Last modified: 2012-05-01 by ivan sache
Keywords: shawiya | berbers | letter: ezza | mouvement pour l'autonomie du pays chawi |
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The Shawiya people live mainly in the Aurès mountains, located in
eastern Algeria. The Shawiya dialect is the second most speaking
dialect in Algeria, after Kabyle. In 1912, the Shawiya speakers represented 8.5% of the autochthonous population; no reliable statistics on the use of dialects has been made available since then.
A recent estimation based on partial data collected in 1986 gives a
proportion of 3.7% of the Algerian population speaking Shawiya. The
apparent decrease in the proportion of Shawiya speakers over the 20th
century is partially explained by emigration to the towns, where the
native language was lost, and, mostly, by the general underestimation
of the numbers of Berber speakers. The Berber identity indeed
resurface only recently in the Aurès, mostly in the 1980s, for
instance with the emergence of modern Shawiya songs.
The most famous Shawiya was the writer Kateb Yacine (1929-1989), the founding father of the French-speaking Algerian literature (he cherished the French language as a "war booty"). Yacine rejected the words "Shawiya", "Kabyle" and, mostly, "Berber" as pejorative, promoting the use of "Imazighen". A great defender of the popular culture, he also wrote in dialectal Arabic and Tamazigh and supervized the translation of his own work into Tamazigh.
Ivan Sache, 12 February 2012
Flags of MAC - Image by Ivan Sache, 12 February 2010
There is little information on the Shawiya Autonomous Movement (Mouvement pour l'Autonomie du Pays Chawi - MAC), whose name and acronym suggests it is modelled on the Kabyle Autonomous Movement (Mouvement pour l'Autonomie de la Kabylie - MAK).
The website of the MAC, in
construction for ages, shows "flags" not backed up by any source.
The flag actually used by the MAC is shown on a photo of members of
the movement who joined on 20 April 2011 a demonstration organized by
the MAK to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the "Kabyle Spring". The flag is yellow with the
black Berber ezza letter in the middle.
Ivan Sache, 12 February 2012