Memories from the RIF: Moroccan-Berber Activists Between History and Myth

Abstract

I was sitting in Noureddine's office, a Moroccan-Berber⁠1 migrant in his late thirties and social worker in Rotterdam. Noureddine migrated towards the Netherlands in the mid nineties, where he has been living ever since. During the sixties and seventies, Morocco, along with southern European countries and Turkey, extended its ties with Europe, as it gradually became a sending region for guest labourers during Western Europe’s heydays of economic progress. The oil crisis of the early seventies brought the pattern of labour migration to an end. Yet most of these migrants decided to settle in Europe. Unlike the first generation of labour migrants, Noureddine was highly educated and joined his family members long after large-scale economic migration was put to a stop. Noureddine was a member of a Dutch Moroccan-Berber association. Whilst growing up in Morocco, he already had been involved with the Berber Movement, an amalgam of cultural associations striving for the recognition of Berber cultural, regional and linguistic rights and the promotion of democratic and secular values and ideals in Morocco and other North African countries, such as the recognition and accomodation of cultural differences and gender equality. In doing so, members of these Berber associations claim their identity as Berbers, and not as Arabs or Muslims. In Morocco, about forty to sixty percent of the population is regarded as Berber.⁠2 Noureddine claimed to be one the first of his generation to found a Berber association in his home region, the northern Rif, after having graduated at the University of Oujda. During the nineties, the number of Berber associations in the Rif steadily grew, as other forms of political activism, such as Marxist-Leninist activist associations, lost their momentum. The founders of these associations take great pride in their accomplishments of spreading knowledge about Berber culture, history and identity in their home region. After his arrival in the Netherlands, however, Noureddine and his peers started to found associations similar to those in the Rif. Consequently, the message of the Moroccan Berber Movement was spread in the host societies in which they spend the most parts of their lives today.