Berber Origins and the Politics of Ethnicity in Colonial North African Discourse (original) (raw)

More than once during our sojourn in the late 1980s in the migrant boomtown of Nador (90,000-plus Berber capital of northeastern Morocco) we heard people casually comment that Nadoris emigrated to Germany and Holland in such numbers because the Germanic Languages and Tamazight (or Berber) languages were so similar. Linguistic closeness made it easy for the emigrants to leam German and Dutch. On other occasions people mentioned that the cross design tattooed on the foreheads or chins of some older women were souvenirs of the Christian era in Berber North Africa. The presence of lighter skinned children in scattered families throughout the Rif mountains of the north provided further proof, said the locals, of the ancient ties that bound the Rif to Europe. One local school teacher even told us tUn *. his tribal region of Kebdana got its name from a legend about the Roman goddess Diana losing her dog ("Kelb" in Arabic) in the mountains of the area, hence "kelb Diana" or Kebdana.