ABUJA (Sundiata Post) I’m in Austin, Texas for the annual University of Texas African Studies conference convened by Professor Toyin Falola. My cab driver from the airport to the hotel is an Algerian, a Berber (or Amazigh as some of them like to be called since “Berber” was originally a Roman denigratory term).
The guy is practically, morphologically white and said in the course of our conversation that the berbers are the white Africans (his phrase), the indigenous people of North Africa. The Berbers, he told me, are the most marginalized people in the world. They’ve almost lost their language; they’ve become oppressively Arabized, and in Algeria, when they protested against discrimination and marginalization, they were mowed down by the Algerian government.
He also told me about the quotidian secularity of Algeria despite 99 percent of the population being Muslim. Ironically, or perhaps not ironically, he told me that the approximately 150,000 Christians in the country are Berbers, a fact that I find fascinating. Is Christianity their way of protesting against Arabization and Islamization or simply the result of French evangelization? I don’t know the answer.
He let me in on one aspect of Algerian history that I was not previously aware of: the berbers lost more people during the Algerian war of independence against France than the Arab, urban populations and yet they were/are not represented in the postcolonial Algerian government.
He also told me that the people in charge of Algerian politics and economy from independence to date are literally from one town/clan–people who were in exile in one town in Morocco during the anti-colonial war.
Our conversation crisscrossed so many topics— the usual discussion of African corruption, nepotism, exclusionary ethnicity, and political mismanagement. He told me that the president, bedridden and in ill health, has not been seen in public or heard from for five years!!
My favorite story, one that I have trouble forgetting, is the one about an Algerian Senator who, in his electioneering campaign, told the people in his constituency that they should reelect him because he had already stolen enough and wanted for nothing, so he was a better electoral bet than a poor newbie candidate who would start his stealing career from scratch and thus betray and rip them off. The senator was perversely honest.
I laughed so hard at the story that my cab driver said that he understood that such a story could only resonate with an African, that such a story was only possible in Africa.
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