Berber Music

Berber Music

The Berber people is the indigenous and major ethnic group inhabiting North Africa (west of Egypt) and part of West Africa (north of Senegal). Berbers call themselves "imazighen". Those who lived in northwest Africa were called "Libyans" by the Greeks, "Africans", "Numidians" and "Moors" by the Romans and early Europeans, and dubbed "Berbers" by the modern Europeans and Arabs.

The Berber culture probably dates back more than 5,000 years and the Berbers were inhabitants of North Africa long before some Arab tribes arrived. The Berber language belongs to the Afro-Asiatic group linguistically and has many closely related dialects and accents. Their music is widely varying across the area they inhabit, but is best known for its place in Moroccan music, the popular Kabyle and Chaoui music of Algeria and the widespread Tuareg music of Algeria, Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali.

Ancient Berber culture is stylistically diverse with music ranging from oboe and bagpipes to pentatonic music and all these combined with African rhythms and an important stock of oral literature. These ancient traditions of music have been kept alive by small bands of musicians travelling from village to village to entertain at weddings and other social events with their songs, tales, and poetry. The real core of Berber music remains within traditional, community contexts. The Berber language is related both to Semitic languages, among them Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and to ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and the Cushitic languages spoken in Ethiopia and Somalia.

Much of the most interesting Berber music is not pop at all, but rather village and urban folk music. Aesthetics and style aside, it is important to understand that the whole subject of Berber music and culture is inevitably colored by Berber people’s longstanding struggle to achieve basic language rights and identity recognition in modern North African societies.