A memoir of how the Amazigh people successfully fought for their recognition in Morocco
For decades after Moroccan independence in 1956, the struggle of the Amazigh people for their indigenous rights and cultural preservation took center stage. They fought against their erasure under an exclusivist Arab nationalist regime. Ultimately, they were successful, yet the history of the Amazigh Cultural Movement and its profound impact on North African society have remained largely inaccessible to English speakers, leaving a gap in our understanding of postcolonial resistance, indigenous rights, and cultural preservation efforts.
The Amazigh Revival is the memoir of Brahim Akhiate, an Amazigh academic, writer, and organizer who was a leader of the Amazigh movement. Translated into English for the first time, it offers unprecedented insight into the Amazighs' fight for recognition and a place in Moroccan society through the first-hand account of a key figure who guided it, starting in the 1960s. Akhiate describes the personal sacrifices, ideological tensions, intellectual debates, and eventual triumphs that led to the constitutional recognition of the Amazigh language and a more inclusive identity.
This memoir, the first work in the Amazigh Studies series, offers English speakers crucial access to previously unavailable perspectives on one of North Africa's most significant cultural movements. Scholars and students across multiple disciplines—including the Middle East and North Africa (Tamazgha), postcolonial history, global indigenous studies, Arabic literature, and Amazigh studies—will benefit from Akhiate's detailed recounting of this important political and cultural moment in Moroccan history whose impact has been felt across North Africa.
Reviews
"Akhiate's memoir is simultaneously an autobiography and institutional history of AMREC, the organization that he cofounded and led for most of his life. This is the authoritative account of how, over four decades of work, Akhiate and his fellow activists turned hushed meetings at his house into a Royal Institute."—Mike Turner, assistant professor, Department of World Languages & Cultures, University of North Carolina Wilmington
"The Amazigh Revival is an important documentation of the long struggle to preserve and elevate the endangered indigenous Amazigh language and culture of North Africa. It testifies to the courage of Brahim Akhiate and his generation of Amazigh activists and intellectuals who risked their livelihoods for a better collective future."—Paul A. Silverstein, professor of anthropology, Reed College
"Paul Raymond's translation brings this extraordinary firsthand account of the Amazigh cultural movement to an Anglophone readership. Powerful, yet intimate, Akhiate's memoir provides crucial insights into the movement's conceptualization of an Amazigh national identity and its complex relationships with contemporaneous political currents, from socialists to Islamists."—Kristen Gee Hickman, Croft Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, University of Mississippi
About the Author
Brahim Akhiate (1941–2018) was a scholar, author, and Amazigh organizer who founded the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange.
Paul Raymond is an Arabic-English translator, journalist, and research editor with two decades' experience covering the Middle East and North Africa region for Agence France-Press, Al-Jazeera, and the Guardian, among others.
