in 1986, UNESCO declared the libyan town of ghadamès (known in libyan arabic as jamahiriya) a World Heritage Cultural Site.
this town is familiar to you. it is part of your cultural knowledge - because it is where george lucas filmed the tatooïne building scenes from his star wars twin trilogies.
that's not why UNESCO declared it a WHCS, though. their website is succinct:
Ghadamès, known as 'the pearl of the desert', stands in an oasis. It is one of the oldest pre-Saharan cities and an outstanding example of a traditional settlement. Its domestic architecture is characterized by a vertical division of functions: the ground floor used to store supplies; then another floor for the family, overhanging covered alleys that create what is almost an underground network of passageways; and, at the top, open-air terraces reserved for the women.the city is covered, keeping it cool during the heat of the day and warm during the cold desert nights. many of the long corridors were known by memory because they were so deeply buried in the city they were lightless. and as the UNESCO article notes, the topmost level of the city was limited to women.
the key phrase here, however, is pre-saharan. see, when the romans arrived, berber peoples already lived in their ancient town; that means we have copious written evidence for two thousand years of continuous inhabitation, and the city was already old. the sahara's spread over time means this city once wasn't in the desert, but a savannah much like exists in kenya today: full of gazelles, ferocious wild oxen, lions, hyaenas, baboons and giraffes.
ghadamès is so ancient it has its own language, proper only to the city itself. not a dialect, not a local accent for a wider language - its own language, as distinct from its nearest kin as french is from spanish or rumanian. speak ghadamès? then i know in which city you live.
the city was abandoned - with the copious use of force by the government - for new ghadamès, a nightmarish communist-style pile of poured concrete, whose attractions did include running water and modern plumbing. with the added bonus of not being shot by the government and the joys of living in a hideous concrete bunker totally ill-suited for life in the sahara. however, the old town was maintained by loving citizens who returned during the day to keep their houses and streets in order, and these days things are a-changing.
there are plenty of sites out there that have pictures of ghadamès, like this one, for example, so i'm going to turn my attention to who the ghadamès are. they are part of the indigenous peoples of north africa called in english 'berbers'. the berber languages - some twenty-six of them - are widely spoken in the maghreb, from the siwa oasis of the west egyptian desert to mauritania in the west, and as far south as mali, nigeria, niger and burkina faso. their stronghold has always been the atlas mountains, and algeria and morocco by far contain the majority of native berber speakers today.
berbers are not arabs. they have their own writing system, mostly forgotten today, called tifinagh - this is derived from the word punic, because they are derived from the letters used by the phoenicians who settled in carthage and created a new state there (until the romans killed them all, anyway). the greeks also borrowed the phoenician writing system, and from them the etruscans, and from them the romans. the roman letters are what we use today.
however, the berber languages are cousins to arabic. they fall within the boreafrasian ("north african + asian") clade of the afrasian language family, one of the largest language families in the world. boreafrasian's western component includes berber, the recently extinct guanche from the canary islands of spain, and ancient egyptian, which lives on as a liturgical language in the egyptian christian churches as coptic.
the eastern branch of boreafrasian includes the large semitic family, which includes the many arabic dialects/languages, the aramaic (including syriac) and canaanite languages (hebrew and the aforementioned phoenician, extinct except for in placenames such as beirut beyruut, 'the wells') as well as many others - ethiopian languages, the unwritten south arabian languages, etc.
today, many berber languages and their distinct cultures are in danger of being elided by larger ethnicities. arabic has been a major source of trouble for berber since nearly all berbers are muslim - spain was conquered not by arabs, but by berbers. ironically, what has helped keep berber alive is not only the isolation of its settlements (i am reminded uncomfortably of the tusken raiders of the star wars films at this point) but also its extremely patriarchal treatment of women. whether this is a native or adopted cultural trait, berber women are mostly illiterate, monolingual and stay in their settlements and homes away from foreigners (arabs). this leaves an ongoing legacy of children raised in an all-berber environment and the languages continued to survive.
when the french colonised north africa, they helped this process. seeking to break up the nativists, they forced french-language schooling on the nation. this means that young people of both sexes didn't learn arabic, though boys' fathers often had them take additional classes. berber women now could speak a language of power, and it did not contest berber in the home like arabic did. arabic, after all, was a prestige language because it was doubly the language of the elite and of religion. now it had lost its elite shine.
still, the legacy of the oppression of women is strong in berber and non-berber cultures of north africa. there is a conflict in the way educated women often write in french; there is a way in which the master's language is best used to subvert his programme. still, it will be an interesting future if things keep changing the way they are. there are so many interesting feminists - fatima mernissi (some of her books in english & her website), fatima sadiqi (books on berber language and culture & her website), the egyptian nawal al-saadawi (some of her books in english and her website.
i know this post rambles, but that's what blogs are for. i couldn't miss an opportunity to talk about native feminists, now could i?
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