White Athena, or: the epistemological blank concerning North-Africa (English translation) more

White Athena, or: the epistemological blank concerning North-Africa Opening lecture for the course of Languages and Literatures of North-Africa by Vermondo Brugnatelli [English translation] Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca academic year 2009-2010 Ancient Libyan princes bearing tattoos on their light skins White Athena, or: the epistemological blank concerning North-Africa 1. African = Black? Black Athena is the title Martin Bernal gave to his widely discussed book (1987), in which he proposed to put an end to the Eurocentric myth of classical civilisation, pointing out the large debt that Western civilisation owes to the oldest civilisations of the ancient Near East, above all the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian. The shocking title comes from the identification (already current in ancient times) of the Greek goddess Athena with the Egyptian goddess Neith. I will not dwell here on the validity of Bernal's thesis. What I would like to stress is the carelessness with which this author (as well as almost all the participants in the debate about the book, both supporters and opponents) seems to consider "black" as a synonym for "African". Neither the Egyptians nor the ancient Mesopotamian peoples of antiquity were "black-skinned". Nor any North African people from Egypt to the Atlantic either. At most they might have been dark-haired and easily tanned, like all peoples around the Mediterranean. But here "black" means precisely "dark-skinned". Indeed, it is a wellknown linguistic habit of contemporary Americans that every time they mean a black person, they refrain from alluding directly to skin colour, using the term "African" instead. In this way, however, they "override" the literal meaning of the word by matching "Africanity" with a feature characteristic only of the peoples of Africa south of Sahara (the dark pigmentation of the skin), leaving aside a large part of the continent — which, as far as we know, at least since the Neolithic, has been populated by light-skinned peoples. The example of Bernal’s title is symptomatic of a serious gap in the representation of the world by contemporary "Western" culture. Are the light-skinned North Africans "African" or not? Today, many people, not only in America, would almost certainly answer "no" to this question, such is the habit of considering "African" only what is "black". As a matter of fact, I know of Berber associations "rejected" by the organisers when they wished to participate as "Africans" in events on "African cultures" in the United States. 2. Northern Africans = Arabs? The common opinion, which more or less unconsciously goes with this uncertainty about the real status of Northern Africans, holds that they are "Arabs". This opinion is fueled by the fact that nowadays the most widely spoken languages in North Africa are Arabic dialects. Moreover, the term by which this part of the world is often referred to, "Maghreb", is an Arabic word which means "West" and denotes the western end of a world that has its center elsewhere. This has given birth to the ambiguous term "Arabo-Berber" that so many textbooks and encyclopedias use when referring to the "ethnic" composition of these countries. As a consequence, if one points out that Northern Africans are Africans too, it is argued that since they are "Arabo-Berber" they are ultimately to be considered as a foreign population that only recently has settled in these regions. A mental short circuit, which takes into consideration only one component — a minor one, indeed, since Arabs were never a large part of the North African population — but allows continued use of the adjective 'African' as a convenient substitute for more direct colour-based words. 2 What is an "Arab"? Obviously an inhabitant of Arabia and its neighboring regions. This means he is an "Asian" (a Western Asian), certainly not an African. The ancient Egyptian civilisation was not, of course, Arabian, nor were ancient Africans like Jugurtha and Massinissa or St. Augustine, Apuleius and many others Arabs. At the time when a Northern African king — more properly a Mauritanian i.e. Moroccan one —, namely Juba II, was considered a model of refined culture, the inhabitants of the Arabian desert led a wild life on the outskirts of the civilisation of the ancient world. 3. An epistemological blank This sort of fog surrounding North Africa, a place rarely thought of as a world in itself, both anthropologically and culturally, constitutes a true epistemological "blank". This is most regrettable, since we only see what we are ready to see, what we manage to "pigeonhole" in our mental categories. And if a category such as "North Africa" does not exist in our minds, every time we wish to deal with the inhabitants of this part of the world we are compelled to take into account other categories, in a tortuous and distorted process, which prevents us from really understanding the object of our investigation. In this way, when speaking of North Africa / Maghreb, one thinks primarily in terms of the Arabs, including all the "Arabic speakers". And those Northern Africans who certainly are not Arabs, those who still speak Berber, remain a mysterious entity, open to many different representations. On the one hand, they are a valuable attraction for the tourism industry. The Berbers are the hallmarks of the exotic: "Come here, tourists, we will take you to really wild places: just think of it, you will meet the Berbers ..." Not to mention the most exploited ones, since they are the most capable of arousing a mythical and heroic imagery: the Tuaregs, whose name and whose culture are an inexhaustible source for car and motorcycle companies... On the other hand, the Berbers are the "bad conscience" of the Arabs (and the Arabised): their very survival until the present day is the reminder of an invasion and a conquest, and testifies the existence of a civilisation much older than the ArabIslamic one — which the establishment of these countries try to impose as the true and only national culture. Hence the measures of harsh rejection of the Berbers, ranging from outright denial and repression of their existence (as in Tunisia, where few people even know that there are countrymen who are native speakers of a language different from Arabic) up to an overt persecution (as has been the case, for a long time, in Algeria and Morocco, where the Berber language and the Berbers themselves still suffer considerable discrimination). 4. Causes How did such a state of affairs arise? It is not easy to explain, since it depends on a number of factors which in some cases go back to ancient times. Already in antiquity the kings of Numidia themselves used Punic alongside their own language in royal inscriptions and did not disdain to learn and use Latin and Greek. Among the most recent causes, we must remember on the one hand the tendencies toward Arabisation on the part of the French colonial power, which scattered "bureaux arabes" all over North Africa, even in Berber-speaking regions (it is well-known that Napoleon III aimed at becoming the head of an "Arab kingdom" stretching from North Africa to Syria), and on the other hand the "pan-Arabism" preached by Nasser – then seen as 3 the beacon of the Arab-Islamic world – which was the prevailing ideology at the time when the countries of North Africa became independent. Add to this the special status that Islam attaches to the Arabic language, the "language of revelation" (and, theologically, a sort of "language of God"). As a result, today those North Africans who have adopted the Arabic language consider themselves as also belonging to the Arab people. Such a phenomenon of linguistic and cultural assimilation has been going on for centuries. As early as the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun noted: “The Beni-Ifran and the Hoouara are subject to these Arabs and accompany them in their nomadic journeys; they have even forgotten the Berber language acquiring in return that of their masters, of whom they also adopted all the external features” (Histoire des Berbères, t. I, p. 197). Acquiring a foreign language is something that can happen in history, but pushing this change to the point of annihilating one's own original identity is something deep and disturbing. Consider, for instance, Ireland, though the situation is different. Here too, there are now very few native speakers of the ancient indigenous language (Irish), while the vast majority speaks English today - but this by no means entails that the Irish identify themselves as English or British! Language is a major aspect of the distortion in self-representation we are considering. Since their independence, the governments of North African countries have carried out several campaigns of "Arabisation", aimed at replacing with Arabic the language of the former colonial power. Half a century has passed, and the Arabisation campaigns still go on. Apparently, the population is not sufficiently "Arabised". Is it not strange that a people should not know their language — if it really were "their" language? The fact is that the language spoken in the countries of North Africa today is very different from the formal variety proposed as a model by official power. In the constitutions of all North African countries one never meets expressions like "the official language in Algeria is Algerian" or "the official language of Morocco is Moroccan". The invariable formulation is: "the official language is Arabic", i.e. the language of another continent. Few come to realise this problem. A great Algerian intellectual, Kateb Yacine, sums up the question neatly: "if we already are Arabs, why Arabise us? And if we are not Arabs, why Arabise us?" 5. The quest for identity Some responsibility for this state of affairs belongs to the Europeans as well. Like it or not, North African countries derive from Europe many concepts and interpretative categories regarding contemporary reality. The fact that European culture lacks an autonomous conceptual framework for their part of the world, does not help them in their search for identity. The theme of identity is indeed an issue in the countries of North Africa, while we look at them but we do not "see" them as they are, rather as something emanating from another world. The name of Morocco (al-Maghreb al-Aqsa) means "Far West"— as a matter of fact most of North Africa lies West of Italy. When the Moroccans find out that they are considered "oriental", it is not surprising that they ask themselves "so, who are we?". As many pointed out, the lack of a satisfactory answer on both the ethnic and the linguistic levels —since they cannot safely define themselves as "Arab", while nobody knows what "North African" means— might 4 entail that they end up finding refuge and identity in their religious component: "maybe as Arabs we are not credible, but we are undoubtedly Muslims." And the religious zeal that often arises in order to underscore this affiliation, if clumsily directed, is likely, these days, to be exploited by extremists or worse. It does not really seem unreasonable to speak of an outside-induced alienation: as we see them, so they tend to see themselves. The reference to external notions (since such are both the European and the Arabic cultures) is a serious handicap to the development of these countries, insofar as it leads to conform to exogenous models —which, by the way, are largely mythologised and thence reproduced in uncritical and stereotypical ways. Two examples among many others: on the one hand, again, religion. As far as Islam is concerned, there is an increasing tendency towards a "Saudi" interpretation of this faith, much more rigid and intolerant than the traditional religious practices of North Africa: this entails abandoning and sometimes overtly condemning many indigenous customs. On the other hand, the way of writing: the Arabic language in North Africa has been written for centuries using a local traditional script, the "Maghribi" style, which nowadays is no longer used nor taught in schools, so that many documents which are important for the history of these regions are accessible only to specialists. 6. The role of the university The failure to recognise the specificity of North Africa determines an approach through the "mediation" of other languages and cultures — a fact which has serious consequences in scientific and academic terms. As a consequence of the axiomatic equation North Africa = (part of) the Arab world, a researcher wishing to investigate the contemporary history and culture of North Africa will easily be routed to a curriculum of "Arabic studies", which firstly requires the study of classical Arabic and of Eastern authors, and seldom offers the opportunity to focus on study and research programs devoted to North Africa. As far as I know, no country in North Africa provides scholarships for local languages, and in Europe too there are only a small number of chairs and research centers devoted to North Africa, as this is seen as a field of study just for a few specialists, as if it were merely an erudite curiosity, concerning languages and cultures belonging to remote antiquity or distant countries. On the contrary, North Africa lies just across the Mediterranean from Europe. Today it can be reached in a very short time by plane, but already in antiquity Cato could easily obtain fresh figs from Carthage, a fact that unmistakably proved the proximity of those lands. Yet, studies on the modern and contemporary literature of these neighbours of ours deal almost exclusively with the works in French and classical Arabic, that is, the languages of the elites. Whereas the languages actually spoken by the people, the languages of most texts of the traditional ("popular") literature are studied only by a very limited number of specialists: it is as if, to study contemporary European culture, one first formed experts in medieval Latin and canon law, allowing only a small number of scholars the opportunity to study and investigate the French, Italian, etc... languages and literatures. Actually, a field of study specific to North Africa already exists: the so-called "Libyco-Berber antiquities", i.e. the study of an era for which an Arabic paradigm is simply unthinkable. In this way, however, North Africans are only seen as a museum exhibit: an entity which has long disappeared, giving way to today's so-called "AraboBerber" civilisation. Studies regarding modern times are fragmented in different 5 areas, which are very specific and often not communicating with each other: Berber language and literature (which ought to be the leading discipline, has only one chair in all of Italy!), Arabic language and literature (by far the most widespread in Italy and around the world, of course focusing on the "classical" language, which Northern Africans themselves find difficult to learn), Arabic dialectology (the waif of Arabistic studies, also with very few courses in all of Italy), Francophone literatures, and so on. That is why the opening, today, of a course dedicated to the languages and literatures of North Africa as a whole, the first of its kind in the Italian university system, may be regarded as a first step in a new direction. Thus, the importance of this event must be underlined. Born from Lake Tritonis (in North Africa, near Djerba), Athena — undoubtedly lightskinned — was celebrated in ancient times by the people of Syrtis Minor with ritual clashes between virgin women-warriors: these rites lived on, almost unchanged, up to the twentieth century, in an oasis of the Libyan desert. Hopefully, the goddess of wisdom will enlighten the minds of academics and ensure that henceforth "North Africa" will increasingly be perceived in itself, and we will not have to approach it through other worlds and other cultures. Milan, October 1st, 2009 Quoted sources: Martin Bernal, Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. I : The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985, London 1987. Ibn Khadoun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale, trad. Baron de Slane, Paris, 1852-1856 (4 vols.) 6