Dissident Spotlight: Kateb Yacine
Kateb Yacine spent his life fighting for the right to speak his native language and celebrate beloved Berber writers in Alergia.
In 1962, when Algeria gained independence from France, the new ruling political made Arabic the national language instead of French. This change was viewed as the beginning of recliaming Algeria’s national identity distinct from that of its European colonizer.
However, the Berbers viewed this change differently. The Berbers were indigenous to Alergia before the Muslim Arab armies took over modern-day Alergia in the 700s. Berbers have their own language which was suppressed when Islamic conquerers originally imposed Arabic on the population.
About 1,300 years later, Algerian Berbers still struggled to have their language celebrated, much less recognized as an official Algerian language. March 1980 saw the Berber Spring, a riot of Berbers in major Algerian cities over the cancellation of an event for celebrating Kabyle poetry.
One of the writers best able to keep the twin colonizers in view — France and a one-party Islamic government — was Kateb Yacine.
Kateb Yacine’s Struggle Against Twin Colonizers
Yacine was a French Algerian playwright and novelist. He became a supporter of Algerian independence after attending a protest where the French army killed several thousand Algerians. During the war for independence, he lived in about half a dozen countries and faced ongoing harassment from French intelligence agents.
During the 1970s, he stopped writing in French, a reversal from his previous practice of “[writing] in French to tell the French that I am not French.” Writing in Arabic didn’t prevent the protests he faced for advocating for gender equality and for his own culture.
In a preface to a book of Berber songs, Yacine wrote in part:
“Algeria is a country subjugated by the myth of the Arab nation, for it is in the name of Arabization that Tamazight is repressed. In Algeria and throughout the world, there is a belief that Arabic is the language of the Algerians.”
He died shortly after writing this preface. Decades later, the movement he dedicated his life to made great strides. Tamazight was recognized as one of Alergia’s two offical languages in 2016. Algeria is now a multi-party democracy, but elections are widely known to be fraudulent, and the orginal party retains the largest share of Algeria’s parliament. That’s before getting into the ongoing press restrictions and human rights violations.
Yacine is a reminder that independence movements can be complicated. Alergia may have been able to overthrow one colonial oppressor, but Berbers had to continue fighting to make another colonial power recognize the right for an ethnic minority to celebrate its own writers.
The vast majority of Alergians speak Arabic and practice Islam. These people have centuries-old ties to the land and have the right to openly do both. Berbers have fought for the same rights and must now protect them at the same time they’re exercising them.