Two consecutive African Berbers Kingdoms once conquered a vast area from northern Spain to deep in the African Sahara. Only to be destroyed by outside forces of the Christian Spain and Arab east. The Almoravids went from being desert nomads to empire builders. Gus Casely-Hayford describes how they managed to control not just the trans-Saharan gold trade, but the key to life itself. Underground irrigation channels, called khettara, ensured they could move the precious resource to where it was needed. The Berbers or the Amazighs ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⴻⵏ are the ethnicity indigenous to North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are distributed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Siwa Oasis in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Niger River. Historically they spoke Berber languages, which together form the "Berber branch" of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Since the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, a large portion of Berbers have spoken varieties of Maghrebi Arabic, either by choice or obligation. After the invasion of north Africa by France people were "not only forced to speak French but that access to every non-French language was forbidden as well. Especially in school, Algerians were forced to speak French instead of their previous mother tongues; this included classical Arabic, the Berber language and all of its dialects. Algerians were required to speak a single language, French".[5] Foreign languages like French and Spanish, inherited from former European colonial powers, are used by most educated Berbers in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in some formal contexts such as higher education or business. Today, most of the Berber people live in Northern African countries such as Algeria and Morocco; a large Berber population is also found in Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, as well as large migrant communities living in France, Turkey and other countries of Europe. The Berber identity is usually wider than language and ethnicity, and encompasses the entire history and geography of North Africa. Berbers are not an entirely homogeneous ethnicity and they encompass a range of phenotypes, societies and ancestries. The unifying forces for the Berber people may be their shared language, belonging to the Berber homeland, or a collective identification with the Berber heritage and history. Linguistically speaking, there are some twenty-five to thirty million Berber speakers in North Africa. The number of ethnic Berbers (including non-Berber speakers) is far greater, as it is known that a large part of the Berbers have acquired other languages, over the course of many decades or centuries, and no longer speak Berber today. Berbers call themselves some variant of the word i-Mazigh-en, possibly meaning "free people" or "free and noble men". The word has probably an ancient parallel in the Roman and Greek names for some of the Berbers, "Mazices". Some of the best known of the ancient Berbers are the Numidian king Masinissa, king Jugurtha, the Berber-Roman author Apuleius, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and the Berber-Roman general Lusius Quietus, who was instrumental in defeating the major wave of Jewish revolts of 115–117. Dihya or Kahina was a female Berber religious and military leader who led a fierce Berber resistance against the Arab-Muslim expansion in North-West Africa. Kusaila was a seventh-century leader of the Awraba tribe of the Berber people and head of the Sanhadja confederation. Famous Berbers of the Middle Ages include Yusuf ibn Tashfin, king of the Berber Almoravid empire; Tariq ibn Ziyad the general who conquered Hispania; Abbas Ibn Firnas, a prolific inventor and early pioneer in aviation; Ibn Battuta, a medieval explorer who traveled the longest known distances in antiquity; and Estevanico, an early explorer of the Americas. Well-known modern Berbers in Europe include Zinedine Zidane, a French-born international football star of Algerian Kabyle descent, Loreen the Swedish-born winner of Eurovision 2012 and Ibrahim Afellay, a Dutch-born football player of Moroccan Riffian descent. In historical times, the Berbers expanded south into the Sahara (displacing earlier populations such as the Azer and Bafour), and have in turn been mainly culturally assimilated in much of North Africa by Arabs, particularly following the incursion of the Banu Hilal in the eleventh century. However much of Berber culture is still celebrated among the cultural elite in Morocco, and Algeria, a precedent set as early as Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century. The areas of North Africa which retained the Berber language and traditions best have been, in general, Morocco, highlands of Algeria (Kabylie, Aurès et cetera) most of which in Roman and Ottoman times remained largely independent. The Ottomans did penetrate the Kabylie area; Turkish influence can be seen in food, clothes and music, and to places the Phoenicians never penetrated, far beyond the coast.

• published: 26 Nov 2014
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