less dangerous Arab nomads. Even after the subjugation of the country by the French the Chaouias still had to protect themselves from certain of their own tribes. It is this perennial division of interests which is largely responsible for the two characteristic kinds of native settlement, the dechra (deshrah) and the mechta (meshtah). The latter is usually a collection of houses or tents grouped over the cultivated lands of the valley floor or anywhere the Chaouia possesses agricultural land. The dechra, on the other hand, is nearly always perched on the heights overlooking the wad; its houses cling precariously to the valley slopes and rise in irregular tiers one above another. Frequently the guelâa occupies the topmost tier. In the gorge of el Abiod the dechra is generally found "incrusted" on the flanks or summits of the vertical cliff. Approach to it is by almost invisible goat tracks, slippery paths, and miniature platforms along which one advances with some hesitation. The dechra is protected moreover as much by its invisibility as by its situation. Seen for the first time from a distance, whether under grey skies or in the glare of the midday sun, it can be descried only with difficulty, for all the houses are the colour of Aurasian earth and stone of which they are constructed. It needs the oblique rays of the evening sun to throw them into relief and reveal their presence to the unsuspecting traveller. Only at the extreme southern end of the Aurès where the mountains sink beneath the sands of the Sahara, do you find, as at M'chounech (Mshunesh), a union of the mechta with the dechra. The defensive part of the settlement, occupying a spur of the now low-lying Ahmar Khaddou, merges imperceptibly into the mechta located alongside the oued el Abiod.

Altogether there are well over one hundred villages in the Aurès: most of them do not exceed a thousand inhabitants, but Menâa, one of the largest, has upwards of two thousand. Since the pacification of the country towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Chaouia population has almost doubled.⁽¹⁵⁾. Even so the average density per square mile is less than forty, including Europeans.

And what of the impact of French civilization upon native society?

"Assimilation" is the order of the day, but such is the strength of tradition among the Berbers that this process is perforce very slow; all the same, assimilation, early or late, is the goal of every administrator. In education, to consider only one field of colonial enterprise, this means that all teaching, even in elementary schools, is in French. It means moreover that the curriculum is substantially the same as that employed in the metropolitan areas of France. In spite of a strong practical bent, much of the instruction is ill-adapted to the necessities of native life. Thus boys attending a school, whose only contact with civilization is a radio set and a bi-weekly postal service, are taught to produce and print their own magazine; there are plenty of errors, needless to say, but nobody is going to notice them in a country where many people still cannot distinguish between one letter and another. The girls, when they attend, are taught knitting, laundering, European cooking, and table etiquette -arts bearing no relation to the primitive appointments of the native house which is as bare of furniture and linen as it is innocent of sanitation.

At the same time many schools can boast fine experimental gardens where the French masters are annually proving the value of new crops, such as green vegetables and temperate orchard fruits, chemical fertilizers, scientific rotations, and terracing for want of which the hillier land is rapidly declining in productivity. Unfortunately the native is slow to copy such good examples. His fields are full of stones that would make magnificent retaining walls for terraces, but he would not dream of disturbing them: "Allah put them there; let no man remove them." Again, when he is given seed potatoes by the French authorities he merely adds them to his evening bowl of couscous.

In brief, the Berber's main interest in "culture" is to learn enough French to get him through his three years' conscription in comfort and perhaps enable him to take a temporary job in one of the big cities, such as Constantine, Algiers, or even Paris. And a surprising number of Berbers, Chaouias, and Kabyles alike, do emigrate temporarily. It is not uncommon to find 10-15 per cent. of the adult male population of a village away from home. Most of them will be engaged in menial work, scavenging, and car-washing for instance, which none the less offers good pay by native standards.

The younger men often stay until they have accumulated enough money to buy their brides- a good-looking woman costs anything up to 2500 francs-and settle down on a piece of land in their old village. You might imagine that residence abroad would educate them up to a higher plane of living, but while it is true that some acquire a taste for iron bedsteads, tables, oil lamps, and the like, most of them remain content to spend their nights rolled up in a homespun rug on the hard dung floor, and to eat their food out of a common wooden bowl by the light of a smouldering, chimney-less fire.

By and large, the Berber still lives in the same way as his forefathers. He still settles disputes by blood feuds, with the aid of professional assassins. He still practices, a most sinister form of medicine: the recognized cure for bleeding is a poultice of gunpowder, cow-dung, and henna applied to the affected part. Moreover he is still pagan at heart and almost everything he does, from ploughing to plundering, requires the use of charms and incantations. In such a world it is not to be wondered at that French and Berber find themselves perpetually at cross-purposes. On at least one point however there is general agreement between them, for what could be truer than the Berber proverb that

"Teaching boys is like ploughing earth,

Teaching men is like ploughing rock,

Teaching old men is like ploughing water"

(1) On the structure of the Aurès, see A. Bernard and E. Ficheur, "Les Regions Naturelles de 1'Algerie", in Annales de Geographie, vol. xi, 1902. 23

(2) Rock inscriptions relating to the exploits of the legions are quite common; so, too, are evidences of Roman cultural influence. In the gorge of el Abiod (near Tighanimine) there can still be seen a section of an irrigation canal (séguia) built by the Romans, and, until recently, one of the Aurasian tribes, the Beni Ferah, used a block-and- tackle device very similar to that described by M. Cato in his treatise 'On Agriculture.'

(3) Signposts in the Aurès commonly give the distance in hours-for mules.

(4) The total number of French citizens (including naturalized natives) in the Aurès Commune at the time of the 1936 census was only one hundred and eighty one; almost all of these were engaged in government work: administration, forestry, police. The number of French "colonists" was negligible.

(5) The very derivation of the "Berber" is uncertain. It may have come from βαρβαροι, or from the Barabara and Beraberata tribes spoken of in Egyptian inscriptions of the seventeenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. The Kabyles and Chaouias call themselves "Imaziren" and their language "Tamazirt."

(6) Among the lines of evidence supporting this contention is the fact that the Chaouias possess certain Judaistic and even Christian customs, e.g. they use the Julian calendar and observe a kind of Christmas feast which they celebrate with the help of a "tree" and appropriate decorations.

(7) Generally speaking, the proportion of dark-eyed people in the Aurès is only about 25 per cent., though in places it rises to 75 per cent.

( 8 ) The distribution of the Chaouias does not coincide perfectly with the geographical limits of the Aurès, largely because the peripheral tribes tend to spread out on to the better favoured foothill and lowland pastures, but in so doing they usually become more or less arabized, e.g. the tribes living near the Batna-Biskra line of communication.

(9) This is higher than the average land values obtaining in the large towns such as Constantine and Algiers.

(10) The keeping of the main canals in condition is regarded as a communal job, each man affected contributing two or more days' labour per annum: the amount being prescribed likewise by the djemaa. In mid-Aures the cleaning is done twice a year: in April, i.e. prior to the first general application of irrigation water, and in August, after the main crops have been harvested.

(11) When these caverns (afri) are sufficiently big, the Chaouia use them as night shelters for their herds as well as their families.

(12) Chaouia migrations must not be confused with the much larger Arab migrations. These start earlier, last longer, and, incidentally, are a cause of considerable anxiety to the Chaouia through whose country they normally proceed. He is sure to find himself a chicken short, perhaps even a sheep, when he comes to gather them in at nightfall. The Arab, furthermore, is not so much interested in the high mountain pastures as in the wide wheat-lands of the Tell: these he helps their European owners to harvest. The subsequent transport of the grain by camel to market and town provides him with a full-time occupation until late autumn, when he returns to the Sahara.

(13) Not all the guelâas are communal: some natives prefer to build their own personal guelâas in well-protected spots near their homes. The oued el Abiod is the home of the guelâa.

(14) The Abdi, lying to windward of el Abiod, is better watered and the need for transhumance normally does not exist there.

(15) In 1936 the population of the three "Communes mixte" into which the territory of the Aurès is divided, was given as 145,765, but as these communes embrace a good deal of the foothill country populated partly by Arabs and Europeans, this figure cannot be regarded as anything more than a very generous estimate of the Chaouia population.

II- Notes on illustrations ......( à suivre )

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