Berbers – nation of North Africa

1. The Berber ethnic flag

Being in Morocco, for sure you will hear about Berbers, or Amazighs as they prefer to call themselves. It is very curious and in some way mysterious nation what makes them more interesting.

Very often people  make relations between Moroccan and Berbers as one nation but it is not completely true. I will try to make it clear, at least a little bit. The fact is that not all of Moroccans are Berbers and not all of Berbers are Moroccan. The Moroccan culture can be relationed in some measure with Berbers culture and vice versa but it does not mean that they are equival. To make it more clear, especially for Poles, I am going to show this on the base of Slavs. To Slavs belong not only Poles or Slovacs, but also Chechs, Russian, Ukrainians, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs and many many more. The point is, that belonging to  the same group and sharing the same past and some tradition it is not everything, because each of the nation has own history and own customs , in one world has one individual culture. The same situation is with Berbers. I hope it is clear enough now.

Moving on, we will take the meaning of Amazigh into consideration. What does that mean? Has it a meaning at all? The answer is : yes of course it has! The word amazig means ‘free man’, except of this meaning we can find also some information which takes other possibilities into consideration  like ‘strong’ or ‘brave’ man. It does not matter which meaning is true anyway, both are better than the word ‘berber’, that is why usually Amazigh don’t like being called in this way. Someone could ask why. The answer is simple. It is very easy to find out.  From the etymological point of view the word ‘berber’ was taken from the old greek ‘barbaros’ what had a pejorative meaning, even now in a lot of European languages the word was accepted with negative meaning expressed a wild, primitive man. So I am not surprised at all why they don’t like this name.

Another interesting thing connected with Amazigh people is that they have also their own language called Tamazight. This language for a really long time had been only a spoken language. In the 20^th century was created a Tamazight writing system and now it is officially used by most of Amazigh.
What is more, this language usually is written in the Tifiangh alphabet but also can be written in the Arabic or even in the Latin alphabet. 

I have put the photo to show you the Tifinagh alphabet which seems to be a little bit weird, like from the ancient times, but on the other hand, it makes Tamazight so beautiful.