Activists and community actors have been engaged, over the last few days, in widespread celebrations across various cities and communes under the territorial jurisdiction of the Nador province, on the occasion of the new Amazigh year 2975.
The celebrations included the organisation of artistic and cultural evenings hosted in performance halls at cultural and social complexes in Nador, as well as on the city's corniche and in public squares. Associations, bodies, unions, and public institutions participated in commemorating this national occasion.
The programmes for these festive activities included the performance of committed songs and musical pieces, the presentation of plays and folkloric scenes, in addition to the display of traditional Amazigh tools, the honouring of personalities and figures, and the distribution of dried fruits.
In a statement to Hespress, Mohamed Boulaayoun, an Amazigh activist in the Selouane commune, said that "the celebration of the Amazigh year in recent years is distinct after it was declared an official paid holiday. Awareness of this occasion, which encapsulates an ancient culture, has expanded, and this is reflected in the massive celebrations that the Amazigh year has received."
The speaker continued: "A group of associations in the region has been accustomed to celebrating this occasion, most notably the Selouane Cultural Association, which organised a large cultural ceremony at the cultural and sports complex in the presence of a group of prominent figures in the commune, and by holding distinguished artistic segments with the presence of the region's leading artists and poets."
Commenting on the celebration of the Amazigh year, Yamani Kassouh, a professor of Amazigh studies at the Nador Faculty, said: "We have followed and are still following closely the organisation of intensive official, popular, and civil celebrations, at the national level, and even in the diaspora in Europe and America where the Amazigh community resides, on the occasion of the arrival of the new Amazigh year 2975. This festive momentum comes after two years of the official Royal recognition of the Amazigh year as an official paid holiday, and in light of the growing modern awareness of the Amazigh identity."
He continued: "We can speak of a noticeable development and a qualitative shift in the celebrations organised for the Amazigh New Year; from popular family celebrations inside the home around a table and rituals, beliefs, and traditions with a specific reference where the mythical overlaps with the ritualistic, the realistic with the imaginary, belief with habit, and hope with pain and fear, within a social organisation linked to the nuclear family, the extended family, the Douar, and the tribe, to celebrations in public spaces extending from association headquarters to youth and cultural centres, guest houses, libraries, hotels, squares, and streets, to the spaces of official public and private educational institutions."
One can speak, Yamani continued, of a development in the nature of dealing with these celebrations of the event from its traditional form to its modern form, from prohibition and banning to doubt, suspicion, and restriction, to recognising it as a national holiday and an official day off. Despite the constitutional recognition of Amazigh as an official language in 2011, the recognition of the Amazigh New Year remained unofficial until the King approved on 3 May 2023, the celebration of the Amazigh New Year, and considered 14 January of every Gregorian year a paid holiday."
The speaker highlighted that the intensive, widespread, and strong return to celebrating the Amazigh New Year indicates the legitimacy and legality of the popular and human rights demand raised by the Amazigh movement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries." He added: "The celebration is a historical and important gain for the Amazigh, which is added to other gains that are in need of further implementation, activation, monitoring, protection, and accumulation."
The professor of Amazigh studies explained "that the celebration indicates a practice rooted in the collective memory and popular history of the North African population, involving cultural and philosophical values that celebrate the land, nature, and the environment, and the human being and the values of cooperation, solidarity, peace, and harmony, in relation to the calendar."
He added: "These values contributed to resisting oblivion, and succeeded in overcoming the barriers of prohibition, and the attitudes of exclusion and marginalisation, practised by discordant parties and voices from among the alienated and ideologised kin. These values gave this cultural practice more immunity and resistance, and the ability to continue and live with a renewed and modern spirit, and with a new discourse, just as it is celebrated today in urban and rural settings with popular and official momentum in all countries inhabited by the Amazigh, and even in the countries to which this human being migrated, and carried with him his culture and values, in the context of globalisation and the threat of domestication and cultural standardisation it imposes."
The speaker confirmed that the celebrations of the event summarise the return of the spirit that believes in the legitimacy of the Amazigh identity, and the call and participation in it gives a strong push to contribute to building our present and our future from the standpoint of pride in our cultural values and our civilisational specificities, in harmony and dialogue with human values and civilisations that respect the values of diversity, difference, and specificity; despite the predominance of the festive and cultural character of the activities held and organised on the occasion, it is also noted that there are civil cultural activities, seminars, round tables, and academic scientific discussions on important topics regarding the issue."
Yamani concluded his statement to Hespress by saying that "the celebrations of the new Amazigh year 2975 formed a new turning point in the history of celebrating the event, in form and content; its size, intensity, and media coverage may contribute to cleansing the insides of some souls suspicious of the Amazigh discourse or those who harbour fear of the Amazigh identity of our country, without which one cannot speak of a democratic civil state, nor of a modern democratic society."
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