Afro-Asiatica: An Odyssey in Black

A blog exploring the documented history and disappearing heritage of the original Afroasiatic
speakers of Africa, affiliated peoples and their ancient and early civilizations around the world.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

" ...in the old sources the terms Berber, Sanhaja, Massufa, Lamtuna and Tuareg are often used
interchangeably" Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle ( 2009). Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled
city of Gold, p. 271.

From Africa too, there came countless tribes; the Nadabar, Gtulians, and Numidians, and
from the scorching south, the people named Moors or Mauritanians, from the Greek word
mauros, which means black. 12th century author of Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis
Ricardi (Itinerary of Richard I and others to the Holy Land.) Chapter XXXVIII.
...among the descendants of Sudan, son of Kana'an are many nations, of them the Ishban, the
Zanj, and many people that multiplied in the Maghreb. Akbar al-Zaman 11th century Arabic
text (Cited by Hopkins and Levtzion in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African
History.(2000) p. 35, Markus Wiener Publishers)
Now the real fact, the fact which dispenses with all hypothesis, is this: the Berbers are the
children of Canaan, the son of Ham, son of Noah. Their grandfather was named Mazyh...the
Philistines children of Casluhim son of Misraim son of Ham were their relations...." Ibn Khaldun
15th century Andalusian North African.

INTRODUCTION - Notes on the Persistent Warping of Berber

History

CAPTIVES OF ARAGON
The name "Moors" has come in recent years to be used in Northwest Africa for tribes that are a
mixture of Berber and Arabian (Sulaym-Hilal) origin, like the men above who stretch from
Senegal to southern Morocco.

This is a post about the settlements in Spain of the once black African populations of the
Maghreb known as the Beriberi or "al-Barabir" in Arabic, Mozarabic (Spanish Christian) and
Portuguese sources - peoples of eastern and Nilotic African origin with biological affiliation to
the Beja and other Cushitic speakers, ancient pre-Islamic Arabians, Nilo-Saharans and Tuareg. It
is not about the modern melange of peoples that colonialists and post-colonial specialists have
come to designate as "Berbers" in attempts to link them with modern European peoples (for
whatever reason), but about all of the peoples who the West has attempted to write out of the
history of Muslim Andalusia.
The reason it is important to distinguish between the Berber of today and the ancient people
who designated themselves Berbers or "Beriberi" is that the Berber-speakers spotlighted in most
academic and political studies today, unlike those of the Arabic texts, are basically a
heterogeneous people with diverse cultural and biological origins linked to all of the known
civilizations of the ancient world surrounding North Africa.
Ancient Berbers were not people that looked or thought like the people of early or modern
European and Near Eastern cultures and their various admixtures. The original Berbers were
noted by the early Near Eastern observers to be divided into five confederations called the
Masmuda, Sanhaja or Zenaga, Zanata, Hawara and Gomara all of which were early known as the
"Maures" or "Mauri" i.e. the black men. The name Mauritania thus was simply the land of
the Maures. For as an old Viking text says "for Mauri is the same as black man and Mauritania
is the same as blackness" (O'Donovan, John, 1860, p. 163; Forbes, Jack D., 1993, 68). The root
of the word "Mauri" since the time of Silius Italicus, Plautus was a synonym for the word
"Niger" or "Negro" among Europeans, including the Christian Spaniards ("Mozarabs"), and
Portuguese.
Ibn Khaldun as well considered that there was a first and second "race" or "generation" of
Berbers both of whose people were claimed and still claim to have originated in the area
stretching from the Arabian Tehama to Abyssinia where the people were once known variously
as Sabaeans or Sabtaeans, Kana'anites or Kanauna, Kush or Yokshan, Ethiopians, Himyari or
Humayri and Indi or Indians. This was the area that was once known in fact as both Arabia and
India, and as we have shown it was undoubtedly the home of the original Semitic cultures from
which emerged the Canaanite/Israelite or Midianitish people of the Torah and Old Testament.
When these people "spread abroad" they settled back in Africa and northward in the region of
Mecca and Medina and finally along the Syrian/Aegean coasts, where they were also known as
"Ethiopians". (See links on this blog Kings Solomon's Miners I, II, and III)
Because of the findings of Kamal Salibi, author of the somewhat maligned, but
groundbreaking text The Bible Came from Arabia, we were able to show that it is likely that the
people of the Old Testament books of Genesis and the Exodus were actually represented in this
still barely explored region. It is only natural that these peoples would have carried their ancient
pre-Islamic Arabian, i.e. Hebraic traditions and legends of their origins back into Africa and then
across "Libya" or what has come to be known as al-Maghreb.
Thus, whether one believes in the Canaanite, Philistine, Israelite, Midianite, Sabaean, Indian
origin of the Berbers or Mauri, it is important to remember that this post concerns those Berbers
thought to be their descendants and not the entirety of modern Berberphone Africa which has its
own unique history and cultural origin(s) quite distinct from that of the original "black peoples"
or Maurusioi of the Maghreb.
Before speaking of the Berber descendants of the Mauri I would first like to comment on the
kinds of misguided information that is being put forth concerning these "Moors" or ancient
Berbers.
Recently, I attended a lecture that was supposed to be about the
Moorsat a major masjid (mosque) in the city of Philadelphia in the United
States. The man was an African American claiming descent from Muslim
maroons or those groups that hid out from European slavers. He had been
out on the lecture circuit and on youtube and is supposed to be a scholar on
the Islamic world who has studied and lectured at the University of
Barcelona. For that reason I wanted to find out what he was accustomed to
talking about.
Thank goodnesss there were probably less than 20 people in the hall
because the lecturer was so ill-informed about the early Berbers and their
relation to Africans and the Africans in Islamic Spain that I felt like I was
attending some kind of national conference for eugenicists in early 20th
century America.
I really didn't know whether to scream or cry during his lecture, but I was
determined during the question and answer session not to get into another
spat like the one I'd had with a rather rude curator after a lecture by Zahi
Hawass at the University of Penn. ; ) Rude curator at University of Penn
Unfortunately, while the rest of the audience sat blank faced and zombie-like
listening to things like not a lot of African Muslims were brought to America
and the Moorish period began with the Almoravids and "when they said
the Moors were black, they didn't really mean black I was attempting to
stop wincing and squirming in my seat. It came to the point where I really
could not hold my tongue because of all the misinformation that was being
spouted. Learn about the influence of Muslim African slaves in America here
The man was also literally clueless even about the tribe of Arab people
Muhammed came from, claiming Muhammad wasn't a Qurayshi!
But in introducing the Moors to the almost exclusively black American
audience he pronounced that black African people had very little part in the
Moorish expansion, which he claimed began with the Almoravids, an
assertion which of course in itself is highly problematic.
I still understand the reasoning behind some of his beliefs. The man
actually was not looking at the Berbers and the early Arab invaders in the
way early observers spoke of them of course because like most reputable
scholars today he wasn't familiar with the descriptions of the Berbers of the
medieval period.
The first piece of information that I had to question was why he had
stated the Moorish period began with the Almoravids, when Berbers had
been noted as Moors or Mauri since before Islam and were in Spain from the
start of the Islamic invasions of Iberia. I noted St. Isidore's statements about
the Mauri being "black as night. His response was that the Greeks often
used the term black for people that were dark, but not necessarily looking
like black Africans. And that may or may not have been true, but since I
wasn't talking about any Greeks I had to wonder why he was bringing them
up in the discussion.
In answer to another querent he said there were African-centric authors
who frequently exaggerated the role of the Moors and blacks in the Islamic
world and were largely biased. This is about when he offered his view that
the Tuareg* were only a small part of the Almoravids as well, a belief which is
understandable only for the fact that most scholars are not aware of the
connection of the Tuareg with the Sanhaja clans even though they are both
said to be wearers of the veil.
Of course there was no time to express to him or to the audience the fact
that the Tuaregs are the nomadic Africans whose people still bear the names
of the great portion of the Berber tribes that took part in the Almoravids
conquests of North Africa and Andalusia in Spain. Back in the 1960s some
folk historians were among the first to have discovered that after the
Sulaym-Hilal Arab conquest of North Africa the Tuareg emerged as the people
known in Arab sources as the Sanhaja - Tuareg seem to reappear as
Lemtuna, Sanhaja, Jedala, Mesufa and Lemta. The Tuareg claim that
Lemtuna was the mother of their race. Pere Charles de Foucauld in his
dictionary of the Ahaggar dialect notes that the legend includes a sister of
Lemtuna who was the mother of most of the Berber tribes of Morocco and,
particularly, of the Berabish. From Smithsonian Folkways. Tuareg Music of
the Southern Sahara, Harold Courlander General Editor. Smithsonian Folkways
 BERABISH MAN - as noted above, the ancestors of the Berabish were claimed to be the
Lamtuna

The historian and Arabic translator Hussein Mones also connected the
Tuareg with the great confederation of Berbers that were spoken of as
Sanhadja or "Zenaga" in Arabic texts in his "The Conquest of North Africa and
Berber Resistance". The article appears in the UNESCO History of Africa
published in 1978. It reads:

"A further group of Sanhadja inhabited an area stretching from the desert land south of Wadi
Dar'a (Oued Dra'a) to the strip of the Sahara that lies along the Atlantic coast as far as teh
Senegal River. Their most important groups were the Lamtuna, Massufa, Djudala, Gazula
(Djazula), Banu Warith, Lamta and Tarka. These last were in fact the famous Tuareg (al-
Tawarik), who have remained the lords of the great Sahara right down to our own day. All these
groups were camel-breeding nomads... Ibn Khaldun calls this Sanhadja group 'the
second generation of the Sanhadja (al-tabaka al-thaniya min Sanhadja)'"
(Mones, 1988, p. 228).

Since that time over the years certain researchers would point out here
and there that the modern Tuareg groups, Iwellemeden (also spelt
Auelimmiden or Ouelimidden) ("Lamtuna"), Igdalen ("Goddala" or "Jedala"),
Iforas (Iforaces)(Fentress, Elizabeth and Wilson, Andrew, 2016, p. 61), Iferouan
(Ifren or Yafrene), Imesufa and Inusufen ("Massufa"), Imaqquren (Maghrawa)
and Tawarek (Targi' yat or Tuareg) ("Tarka" or "Tarqiyya") all now based in the
countries of Niger, Mali, Senegal and Libya, still reflect the names of not only
the Sanhaja, but their Zenetian or Zenata ancestors who represented the
majority of Berbers not only of the Almoravid, but of the Zirid and Hamaddid
dynasties.
As Allen Fromherz puts it in The Almohads: The Rise of an Empire the Tuareg
are "probable descendants of the Almoravids...Ethnographical descriptions of
the matriarchal nature of the Tuareg descendants of the Lamtuna Almoravids
can be found in Susan Rasmussen.... (Fromherz, Allen J., 2012, p. 224, fn
213).
Thus, scholars on the "Moorish" empire have long been aware of the
Almoravid connection to the African Tuareg who, incidently, apparently make
up a good portion of the ancestors of many African Americans judging from
dna studies.
Nevertheless when I mentioned to the lecturer during the intermission this
relationship of the Lamtuna and Sanhadja and Almoravid peoples to the
Tuareg (already noted by scholars), he told me that "that is not what his
sources say" and "we can agree to disagree", after which he put on his
jacket and walked away in a huff as if I had insulted him.
During the course of his talk he referred to Ibn Khaldun whose family was
actually Andalusian in origin as an Arab. He did the same for Ibn Sina (of
primarily Persian descent), Ibn Rushd (of Persian descent), which is par for
the course or usual and not unexpected since any individual with at least one
Arab paternal ancestor or who spoke Arabic was probably considered of Arab
ethnicity back then as today. Yet when mentioning the Sanhadja, the lecturer
neglected to mention who they were.
As we have seen the bulk of the Iraqis and Syrians were originally different
peoples ethnically and phenotypically from the Arabs, but often confounded
in modern history books, so when I made reference to the branch of Arabs
called Quraysh living in Jericho in Palestine (or the modern Israel/Palestine)
who are still black he seemed rather dismissive.
He had first mentioned the Quraysh (also spelt different ways, like
Qoreish or Koreish) as a tribe of Arabs that persecuted Mohamed when
someone asked who they were. Since it was a small group in the room I
spoke up to add that they were also the tribe that Muhammad had come
from - to which he summarily announced no, they weren't. After being
dumbfounded for a moment I answered "yes, there were", at which time
he again immediately dismissed the suggestion. Now at this point I am kind
of speechless starting to question my own sanity, and then his sanity.
OK, I thought, maybe he had heard the modern Quraish there in Jericho
were largely descended from Nubian slaves, an unproven assertion of some
news media outlets there in Israel. That's understandable. I was giving him
the benefit of the doubt that he had heard something otherwise or was of the
opinion that the older inhabitants of the Arabia peninsula were more like the
people of the Middle East most often seen in western television or media
today, but to assert that Muhammad was not a man born from the tribe of
Quraysh was quite another and baffling thing to hear.
Rapidly many ideas ran through my mind. I questioned if I was dreaming
at home and hadn't woken up yet or something, or maybe my memory was
failing me. Surely this man wasn't telling me Muhammad, the prophet of
Islam, was not from the Quraysh. I could have sworn that I had read in more
than a few places, in fact over and over and over again that Muhammed was
from the clan of Hashim or Hashemites who were of the tribe of Qureysh!
Mind you, this professor was someone who had just mentioned the bias
of Afrocentrics, and their tendency to exaggerate. So now I was starting to
realize I was speaking with someone who not only was biased himself, but
basically didn't know what he was talking about -especially when it came to
anything related to the ethnic history of the Moors, or Arabians and the
Berbers who were in fact the reason the word Mauri had come to be
synonomous with the words signifying "negro" or "black" - like I said even
among Mozarabic Spaniards up until a few hundred years ago.
Too bad none of the other members in the audience of less than a couple
dozen or so people didn't seem to know the relationship of their Prophet to
the Qureish either. I would have thought knowledge of and interest in the
Prophet's people would be basic or fundamental to someone learning about
the emergence of early Islam considering the importance early Muslims and
the hadiths gave to genealogy. Either I don't know what world I was living in
and my head is in the clouds, or else there is definitely something wrong with
education in African American masjids. lol!
I could say something else here, but I'll just say its no wonder that Oprah
Winfrey went over to Africa instead of staying here in the U.S. and founding a
school here. : (
Now I wished to be able to tell the people in the room there that this man
as an Islamic scholar should be knowing what tribe the Prophet of Islam
came from, but I kept my mouth shut after that because maybe there was
the slightest chance that I was wrong. Now looking back I guess the four
PhDs he received from African universities (he informed me of this during the
intermission) didn't require him to learn where the Prophet came from and I
am actually embarrassed for this lecturer. It also doesn't speak well for the
universities he went to if it is true either, but I'm not going to bring Africa into
this because I am sure most Muslim Africans, layman or otherwise, know
what tribe the Prophet belonged to even if this man who considers himself an
African American and a scholar didn't. More likely he developed a lot of his
views and perspective of Africans during his stay in Barcelona or just as
likely, Morocco. : )
But, in any case many assertions such as the ones this man made has just
reaffirmed my view that a PhD doesn't mean much when it comes to certain
areas of study, and neither does living in Muslim countries apparently,
especially North African ones where the names Berber and Arab are
sometimes more a matter of nationality or language than cultural and
biological origin, not to mention historical documentation. : (
 The lecturer also advised the audience to learn at least 4 languages so
they could broaden their scope of what they learned something I would
agree. But one needs to wonder how much reading of history in either
Arabic or English was done by this man with all the nonsense that was being
spouted.
This is what led to me lengthening this post that was supposed to have
been out much earlier last year. I never meant for it to end up the length of a
book - again. But, I've just far too often been coming across this type of
nonsense spoken and written by supposedly reputable individuals who have
presumably been studying these things so that it's turned out a lot longer
than I had planned. I've needed to add on to it endlessly, in an effort to
refute the fount of fallacies that are being repeated.
Here for example is something typically nonsensical written about Tuareg
women who are referred to as black and Amazons in something called
the Primera Cronica General composed in the 13th century. The author, a
Ronald Messier, comments After the death of El Cid, Christian chronicles reported a
legend of a Turkish woman leading a band of 300 black African female archers. This legend was
possibly inspired by the ominous veils on the faces of the warriors and the dark skin colored blue
by the indigo of their robes (Ronald Messier, p. 118).
In a later passage Messier writes elsewhere, H. T. Norris addresses the legend of the
Amazons in the Almoravid army citing the Primera Cronica of Alfonso X and L. P. Harvey's
article in The Journal of Semitic Studies. "The latter wrote I therefore think that King Bucar had
a group of Touregs in his army, and that because of their outlandish veiled garb these warriors
smeared with indigo were mistaken for negresses. (Messier, p. 213).

Even the smeared dye of indigo robes on dark brown faces can't hide the Tuareg's eastern
African roots.
 First of all, its not certain how someone could come to the conclusion that
a word for black in Spanish should be translated as "negresses". The word
"negress" is an anthropological term.
Did Alfonso ever study anthropology? Obviously not, since he was born
several centuries too early for that.
Just because people in western academia think the term black should only
be applied to peoples of sub-Saharan Africa doesn't mean this Alphonso of
the 13th century was referring to women from Sub-Saharan Africa. The word
black may be tantamount to an anthropological notion in western parlance,
but in Spanish lest we forget - the words for black i.e. "negro" referred to a
color or the complexion of a person and not necessarily an ethnic or
racialstereotype of a West or Central African. Alphonso of course never
meant anything but to describe the color of Tuareg women who, after all
were Berber women - women from a people who more often than not are
described as black in medieval literature like it or not.
They are called a black", "Moorish", "band in the "Primera Cronica", but
that doesn't mean "sub-Saharan African". Maybe for modern folk to say black
or Negro may mean "sub-Saharan", but for the Spanish 13th century ruler
the description was for a group of women who happened to be black in color
as was common to "Moorish" people - whether one likes to believe it or not.
In Tuareg societies and in those of the peoples that were originally called
Berbers society was matrifocal where women "ruled the roost" so to speak
though this probably lessened with the coming of other groups into North
Africa. But the importance of woman, is still emphasized as Tuareg men in
some areas traditionally speak softly in the presence of women and have to
live with their wives family or mother for op to 3 years or until his mother-in-
law says the marriage is firm. Such deferential attitudes toward women and especially the
mother-in-law were once widespread in Africa and common among other African societies
including the Beja, Beriberi and Nilotes.
Among the Kel Ewey for example one anthropologist has noted "Tuareg men
are usually 'ashamed' before women and speak in low, hushed voices before
them". And men who have received the face veil are not allowed to eat or
drink when women are present (Rasmussen, 2006, Susan p. 50). Men make
the brideswealth payments and if the couple divorces she of course keeps it.
It is not that rare to find a Tuareg woman that has been married several
times or even over a dozen times.
Tuareg noble clans have a protective relationship with certain client or vassal
tribes and the protection by a women is considered more important or
valuable than that of a man. The Tuareg are clan-based matrifocal societies
as were most other of the original Berbers such as the Kanuri, also known as
the Beri-beri. An early writer says of them "the Kanuri Berbers of Bornu still
live under the matriarchal system" (Randall-MacIver, David and Wilkin,
Anthony, 1901, p. 5). The Shluh Berbers otherwise known as the Masmuda
were similarly matrilineal in their focus and inheritance. However, northern
coastal based Berberphones that share much in common biologically and
culturally with their Euro-Mediterranean and Near Eastern neighbors, like the
modern Kabyles remain the most patriarchal people in Africa. They are
patrilocal and patrilineal probably preserving some of the old Indo-European
views of women. Unlike the other Africans just mentioned in traditional
Kabyle culture the girl goes to live with the husband's family (Wysner, Glora,
2013, numberless pages).
Traditionally Kabyle woman could not inherit property, and the society was
characterized by extreme male domination ( Knauss, Peter R., 1987, p. 6).
This type of patriarchy though traditional, is very old and very real in the
Kabyle region and first mentioned in the 4th century. It is perhaps a legacy -
like their biological inheritance - of the Germanic tribes, Vandals, Lombards
and the Byzantines that settled the area.
But, whatever it is - it's not African! : )

An older interpretation of the Amazons of Valencia refers this time to "Turkish darts" and 200
princesses.

"Upon the third day after the Cid departed this life, the king Bucar landed his
forces in the port of Valencia an immense host of Moors and Africans- so great
as to astound all the beholders. There were with him six and thirty kings and a
black queen of the Moors , who led an amazonian band of 200 princesses, each
of them as black as herself, all naked to their waists, with their hair covered
with red wool and bearing arrows amd Turkish darts in their hands. These
amazons appeared in the field, in fulfilment of a certain vow, and to perform a
pilgrimage pleasing to their propehet. And the king Bucar ordered his tents to be
pitched round about the city. And they numbered 15,000 tents; and he
commanded the black queen's band to form the vanguard as close as possible to
the city gates. The Court magazine and belle assemble and monthly critic and Museum
Number 103,

The second major misinterpretation in Messier's passage, this time having

a slightly comical ring to it (considering the status of women in Turkish
culture in that time), is the assertion that a Turkish woman archer
somehow gained control over a band of big, black Libyan and matrifocal
women, i.e. Amazons. As Carol Lefleur states, their leader was in fact not
Turkish but a Tuarek leader, Nugaymath al-Tarqiyya ( the star of the Tuareg
archers)' in Arabic, who led an Almoravid, i.e. Tuareg siege of Valencia" ( See
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobbans, "Nubian Queens in the Nile Valley and Afro-Asiatic
Cultural History", Ninth International Conference of Nubian Studies, Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.)Tuareg women archers article link
But no matter, Mr. Messier, the author in fact doesn't mention much about
the Tuareg in his book which happens to be all about Almoravids; i.e. the
Lamtuna and their related Tuareg kinsmen. He probably had no reason to
comment on the irony, or strangeness rather, of the statement he cites from
another author, L. P. Harvey who apparently wrote - I therefore think that King Bucar had a
group of Touregs in his army (Messier, R., 2010, p. 213).
 But yes, we can all surmise and in fact its been documented that Abu
Bukari b. Umari, the Lamtuna Tuareg (Gazula on his mother's side) had his
own veiled Lamtuna and Gazula people in his Almoravid army. And yes, they
were for the most part what is called "negro" in Spanish - that is to say
"black" or very near it. I surmise L.P. Harvey's problem is that he didn't know
the Almoravids were primarily the Tuareg i.e. the Iwellemeden ("Lamtuna")
Tuareg or veiled Berbers and their brethren, so he assumes Alphonso is
misled into thinking they are women.

Kouba from the Almoravid period in Morocco.

Lastly, the idea that the Moorish band were mistaken for black women
because the Tuareg used indigo that smears and makes them look black is
another way to avoid the obvious fact that the women described as black
were Tuareg. Apparently Norris in any case written that the women had
"shaven heads" except for hair that was tied in a topknot.
Luis del Marmol y Carvajal, 1520A.D. a 16th century Spanish traveler and
chronicler from Granada speaking on the origins in the Horn of Africa of the
five major Berber confederations he calls "Masmuda", "Sanhaja", "Gomara",
"Zanata" and "Hawara" stated, These five peoples first populated eastern Berberia, and
afterward spilled over into different habitations, making themselves lords of most of Africa. They
were collectively called African Berbers, because they first lived in Berberia.
He was repeating what earlier Arabic sources had said. Berberia is the region located in
the area now called Somalia by the Arabic writers like Ibn Battuta, and before
that by the Greeks and Romans. Thus as Ramzi Rouighi has said, Clearly, for
six centuries Greeks and Romans consistently and regularly described a Barbaria on the east
coast of Africa (R. Rouighi, 2011, p. 71). Veiled Berbers were said to have lived in
Zayla near Berbera Port. The pre-Islamic Arabians called the area Barbar and
its people al-Barbar (Baadj, Amar S., 2015, p. 11).
This is how the origin of the Berbers was commonly conceived of until the
beginning of the European colonial era. That they were still considered a
people of East African origins by 16th century travelers from Granada as
having eastern African or Eritrean origins - as in the time of Josephus of the
first century -is telling and significant.
Today some specialists seem oblivious to the fact that this eastern Berber
region existed. And, when they acknowledge it they claim it had no relation
to the Berbers of the Western regions the Arabs called al-Maghreb.

{I respectfully dedicate this blogpost to my African ancestors as well as to

the native "Blackfoot" ancestors who according to an aunt originated in
South Carolina among the people that were once reported in newspaper
articles to actually have been a combination of "Moorish" slaves, Indians and
Portuguese.
As well I dedicate this to my European ancestors...** }

Today a variety of observers from geneticists to historians assume a European-affiliation and

in particular a non-black origin of the ancient peoples called "Berbers". A modern author writing
on the Berber nationalist movement has said, Among the Ishelhin speakers of the Tashelhit
dialect in southwestern Morocco (the Souss region) as well as in the southeast, 'Amazigh' is both
a literary archaism and a term denoting white or true Berbers as distinguished from the
black-skinned Berberophones of the region (Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce, 2011, p. 212).
By Berberophones we can assume the author Maddy-Weitzman is referring to the slave
descended Gnawa or the Haratin. By "white" it is not known whether he means fair-skinned
Berbers of modern Morocco or the dark brown and near black Berbers there and in the Maghreb
who have traditionally called themselves by the word bidan (translated literally as white but
having more of a cultural meaning than anything else). But it is clear from the cover of his book,
The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States, that the author
considers modern Berbers that look more like Europeans to be the true Berbers.
BERBERS OF THE SOUS VALLEY - Described by Guiseppe Sergi as of "very dark
complexion", (see his book The Mediterranean Race) they along with the Berbers of the Wadi
Regh and Nafzawa are among the Berbers anthropologists and historians are now trying to claim
were descendants of slaves even though the Mauri even north of these regions since ancient
times have been called "black as night". The Sous Valley in particular was settled by Masmuda.
Even if they have absorbed sub-Saharan slaves, if anything they are probably a lot lighter than
they were in the time of the Byzantines!
As we have shown in this blogspot, such people now common to the Mediterranean coasts
of North Africa in general are greatly modified both biologically and culturally and could hardly
be the best representatives of the early Berbers in the same regions once referred to in Arab,
Byzantine and Roman sources as the "five nations of Sabaeans" and Himyarites, or as Mauri,
Numidians, Levathes, Indi, Gaitules, etc.
Nor are the present fair-skinned peoples along the coast the best biological or cultural
representatives of the people referred to as the 2nd race of Berbers the latter being as we have
seen the veiled Tamashek or Tuareg*, i.e. Mazikes and their vassal castes composed mainly of
Songhai or Soninke, Zaghai or Ahel Gara (Jarawa). (See link for more on the Gara).
A thousand years ago the Masmuda were the Berber population of the Moroccan coast whose
largest branch was called Ghomara or Gumari. As Hsain Ilahiane puts it in his Historical
Dictionary of the Berbers (Amazighen) , "Masmuda branches and subgroups occupied the major
parts of Morocco: the Ghommara all over the Rif as far as the straits and southward into the
plains by the Abu Ragrag and Sabou rivers..." (2006, p. 91). The Barghawata or Berghawata of
the Atlantic coast of Morocco between Sale and Safi were also Masmuda while others believe
they were Zanata (Naylor, p., 2009, 272, fn. 2). It was previous to and during the time of the 12th
century Masmuda-led Almohade invasions and empire of southern Europe and North Africa that
observers writing in Arabic referred to the Masmuda as black-skinned (Lewis, Bernard, 1974,
p. 217) and as black Africans . Yet, today most inhabitants of the Rif in Morocco calling
themselves Masmuda and Ghomara are as fair as Europeans and sometimes even north European
populations.

In Majorca during the reign of the Almohad Masmuda Berbers a "Moor" falls victim to soldiers
of the King of Aragon on the last day of the Christian year 1229. As stated by Amar Baadj,
"Majorca would remain under Almohad control until its conquest by James I of Aragon, when it
passed out of Muslim hands forever." (See Saladin the Almohads and the Banu Ghaniya p. 161).
Though it may be true that many of the black Moroccans of today are not Berbers there are many
still near black Moroccans who in fact represent the black-skinned peoples once designated
Berbers and Mauri right up until the 15 and 16th centuries.
It is interesting and fascinating that the West's academics are not curious about what happened
to these black Africans of the Maghreb i.e. the Berbers, so vividly described by early authors
with words and in terms that could not be confused with the "swarthiness" of modern Europeans
or Mediterraneans.
What happened to those "Moors" of the Riff mountains of Tangiers - horse-riding wearers of
loin-cloths who St. Isidore of Seville told us were "black as night" and the 8th century Mozarabic
Chronicle of 754 claimed were of a color so horrifying that it scared away the horses of their
enemies. What happened to the javelin-throwing "Ethiopians" called "Mauri Mazazeces" and
"Mazices" in Tripolitania of the Byzantine writers whose name has only in the 20th century been
adopted by all Berber-speakers.
Perhaps, some believe they'd be better off not knowing, but that is what this post is
attempting to address.

The So-Called Blackamoor vs Moor Divide

In his book Iberia published in 1968, James Michener spouted the prevalent postcolonial
perspective that the word blackamoor was invented to describe Negroes; the great bulk of the
Moors must have been white men tanned by the sun, like Arabs (Michener, J., Iberia, 1968, p.
163).
In fact the name blackamoor in Western Europe appears to have been applied not just to
anybody black as a Moor, but to anyone thought to be descended from one that wasn't
necessarily black in color. The name was frequently used for European individuals who were
considered of black African, i.e. Moorish in blood or origin, but not Muslim. Thus, in 1945
Austrian author and composer Max Graf quotes novelist Heinrich Laube who described fellow
Austrian Johann Strauss Senior (famous like his sons for his Waltzes) upon seeing him for the
first time. He wrote of him as black as a Moor with curly hair, the typical King of the
Blackamoors (Graf, Max, 2015).
Such descriptions contradict the view promoted by some that a Moor usually referred to any
Muslim from Spain or North Africa and that a "Blackemore" was a black Muslim. They suggest
rather that it signified any man that showed descendancy from a Moor, i.e. black man. Witness
the description of Strauss by Laube. The man is completely black like a Moor, the hair frizzy,
the mouth melodious. One has only to regret that he has a white face... he adds, otherwise he
would look like Balthasar(Lang, Zoe, 2014, p. 115). Laube even goes so far as to ascribe the
music of Strauss to Africanly hot-bloodedness saying he conducted a dance in an African
manner.
He clearly saw Strauss as a fair-skinned descendant of black Africans as he was consistent
in comparing his features to them (Lang, Zoe A., 2014, p. 116).
Strauss had according to the same author a brother who was olive-skinned and one ivory-
skinned with jet black hair. Strauss's grandmother was born in Spain, but we can surmise that in
his day one had to be darker than olive-skinned to be likened to Moors. Similarly, the pianist
and composer Hadyn was described by a Prince Esterhazy (a Hungarian nobleman he worked
for) as a fine blackamoor (Stapert, C., 2014, p. 40) and even as a blacky according to one
translation. Such instances of the use of blackamoor seem to convey more of a meaning of being
black like a Moor as put forth by J.A. Rogers, rather than a black Muslim, and like the word
Moor, had the sense of being either a black man, or descended from one. Like Strauss,
Beethoven was also called a "Moor" and "a black Spaniard" because of his dark skin and
possession of traits described in his time by other Europeans as Negroid whether one likes it,
or not.
On the other hand the phrase "white Moor" in Europe seems to have been used for Muslims
who were not typically Moorish in complexion.
 A diverse array of scholars have become unnecessarily deluded over the usage of the word
Moor and the appearance of the early Berbers in ancient times. In her article Delicious
Traffick': Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern stages an Ania Loomba notes that
Shakespeare used the word simultaneously with Negro in texts like the Merchant of Venice.
According to Loomba The Spanish derived the word 'moro' from the Latin 'maurus' which in
turn came from the Greek 'mavros' meaning black... Then she makes the point that they used
it to designate their conquerors who were not black at all but a mixture of Arab and Berber
Muslims (Loomba, A., 2000, p. 210).
Thus, she is another one of the many scholars curiously supposing the two people, which as
we have shown, once epitomized blackness to be not black at all. Of course one must wonder
what not black at all may mean for this modern professor of post-colonial studies. One doesn't
know whether to understand her use of the word black in a literal sense or in a cultural sense.
But, as we have seen from references on this blog the complexion of the earliest Berber and
Arab Muslims was most certainly the reason Moors were characteristically depicted as black.
Both populations, but especially the former, were part and parcel of the peoples considered black
in Africa by outsiders up until the 15th century.
But, at least Professor Loomba acknowledges where the word Moor came from. There are
many specialists in ancient history that don't even know or admit to the original meaning and use
of the word. The question then arises as to why so many have been led to make assumptions
about early documented inhabitants of the world they've evidently not done much learning about.
As we have shown these views were largely influenced by the present day demographic
situation of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as a little bit of wishful thinking on the
part of historians. It was the wont or desire of certain colonial and some post-colonial era
scholars to make the people there into the unmodified descendants of palaeolithic European
populations, i.e. the Mediterranean race of Gabriel Camps and other anthropologists.
The people designated in North Africa Berbers in the early periods were explicitly referred
to in almost all sources as black-skinned. This includes not only Latin and later European texts,
but early sources of the Arab-speaking Middle Eastern and Central Asian world. There was
certainly no tribe of fair-skinned Moors/Berbers that is spoken about in early histories. And, in
actuality the people who have used the term Berber or Beriberi for themselves were and are
still for the most part black Africans. Thus, it should not be surprising that certain individuals
claiming Berber nationality and that they speak for modern Berbers will comment that they have
actually never used the word for themselves and that it is in fact a term invented for them by
others.
And essentially they are right. The word Berber obviously is and was originally used by and
for the Zaghawa-related and then Tuareg-related people who in North Africa have since mixed
with North African Vandals, Lombards, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Normans, Franks,
Syrians, Arabians, Genoans, Andalusians, Turks, Bosnians, Persians and numerous renegade
European converts to Islam - and that's not even taking into account abundant supply of
documented highly-sought-after Byzantine, Circassian and western European concubines. : )
Studies have in fact shown that the current inhabitants of the coastal regions of North Africa
as well as peninsular Arabia are genetically tied to populations of the modern Levant and Iberia.
This would actually make sense since the same people that are known to have played a dominant
part in populating the Levant also came to populate Spain and Portugal and have immigrated
from these regions within the past several centuries into North Africa.
One study done using both SNP and STR analysis has shown that up to 60 percent of the gene
pool of modern Maghrebis is from the Levant while another 23 percent is from Iberia. The only
problem with the study is that they suggest the Levant influence was due to the Phoenicians
when in fact it was likely due to the influx of later peoples coming from the Levant both as
slaves, concubines and later populations from Syria (not to be confused with the Sulaym-Hilal
invasion) that fought against the Berbers. DNA Tribes Genetic Analysis of North African STRs
Other genetic studies have come to nearly the same conclusion - modern Berberphones of
North Africa are biologically more Near Eastern than African.

It is clear that the so-called Berber Y haplogroup M81 or E1b1b1b in modern Moroccan Berber-
speakers is a legacy of the one-time Tuareg presence along the coasts of North Africa. It is the
dominant haplogroup of the Tuareg, including those to the far south in Burkina Faso at Goram
Goram and in Gosi in Mali. It is also high among the Sahrawi of Morocco who are also in large
part relatively dark-skinned, but it decreases as one heads from the south to the north in
Morocco.
We have one study below -
"As results, a large majority of the Berber-speaking male lineages belong to the Y
chromosomal E1b1b1b-M81 haplogroup. The frequency ranged from 79.1 to 98.5% in all
localities sampled. Then, the E1b1b1b2-M183 was the most dominant subclade in our samples,
which ranged from 65.1% to 83.1%. In contrast, the E1b1b1b1-M107 and E1b1b1b2a-M165
subclades werent found in our samples. Our results suggest a predominance of E1b1b1b-M81
haplogroup among Moroccan Berber-speaking male with a decreasing gradient from south to
north..." (Reguig, A., 2014).

Another paper entitled "Genome-Wide and Paternal Diversity Reveal a Recent Origin of
Human Populations in North Africa" appears to get to the gist of the problem when it comes to
conclusions about modern Berber origins. It supports an origination of modern Maghrebi's and
Egyptians derived from a diversity of people or admixture.
"PCA on genome-wide SNPs (Figure 4A) shows that North Africans are diverse and closer to
Middle Easterners and Europeans than to Sub-Saharan Africans. Egyptians appear the closest
to Middle Easterners and Europeans while South Moroccans are drawn towards Sub-Saharans.
Tunisian samples (Chenini-Douiret Berbers) form an orthogonal cluster close but distinct from
other North Africans which mostly appear in overlapping clusters....
"All North Africans except Tunisians appear to be a mixture of populations related to Yoruba
and Eurasians (Basque and Lebanese Christians)...
"Our results from the maternally inherited mtDNA genome [45] and the paternally inherited Y-
chromosome show that both males and females in North Africa underwent a similar admixture
history and both are today a mixture of African and Eurasian lineages with more affinity towards
the out-of-Africa populations than to sub-Saharan Africans. We should note here that although
the pattern of admixture with the surrounding regions is similar in males and females, the
demographic processes or historical events driving these admixtures could have been different.'"
"Our analysis of modern North Africans shows that most populations emerged recently from
admixture of Africans and Eurasians and therefore are ineffective in resolving questions about
ancient human expansions." (Fadhlaoui-Zid, Karima et al., 2013) Genome Wide and Paternal
Diversity Reveal Recent Origin...
Finally there is the article - "Genetic Structure of Tunisian Ethnic Groups revealed by paternal
lineages" by Karima Fadhlaoui-Zid et al.
"The most common lineage was the North African haplogroup E-M81 (71%), being fixed in two
Berber samples (CheniniDouiret and Jradou), suggesting isolation and genetic drift.
Differential levels of paternal gene flow from the Near East were detected in the Tunisian
samples (J-M267 lineage over 30%); however, no major sub-Saharan African or European
influence was found. This result contrasts with the high amount of sub-Saharan and Eurasian
maternal lineages previously described in Tunisia. Overall, our results reveal a certain genetic
inter-population diversity, especially among Berber groups, and sexual asymmetry, paternal
lineages being mostly of autochthonous origin. "

An example of the modern diversity in phenotypes of the inhabitants of the Chenini-Douiret

region is seen below. The people of the area are as mentioned above Berbers with differing
amounts of Near Eastern genetic contribution, while other Tunisian Berbers show high levels of
absorption of women from both Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. This means the people below
that are near black in color are not black due to being sub-Saharans or "black Berbers", but
remnants of the true ancient Berbers.

CHENINI Berber woman

CHENINI "Berber" men (with Near Eastern phenotype)

DOUIRET Berber man

 A Berber couple of Chenini, Tunisia in their traditional home

Douiret Berber man

So what's been discovered is that the paternal African haplogroup or Y "Berber marker" M-81
( E1b1b1b) that is dominant in the Tuareg gene pool still flourishes among males of the modern
Maghreb in varying degrees. North African peoples in general however for the most part show
more admixture with populations that are in a sense not indigenous to Africa, but connected to
the Middle Eastern Levant like the Christian Lebanese who themselves have been linked to the
Crusaders in certain other studies.
Modern Berbers of today's Tunisia as elsewhere in the northern Maghreb reflect a biological
heritage that is mixed or heterogeneous - that is to say both Berber or African and otherwise
Eurasian or Near Eastern.

We should note here that the admixture that has taken place in the North African area with
the Levant reflects the various historically-documented population movements that have
occurred within the last 1000 years and have made the North African landscape of peoples what
it is today.

Reft of the Moors: Ignored Documented Descriptions of the

Berbers of the Maghreb

The 12th century Itinerarium of Richard, the Lion-Heart in fact states that Gaetulians, and
Numidians, and from the scorching south, the people named Moors or Mauritanians from
Mauros which means black all made war against the crusaders under Saladin and his Kurdish
troops (Vinsauf, Geoffrey, 2015, no numbered pages). It is safe to say that since the Gaetules
and Numidians both according to Leo Africanus 16th century and others were connected to the
veiled ancestral Tuareg the Goddala or Joddala (modern Igdalen of Agades) and Lamtuna
(medieval translation of the name of the Tuareg Iuwelimmiden or Auelimmeden) and their kin
and vassals , the Moors coming from the scorching south in Mauretania mentioned in the
document are not the Tuareg, but some other people.
 THE "LAMTUNA" TUAREG OF TODAY

The Lamtuna (Aeelemmiden or Ouelleminden) according to Leo Africanus along with the
Lamta, Gezula, and other veiled men came out of the desert of Numidia. Ibn Khaldun said that
in the 8th century they already had a kingdom. This kingdom, called Anbiya, had actually
included the Sous region in the southern part of what is now Morocco, and stretched between
Sijilmassa and Ghana. Both of the names Lamta and Lamtuna were said to have come from their
light shields named for an oryx or African antelope called Lamt or El Amd. The hides of this
animal were used to make their shield which were dipped for months at a time in milk to make
them impervious to swords and other instruments used in battle.
The Tuareg clan name Imakitan is likely the same as that of the Micateni of Numidia
mentioned by the 1st century Diodorus in Book 26:232 (in the context of the Punic war) and
perhaps the name as the Muctunia manus and also Ucutameni of other writers who later became
the Iktameni or Kutama or Kitama Berbers said to belong to the either to the Sanhaja or
Masmuda. But, according to Jamal Abu Nasr the Kutama of the medieval period were a
sedentary branch of the Sanhaja (Abun-Nasr, Jamal, 1987, p. 60).
In the previous blog on the Saracens we saw that Sicily was occupied by a number of these
Moorish people for which reason Palermo was called the Gate of the Blacks (Bab es-Sudan)
(Kaplan, P., 1987). It was said that roughly 16,000 prisoners were removed from Sicily by the
ruler Frederick and brought to settle in Lucera, Italy.
A specialist on the matter of Moors in Sicily writes as follows.

When tensions between the Christians and Muslims in Sicily in the first decades of the
thirteenth century disrupted life on Frederick II's island, the emperor did what the Christian
rulers of Iberia had done in the eleventh century: he removed the Muslims from his kingdom.
Instead of expelling them, however, he deported them to Lucera, a town previously inhabited by
Christians in Apulia, forty miles or so from the Adriatic Sea in the southern Italian peninsula.
The first deportations began in the 1220s and continued for twenty years. By mid-century,
Sicily's Muslim population no longer existed. Some had fled to North Africa while the majority
had been settled in Lucera and small villages in the same region. See Sally Mckee's Review of
Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera by Julie Taylor The American Historical
Review, October 2004.
Though some have taken issue with the statement that all Muslims were treated harshly by all
Christian rulers, the point is that a large group of the Moors definitely ended up in Lucera and
other towns in Italy. Names like nigri are seen in documents with reference to those in the
service of Frederick and some of the personal names mentioned in the documents suggest North
African toponyms. In 1239 Frederick ordered the formation of a brass band which was to
include the sclavis nigris, while in a letter of 1240 two servitelli nigri are named they are
two youths named Musca and Marzukh.
The name Marzukh sounds much like the name of Marzuk or Murzuk, an early and still extant
town in Libya inhabited mostly by the Berbers (Tebu and Tuareg). It is likely then that many of
the "Moorish" men in service to the King of Italy were simply North African Berbers or Beriberi
from places like Libya, Tripolitania and the Fezzan.

Men of Murzuk in Libya belong to the populations once called Berber from their name
"Beriberi". They are called Tubu/Tibbu or Teda and may be remnants of the Tedamensii - a
people of the "Ethiopians" or blacks of St. Isidore called Garamantes. Closely related are the
Goran, Daza and Zaghawa (whom were called the "Zawagha" Berbers or "Azuagha" Moors).
Berber History and the Misinterpretation of African Color Terms

The tawnie Moores are divided into five severall people or tribes: the tribes called Zanhagi,
Musmudi, Zeneti, Hacari, and Gumeri. Translation of Leo Africanus 16th century
categorization of the Berbers in History of Africa.

Berbers at a meet-up in southern Morocco in the Wadi Nun (Oued-Noun) region

For Leo Africanus Numidia of the 16th century was of an enormous expanse extending
between the Nile and the ocean sea (Atlantic). Its major cities included Wargla ("Querqelen"),
the Gharian, Ghadames, Misrata, Mesallata, Touggourt (Tegort), Birdeoa, Figuig, Sidjilmasa,
Ifren and Tekrur. The Berber or mainly Tuareg people occupying the area - the Zenata,
Masmuda, Megrawa, Lamtuna and Gezula are called tawnie Moors by Leo, or his translator
while the Sudanic peoples are called the" black Moors" or Negros, (originating with the name
Niger). The word tawnie would correspond to the literally brown complexion of the Tuareg
and modern Iullemidden modern Lamtuna , Zanata and other Berbers still occupying these
towns.
Thus writes a colonial observer, "Tuggurt, a brown colored town, occupied by Ghuara is very
like Wargla in appearance" (Pommerol, 1900, pp. 233, 241, and 245 ). Aside from the Tuareg-
related groups like the Ifren and Maghrewa who settled at Wargla, the still very dark-skinned
Djarawa (Ghuara) a branch of the Zanata were the largest population of the region. Previously
we spoke about the Jewish heritage of many of these groups, especially the Djarawa or Garawa
and their leader and prophetess "Kahina", a Queen of the Aures, and likely Garamantes of the
Byzantines. See more about the Gu'ara (Garawan or Djarawa Berbers) of these ancient towns
here.
The Tuareg Inaden blacksmiths caste in fact claims descent from the Jews of Wargla.
Similarly the Wangara/Garawan (Soninke) related groups further west and south had traditions of
Jewish origin.

"In today's Mauretania, endogamous groups of blacksmiths claim Jewish descent and some oral
traditions maintain that it's early inhabitants, the Bafur, were Jews from Wadi Nun.... Other
traditions from Mali document the prevalence of Jews in the pre-Islamic period, some claiming
that Maghribi Jews from the Dra'a and the Sus regions shared with the Mande their knowledge
of blacksmithing.
The History of African Jews, one of the most understudied chapters in African history, would
extend back to the days of king Solomon....
By the eighth century there were communities of Jews in most major oases on the desert edge
such as Sijilmasa, Tu'at, Gurara, Ghadamis, Sus, and Wadi Nun " (Lydon, Ghislaine, 2009, p.
66).

The African Jews referenced in this paragraph refer to the Soninke/Songhai or Zaghai or
Zaghawa branch of the Berbers, i.e., the original Beri-beri as we have explained previously in
our blog about the proto-Berbers.

Men of Tamentit a town of Tu'at (Tuwat) oasis in the northern Sahara of Algeria. The
inhabitants speak the dialect of the Zenata Berber called Taznatit. Many towns in the northern
Sahara were established in the 6th century AD by the Ibadi. See video on link of the
Berber Berber Men of Tamentit sing . These people of such towns in the region of ancient
Numidia are similar to the Maurusioi or Mauri Procopius, Corippus, Lucan, Isidore and other
ancients frequently spoke of. They once occupied much of coastal Northwest Africa or
"Mauritania" as well. : )

Al-Idrisi links the Bafour in fact to the Teda-Kanuri people or modern Beri-beri.

"Al-Idrissi's testimony informs us that the Bafour spread out in the west of Mauritania, and on
the Atlantic coast where they were persecuted by the Almoravids: 'To that important Bafor
dispersion of the Judaized blacks of Adrar and Tagant, one must add the Bafor fraction which
lives on fish on the coast...Only a small group of people from Kamnuria remain scattered
between these deserts and near the coasts and living off dairy products and fish. They lead a
hard and precarious life they wander in this territory. The oral tradition that presents the
fisherman of the Mauritanian coast scattered between these deserts and near the coast and living
off dairy products and fish, the Imraguen, Shnagla and Ouled Ahmed Dahman as descendants of
the ancient Bafour, corroborates al-Idrisi's account, and observers noted that they concealed
their Jewish religion" (Bruder, Edith, 2008, pp. 108-109).

IMRAGUEN - fisherman of the Mauritanian coast are thought to descend from the Bafour or
"Mauri Bavares". Idrisi links them to the Kanuri peoples further East in Kanem-Bornou. "The
Bornu people especially the traditional ruling class of the Kanuri, are aware of the historical
roots and role played by the ancient Zaghawa in the foundations of the Kanem Empire (Arabie,
B., 2012, p. ).

Under Arab cultural influence such people though black to westerners are those that came to
describe themselves as whites in Africa, because of the many much darker slaves brought from
further south. However, had they meant white or fair in the European sense, the word red or
ahmar would have been used as it was the term among Arabs for the complexion of people of
Syrian, Persian, Byzantine, Frankish and Turkish descent. The Arabic term (biyad or abyad, etc.)
which has been translated as white was in that day usually reserved for very dark-skinned
Arabs and Africans like the Tuareg (Sanhaja) or Fulani (Woodabe), who in the late medieval
period were essentially dark brown as most remain today, though lighter than other Africans.
Africanist Bruce Hall has been one of the few to explore the modern definition of black
and white in African Sahelian societies and note that the meaning of each is dissimilar to the
way such terms are used in Europe and the West. As he also has pointed out, in the Sahel the
term white is frequently used by and for Fulani, Tuareg and the rather dark-brown Arabs (the
Trarza for example). Sometimes, the Soninke Wangara and other merchants are designated
whites in old texts as well.
Hall at least prudently qualifies his usage of the words race, black and whitein a
footnote in the introduction of his own book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-
1960 saying - .
Throughout the book I will use the term black ,white and race . It will be
understood, I hope, that even when not indicated by quotation marks or parentheses these terms
are not meant as objective descriptors of physical or racial difference, but as social and cultural
constructions (Hall, 2011, p. 6, fn.)
But, another American historian Timothy Cleaveland published in the Journal of North
African Studies writes in his abstract Ahmad Baba included only one Black scholar in his
biographical dictionary and instead featured nine scholars from his own Berber patriline,
including himself. The ironic characteristics of the Miraj al-Suud and Nayl al-Ibtihaj may best
be explained by Ahmad Babas own ambiguous status in Timbuktu and the broader society of
Islamic West Africa as a White Berber living in the land of the Blacks (Cleaveland, 2015,
Abstract).
The last statement of course implies Berbers were not black Africans. But, according to
early observers Sanhaja and other Berbers were a people black and near black in color if not
culture. What's more according to some accounts Ahmad Baba was far from being purely
Sanhaja Berber and part of his ancestry was from the Sudan. In any case, if he was white in
the African sense that should not be confused with the modern Western one, and to say that only
one scholar was black in reality has little resonance with comtemporary Western considerations
of what a black complexion is.
It probably would have been better to say few sub-Saharans were named by Ahmad Baba, but
even that sounds inappropriate since Berbers were at some periods were recognized as much sub-
Saharan as they were northern peoples. Baba was black in the western or European sense
because he was Berber and secondly because his foremothers were also of sub-Saharan origin. If
he considered himself white it could only have been in the Arab cultural sense that is now used
among the Fulani, Ibo and other groups that Western observers have customarily considered
black Africans. A prime example of this usage is in the text of Ibn Battuta supposedly a Berber
himself when he describes a group of Bardama or Tuareg women of Mali as "pure white" or of a
"whiteness without admixture" (Poppenoe, Rebecca, 2004, pp. 33 and 34). Bardama is the name
of the Tuareg even today. The Fulani still call the Tuareg "Burdaame", and the Soninke name for
the Tuareg is Burdama (Hill, Allen G., 2012, p. 9; Jablow, Alta, 1990, p. 42).
Some authors have also suggested that the Sanhaja refused to mix with the inhabitants of
Tekrur based on the fact the latter were blacks.
According to al-Maqqari, the people of the Tekrur had in fact under their king invaded the
Sanhaja city of Walata or Aywalatin. But the partners of the King of Tekrur he stated were in
Tlemcen, a town in Algeria. It would only be natural that the Massufa clan of the Sanhaja of
Walata, today's Tuareg clan of Inusufen or Imesufa, would develop some dislike of the
inhabitants of Tekrur. Thus, the whole generally agreed upon premise of why the Sanhaja
Berbers despised and would not intermarry with the Africans of Tekrur is once again a case of
projecting modern Maghrebi and Western anti-black views onto an historically and contextually-
unrelated matter.
Such antipathy in Africa when it has existed between peoples was mainly historically and
economically-based as everywhere else in the world. Such tensions also existed and in some
places still between the lighter nomad or "red" Fulani (called Woodabe or Bororo) and other
African groups.

Woodabe Fulani men looking not much different than the Tuareg in complexion and facial
characteristics (derived from their ancient African ancestors) stand in front of other black
Africans. Such people were designated "red" and "white" men in Africa, before such terms came
to be confused with the usages of the same terms by European colonialists for themselves.

On the other hand, the Tuareg who today consider themselves playmates of the Woodabe
group of the Fulani could not have had the biological aversion towards mixing with the latter.
Woodabe and Tuareg, both being so-called "red" or white nomads that tended to avoid
intermixing with agriculturalists in various regions of Africa. "In West Africa and Sahel many
African peoples place Fulani in the same category as Arabs and Tuaregs - 'red-skinned' people
that have used Islam as a vehicle of conquest and rule"(Riesman, Paul and Szanton, David L.,
1992, p. 12).
The Woodabe appear to be very insular even in comparison to the Tuareg. While the latter in
particular or Sanhaja as they were called have had their ages long custom of subjecting to control
or enslavement the people who used the plough to till the land even if that slavery differed
somewhat from both the Middle Eastern, African and Western types of chattel slavery.
Yes, the agricultural populations tend to have blacker skin, but Tuareg who made up a great
part of the Sanhaja of that period could hardly have appeared much different than what most
Tuareg, Fulani and other dark-brownish sub-Saharans are today, closer to dark brown and brown-
black than the sallow or yellowish brown (light) color now found among many of the Hoggar
Tuareg or those of the Acacus region of Libya. Thus an Encyclopedia in 1911 reads rather
inaccurately - "Their general color is the reddish yellow of southern Europeans, the uncovered
parts of the body being, however, darker through exposure." And in direct contradistinction to
modern genetic studies another recent Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: S-Z reads - "The
Tuaregs are a Berber people, descendents of the Zenaga Berbers, a Caucasian people with later
black African and Arabic admixtures (Minahan, James, 2003, p. 1923).
In fact fair skin among Tuareg populations in a Mediterranean sense of "fair" is rather
uncommon except for a few places. Most Tuareg are still very dark in comparison to coastal or
Mediterranean Berbers. Those especially in the Ahaggar region of Algeria and Acacus region of
Libya also have a more marked or noticeable amount of modern Eurasian admixture likely due to
the slave trade or absorbing other northern peoples. The Tuareg of Libya are also said to have
"mixed with Turks and Tartars" in African manuscripts, but those of places like Murzuk and Ghat
are still rather dark. Like the Fulani, the Tuareg especially in the Acacus region of Libya may
also have an Eurasian component, but one that predates the spread of late bronze age Europeans
in Europe.
Tuareg of Libya at a festival of Ghat

A Tuareg girl of Libya

The identification with the Berbers or Tuareg with the Philistines or (pilishtim) was actually
commonplace in Midieval Muslim Spain. In fact in many Jewish texts from Spain the word
Berber is replaced by Pilishtim (Philistim). When the Hebrew chronicler Abraham Ibn Da'ud of
Toledo (d. 1180) refers to the Berber king of Grenada Habus b. Maksan, he calls him melekh ha-
pilishtim, King of the Philistines, and states, too, that the minister Joseph Ibn Naghrela was
murdered by the Philistine, that is, Berber, chiefs (Berthelot, K., David, J. E., Hirschman,.M.,
2014, p. 304).
The fifteenth century Genoese observer Antonius Malfante wrote about the Tuareg (veiled
Sanhaja) as Philistines, saying they were fair in comparison to the black Africans they lived
amongst. In translation they were bianchi Africani and tawnie. However, in the same
century Portuguese voyager Alvise Cadamosto (d. 1483) describes the Sanhaja of Oudane in that
area as brown rather than lightish and the Arabs themselves were also described as of brown
complexion (Blanchard, Ian 2005, p. 1139, fn. 114), which would characterize the majority of
both of these so-called "white" peoples even today.

Arab girl of Ouadane (Wadan)

 ARAB GIRL OF WADAN

A recent article states, The Tuareg had a racist contempt for the dark-skinned agriculturalists
and did not see themselves as part of the same cultural universe. They saw themselves as white,
though many were quite dark. Their supposed 'whiteness' made them favored by colonial
administrators, but left them targeted by African nationalists.
http://peacemagazine.org/archive/v29n2p10.htm

But as we can see whiteness of the Tuareg and Fulani as with African Americans has little to do
with whiteness of Europe or even modern coastal North Africa, but is a way to describe "black
Africans". Nevertheless, many mistaken views of the Tuareg have arisen due to the presumption
that modern coastal people called Berbers represent truer Berbers than the people that called
themselves Berbers not living near the Mediterranean coast today. Such ideas have led to
interesting, but baseless genetic studies founded on unwarranted suppositions. Some of these
studies for example are based on the idea that the Tuareg were descendants as the plough-using
Garamantes and autocthones of North Africa or Sahara.
But, the Tuareg whose noble castes despise the plough as we have shown are direct descendants
of the largely nomadic ancient Levathes Mauri still bearing their names. Among them are the
modern Inusamani (Nasamones), Ifran (Yafran) and Iforas (Ifuraces), Imoshagh (Mazax
or Mazices) and Imakitan or (Micateni), Imaqqoren (Machruas), and Kel Cadenit
(Silcadenit) whom retain customs of the more nomadic and war-like ancient Libyans such as
the Nasamonian practice of sleeping near ancestral tombs of their ancestors and prophesying
through dreams. Al-Bekri said the Tuareg were strangers to agriculture, and even bread, living
entirely off of the meat and milk of their herds. Ya'aqubi also said they had no cereal or grain.
In any case to suggest that the very warlike and predatory ancestors of the Tuareg people were
the basis of agricultural Garamantes whom Herodotus said in his time had no weapons of war, is
hardly warranted. In fact as has been suggested they may have been among those that contributed
to its destruction.

A Tuareg specialist from the Smithsonian institute wrote decades ago -

No Tuareg of noble birth will stoop to work of any kind and so, with the passing of the rich days
of plundered caravans and towns, he is often reduced to the precarious, but always dignified,
existence of an aristocratic mendicant. It is this same aristocratic outlook on life and the
'protection' they have afforded to Sahara commerce which has earned them the names of jackals,
thieves and murderers, and the opprobrium of their Arab enemies. (Holiday, Finola and
Geoffrey, 1960, p. 2)

In another words, it is probable that throughout history Tuareg nobles have worked hard to get
protection money from client or vassal clans, but work involving the plough, harvesting and
taking care of crops was probably considered work beneath them.
The Soninke or Isuwaghen, Zuwagha or Zaghai, i.e. Zaghawa also called Wa'n'gara or Djarma
Songhai may on the other hand have claim to be Garamantians and Gamphasantes. It is usually
their vassal clans composed of Soninke (Garawan/Wangara) or Zaghai origin that engage in
agricultural practices, rather than Tuareg nobles, along with salt and gold mining, metallurgy,
masonry, music and other things the great African civilizations of the Sahel were known for. The
Soninke, like the Garamantes "peoples of Djerma" were likely originally Nilo-Saharans,
knowledgeable in hydraulics who once used their masonic skills to build pyramids similar to the
Nilo-Saharan speakers of Meroe. (See link) The former were early on joined by the Zaghai or
Zaghawa who added elements such as silversmithing, the tradition of raiding and possibly
Judaism. See link
Some European colonials and modern scholars sometimes think of the Tuareg as a single cultural
population, but in reality the the vassal tribes are not Tuareg by origin and originated as clients.
The latter are actually remnants of the first race or generation of Berbers mentioned by Ibn
Khaldun, whose history has been overshadowed by the more glamorized Tuareg and their
mysterious veils.
Much like the Bedja who were romanticized for their independence, seeming fearlessness, pride,
ferocity and for inspiring fear in neighboring tribes and at times for being murderous ruffians, the
Tuareg were rarely thought of as black Africans in the colonial period. At times they were even
noted for having Nordic traits and the blondism found among some of those northern oases was
eagerly pointed out.
The Tuareg were frequently engaged in murderous raids and pillaging as in Roman times, and
probably as in the time of Moses for that matter. Many early explorers had been killed venturing
into their land, so there was a sort of love hate relationship that developed at least in accounts of
the Tuareg. But in the end a kind of adoration had won out and even today they are probably one
of the big attractions of Africa.
A colonialist named Rodd wrote "they are more like Nordic folk in that their limbs and backs
are smooth until exerted, when the muscles stand up hard and tough" (whatever that
means)....further down he says, "Of all their characteristics the one I have most vividly in mind
is their grace of carriage. The men are born to walk and move as kings, they stride along swiftly
and easily, like Princes of the Earth, fearing no man , cringing before none, and consciously
superior to other people" (Clark, Thurston, 2016, numberless pages) And so on and so on.
The author of who cites this passage also speaks of Henry Duveyrier the young Frenchman who
lived with the Tuareg nine months.
"The first and most important proponent of the second part of the schizophrenic European myth
depicting the Tuareg as noble and brave warriors, a beautiful and hospitable people was Henri
Duveyrier. In his book the Tuareg of the North, Duveyrier spoke of the Tuareg's grace, chivalry,
and respect for their women. He even found beauty in their war charge:
'To see a Tuareg war charge is to feel complete and utter fear creep through one's body. Great
serried squadrons of tall, blue-veiled men, mounted on fast white camels crashing forward like a
vast roller. The shrill cries of the warriors, the thrilling sound of the javelins flashing through the
air, and the long lugubrious beat of the tobol [drum] combine to make it one of the most
stunning spectacles to be seen on any battlefield...."

Vassal clans of the Tuareg who were very likely bringers of the name Berber to the Sudan have
come to be named in recent times black Tamashek. But, as Bruce Hall puts it, One suspects
however, that the use of the term for Blacks to refer to low-status members of Tuareg society is,
like the Moors, a largely recent development. (Hall, B., p. 342)
As has been discussed earlier in this blog the Tuareg still retain the names of their ancient
forebearers the Romans knew and fought so often against. The origins of the Tuareg noble clans
or caste is certainly with the with the nomadic Levathes (also written Laguatan or Leuathae and
Ilagwathes) Mauri and Austuriani of the Byzantine era whose groups included the Iforas or
Ifuraces or "Frexus" (Mattingly, D. J., p. 93- 100 ) (See earlier blogposts), who (as also
mentioned previously in our blog) wore the same wrist knives and long robes and used the camel
more than the horse in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.
Nasamone, Marmarica and Syrtica (Sidrata) were used as a synonyms for the Laguatan
(Mattingly, p. 101). The Tuareg clan of Inusamani preserve the old ethnonym of the Nasamones
and their culture. According to the folk historian Finola Holiday Tuareg still practice the ancient
Nasamonian customs.
There are several references in early history, reasonably attributed to the Tuareg. Herodotus
records a party of Nasamons, a Libyan tribe, setting out across the desert and reaching the river
Niger. There is evidence which relates certain customs of this tribe - particularly the method of
preparing flour and the practice of questioning the dead to obtain intelligence of the future - to
the Tuareg of today (Holiday, Finola, op. Cit, p. ).
And, it is also highly unlikely that such people as the Nasamones, Ifuraces, Mezikes, Micateni
and Astrikes and the like were perennial inhabitants of North Africa directly descended from its
palaeolithic inhabitants. Modern Tuareg are biologically or genetically closest to the Beja
according to some studies and to some extent other Ethiopians rather than modern North
Africans that are considered Berbers today. Thus Cavalli-Sforza says the genetic relationship
between Beja and Tuareg "demands explanation" and he asserts, "The Tuareg do not belong to
the Berber North African group, but to that of the Ethiopians..." (Cavalli-Sforza, Luca et. al,
1994, p. 173).
This is not surprising since they are in part derived from the Zaghawa and both share Tuareg and
Beja share unique customs. But early observers also noted strong cultural links of the Tuareg and
Beja to the ancient Sabean or Ethiopic peoples even further east in Horn and in the Yemen,
which may as also mentioned previously, explain the seeming links to the Sabaean and
Phoenician alphabet of their Tifinagh script. The tomb types associated with the Tuareg are
similar to a type called argem or rigem found there in the Horn and in the early Afro-Tihama
culture of Arabia. (see link)
One recent article summarizing a study of Tuareg genes mentions,

The fact that the genetic distances between the Tuareg and Berber/North-western Africans were
larger than that between the Tuareg and Beja, provides a picture of a common origin and
population separation at some point more than 5000 years ago. Interestingly, both people are
also pastoralist and speak Afro-Asiatic languages, even if the Beja language (Bedawi), with its
four dialects, belongs to the Cushitic branch, whereas Tamasheq belongs to the Berber branch"
(Pereira, Luisa et al., 2010, Introduction).
But modern Northwest Africans are not a homogeneous unit and the Berber dialects probably
even less so. Those Berberophone groups obviously more European and Near Eastern than
African are only tangentially connected to the Berber of Andalusia and North Africa mentioned
in the medieval Arabic texts. Coastal North Africans should not be viewed as a group evolved
exclusively from the Berbers of the medieval or ancient period or neolithic periods. And they are
definitely not evolved from the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean. Neither the European
nor the African side of the Mediterranean coast today has much in common cranially or
osteologically with neolithic population of the Mediterranean in North Africa (Brace, Loring,
2005, See Loring Brace's article here ). The latter have more in common with the Eritrean
peoples like the Somali and makers of the protohistoric Capsian culture.
As well the neolithic and bronze age physical remains and material culture of the Maghreb and
Saharan rock art show connections with modern east Africans and people like the nomad Bororo
(Woodabe Fulani).
The conclusion should be that modern North-western coastal Africans are related to early Berber
populations to the extent they are biologically-related to people like the Tuareg and Zaghawa or
Zaghai who were in fact the majority of Berbers spoken of in early Arab texts. It would be
logical to conclude this as several fair-skinned coastal Berber groups like the Ghomara of the
Riff in northern Morocco claim descent from people who were just several centuries ago or until
the 14th century designated or described as blacks in the same region. Abu Shama was one of
the last writers to describe them as blacks in his 13th century Kitab al- Ravdatayn according
to Bernard Lewis's, Islam Religion and Society ( Lewis, B., 1974, p. 217). But, Leo Africanus of
the 16th century even links these Gumeri to the Bardoa of Libya a town occupied by in the
present day by Tibu and Tuareg populations. On the basis of what was written by Luis del
Marmol-Carvajal he considers them one of the Berber peoples and refers to them as the Bardaei
or Berdoa - a name still preserved in the Bardai oasis of Tibesti in Libya (Keane, A., p. 1883, p.
409). The Grenada born Luis del Marmol Carvajal mentions the Bardoa as one of the five great
sections of the Berbers along with the Targa (Tuareg), Lamta, Sanhaja and Guenziga (from
which comes the name Gonzaga).
The Azuagues, are whom Marmol speaks of as the Berbers of the vicinity of Bougie or Beja in
Kabylia.
The Libyan Berdoa or Bardai were considered to have been the Tubu or northern Tubu by some
and Tuareg by others (Barth, H., 1862, p. LXVII). Heinrich Barth believed it was a mistake to
connect the Tubu with the Birdeoa. The former were a group affiliated with the modern Zaghawa
or Azuagha the one time Moors whom Marmol-Carvajal says were descendants of the
peoples that had founded Carthage.
In recent times they have been characteristically linked to either a Berber or Negro ethnicity
depending on the writer. Arthur Keane comments that Leo Africanus transfers to the Berber
(Tuareg) connexion the Gumeri and the Bardaei, who are really Tubus of the Bardai oasis
(Kean, 1894, p. 225). Referring to the Tubus elsewhere he writes this interesting if somewhat
troublesome nomadic race... appears to occupy a dubious ethnological position between
surrounding Hamitic and negro people (Keane, 1883, p. 409).

Women of the Zaghawa or "Azawagh" of Chad were part of the original ancient Berber
population that were considered mixed "hamitic " and Negro" populations by colonialists.
 But, instead of admitting the obvious role of amalgamation or absorption in the formation of
modern Berbers (the process of black African Berber men absorbing foreign and obviously not
very black women), such information has been ignored since the late 20th century or at least
remained relatively obscure, and various orientalist historians have needlessly fabricated myths
of a European origin of Berbers (like the early Ghomara or Gumeri of the Masmuda) that
continue to influence modern historians and anthropologists alike. The case of the Ghomara or
Gumeri of Leo Africanus who were in fact - at the time of the descriptions of writers Abu Shama
and Nasir Khusrau - the largest branch of the black Masmuda of Mauretania Tingintana of a
thousand years ago are a good example of what has happened to the Berbers in histori - and to
the early Arabians.
Some authors had even come to suggest an Irish or Celtic origin for these now whitish Ghomara
and other Berbers along the coast. In an article submitted to the Royal Society of Canada, a
Reverend Dr. Campbell wrote The Berber languages are Celtic. Pegot Ogier and other French
writers agree that the Guanches are Berbers, and also that they may be put down as exclusively
of Celtic origin. A few paragraphs later he writes The Cymric element was strong in the
Berber stock, and goes on to talk about the fine Roman looks of the present Shilluh (Shleuh)
of Zimurh (Zamor).
But, making people that are today more biologically European than Berber into the true
Berbers and all of the darker Berbers into just "Berberophones" and then presuming the first to
be indigenous to North Africa is the reason the origin of the Berbers has remained such an
enigma.
In fact linguist Alexander Militarev in his article "Tamaraq Tuareg in the Canary Islands" (1988)
has shown that the Haggar or Hawara Tuareg probably brought their Berber script to the Canary
Isles possibly around the 7th century AD (Militarev, Alexander, 1988, pp. 195 to 209). There are
strong "Ahaggarisms" in the Gaunche language because of it. Nevertheless, the modern
Gaunches themselves of course have little to do with the Tuareg. Tuareg Influence in the Canary
Isles

More Scholarly Misrepresentation of Africa's Past Among

Other Things
The variety of shades among black Africans was recognized by Arabic and African
observers. Similarly, European writers addressed the difference between the shades of fairness
among Europeans. The noted American inventor and founding father (for the U.S.) Benjamin
Franklin distinguished a variety of tones among the incoming early European immigrants to the
American colonies. It has often been noted that Europeans even used such terms as black for
individuals among them that were darker than the norm. A similar thing was done among black
Africans and affiliated peoples in Arabia. The term white has traditionally been used for
certain black Arab or African people and African Americans of the same complexion. It has also
been the case for a long time that red or white was in different areas used for black Africans
for West African and East African black populations that are not absolutely black as well, but that
is not to be mistaken for the Arabic use of the term red for European or other fair-skinned
people. As mentioned previously in this blog certain Arab-speaking societies, when referring
to skin, an Arabic speaker may use [abyad] (white) as a euphemism for [aswad] (black)
(Allam, J., 2000, p. 78). As well the word meaning white can be used to describe the color of
coal (Boullata, Kamal, 2000, p. 302) .
This usage was customary for complexion where a black complexion with exceptionally clear
or shining caste could be described as abyad and that of black buckwheat as found among
many Sahelian Africans, Fulani, Tuareg, Trarza etc. could be expressed as abyad or bidan. It
finally came to take on a cultural significance as well since many of the latter had obtained
higher status in the Sahel and Sudan.
A fair skin as is characteristic of modern coastal Berbers was described as red under Arab
influence.
Unfortunately, a number of academics having failed to discern or discriminate between the
Arabic influenced uses of such words in Africa and as a result many of the people, i.e. Fulani,
Tuareg, Wangara, or medieval Berbers often called whites in medieval Arabic writings have
been wrongly interpreted as being swarthy Mediterranean people. Meanwhile, the references to
the Berbers and Moors being black or even black as night and ink or pitch black have been
considered either anomalies or exaggerations.
In truth no one in the past would have logically compared the difference in tone that existed
between the color of early Berbers of the medieval period with that of a modern southern and
northern European as is done today. In America as well swarthy Europeans were not confounded
with early Berbers. Benjamin Franklin an English man in American colonies stated the
following:
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly
be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our
Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion... in Europe, the
Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy
Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the
principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were
increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of
Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in
Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase
the sons of Africa by planting them in America where we have so fair an Opportunity by
excluding all blacks and tawnies, of increasing the lovely White and Red?. Benjamin Franklin
English immigrant in America. 1770s.
Fortunately the elitist and apparently very white English dained to let in the swarthy
Germans, the largest immigrant group in America into the colonies thereby becoming as strange
as it may sound honorary whites.
The Berbers would never have been considered swarthy whites in the U.S. because in that day
for Europeans and peoples of the Middle East, a Berber was still a black man of the race of
Ham. He could not have been any more light in tone than the average modern African
American, another people mostly black with some pale among them but frequently deemed
white in Africa today. In fact Berber was another designation for black Africans brought to
America as far as early European Americans were concerned, and thus came about the slave law
which stated the term negro is confined to slave Africans (the ancient Berbers) ... Section 4
Negro Law of South Carolina.
Of course at that time no American academic or European colonialist had yet ventured to
Africa where they could designate and qualify all the biological descendants of Europeans and
Eurasians in North Africa true Berbers and categorize all the lesser modified descendants of
Berbers in North and inner Africa the fake ones or (more usually) descendants of slaves. ; )
Ignorance of the Berber biological affiliations has been perpetuated in academic articles such
as the well-knownBerbers and Blacks, Ibadi Slave Traffic in Eighth Century North Africa by
E. Savage, and more recently in works like "Blacks and Slavery in Morocco" and Black Morocco
by Chouki Hamel. Such treatments have tended to reinforce the European colonial notion that
that there has always been a perennial separation in the region of Maghreb with respect to color
and culture and particularly between presumed Berbers of Eurasiatic or Caucasoid origin and
so-called black Africans.
Something of course similar has been done with ancient Egypt, where Egyptians are
perceived as some darkened white type invaded at various times by black and of course less
civilized Nubians, who trickled in over course of time and modified the population in the south
of a presumed caucasoid Egypt.
Strangely enough, Savage in his article quotes from another scholar about the numerous
Berber women taken as slaves to Iraq mentioned by Ibn Butlan. He wrote that the demand for
North African slaves lay primarily in the east where they were sold for different places in the
markets of the central Islamic lands. The best known were the female slaves, qayna, who
entertained the caliphs themselves. Though the majority of slaves was barely, noticed by history,
an eleventh century writer, Ibn Butlan wrote about the singers that the ideal slave was a Berber
woman... because they were given training in music and literature both in Mecca and Medina
before being sent off to Iraq. Savage goes on to say "they were highly regarded for housework,
sexual relations and childrearing" while Black women were seen as docile, and good wet nurses.
Berbers and Blacks: Ibadi Slave Traffic in 8th Century North Africa
Perhaps Savage hadn't seen the full text of this 11th century Iraqi doctor, Ibn Butlan on the
Berber women. Whatever the case, he hadn't cited the rest of what the text asserted concerning
Berber woman as ideal concubine or he may not have chosen to name his paper Berbers and
Blacks. He would have noticed that Ibn Butlan also flat out states in the same paragraph that
these North African Berber women from the Sanhaja, Masmuda and Kutama confederations
were mostly black with some paler ones among them. ; )
And this as we have said would make them in fact darker than Beja women of Nubia whom
the same Ibn Butlan describes as golden in complexion.
 Berber woman of northern Maghreb

As already mentioned in this blogspot (and more than once) this description of the Berbers
including the Masmuda, Sanhaja and Kutama of the Maghreb was reiterated by numerous later
observers from Syria and Persia up until the 14th century. The list of individuals from the Near
East and Central Asia that described the Berbers' blackness also includes Ibn Kathir of Mamluk,
Syria, the Persian Ibn Qutayba (9th c.), Syrian Abu Shama of Damascus, Nasir Khusrau of
Persia, Ibn Nadim, and Ibn Rakik to name just a few. Not to mention the earlier Byzantines like
Corippus and Procopius.
Nadim of Baghdad writing in the 10th century wrote of the Zanj, Nubians, and Berbers as blacks
a few years before Ibn Butlan also from Iraq spoke of the Zanj, Habesha, and women of the
major Berber tribes of Sanhaja, Kutama and Masmuda as black.
Were the two men not talking of the same Berber people?
Although Ibn Butlan explicitly mentions the Berber concubines as women from the Maghreb
most modern historians have tried to deny the link between Berber confederations of the
Maghreb and those of east Africa and Nubia. Thus in their minds all the other comments on the
Berbers being black must be references to those in Berberia, i.e. Somaliland ( Hamel, C., 2014 )
Hamel's book Black Morocco offers unfortunately the usual example of modern views of
early Berbers in Africa. The author evidently imagines real Berbers were always some enigmatic
fair-skinned African even separate from modern Tuareg, whom he evidently prefers to think of as
Berber-speaking rather than Berbers. Meanwhile the only blacks in North Africa are relegated
to subordinate status and are supposedly represented by the Haratin and various sub-Saharan folk
he calls blacks. Even, Estebanico called the Moor and the black who may very well have
been an Arab - and a pure one at that (being that his name means "little Stephen" or Esteban) is
also implied as being a slave of the Berbers - apparently before he became a Portuguese slave. : (
 Ironically, in support of this mindset he mentions the story of a legendary Masmuda figure, a
Shaykh of the Shaykhsin the Maghreb, called Abu Yi'zza or Moulay Bouazza, who was a Sufi
spiritual leader and healer that once pretended to be a female slave to help out a friend.
Abu Yi'zza was actually a member of the Haskura who were originally a clan of the Sanhaja.
The latter had moved into the Atlas mountains and had been absorbed into the Masmuda people
by the Almohad period (2002, Powers, David S., p. 92).
We see in Hamel's book, Black Morocco, the following:
It is interesting to note that the Sufi figure named Abu Yi'zza (d. 1177) mentioned in this
anecdote, who was from the Masmuda Berber, had a companion who just got married. This
companion informed Abu Yi'zza that his wife asked him for a female slave, but he did not have
the means to get her one. Abu Yi'zza proposed to him that he could take the place of the female
slave. He thought that he could easily pass for a female slave when dressed up like a woman,
because he was black and had no facial hair.
Hamel commenting on this writes,What is revealing in this story is the assumption among
the Masmuda Berber that slavery was associated with black people. But at the same time the
fact that he was an important Sufi figure suggests the opposite as well as spiritual mobility....
For whatever reason or perhaps because Berbers had slaves from the Sudan, Hamel then goes
on to surmise that Berber racial attitudes toward black people could have dated back to before
the Arab conquest, when the Berbers of Sanhaja and Masmuda were forced to leave their
homeland because of external invasions.
Of course, Hamel never exposes what he thinks the Sanhaja and Masmuda people were in
terms of complexion. I'm not certain but perhaps for Hamel as with many North Africans, people
that are black-complexioned are only black when found in a sub-Saharan African context or as
slaves. He failed to see the irony of using the term blacks for people the Berbers despised in
contradistinction to the Berbers who themselves were if we are to believe the historians of that
time black-skinned Africans, albeit of a different culture and origin.
But, the point is the term blacks obviously should have been put into context. Moulay
Bouazza is claimed to have had black skin in the story. He was thus the color of the Masmuda
Berbers he came from. However, the people who have passed down the story of Moulay
Bouazza (Abu Yi'zza) appear for the most part ignorant of this fact.
Ibn Butlan who lived in the same period of Abu Yi'zza was referencing Abu Yi'zzas people
when he spoke of the Berber women being mostly black, but for a few was he not. Those
whose father is Sanhaja and whose origin is Masmuda and who epitomized racial
excellence. The Masmuda that Abu Shama referred to as black-skinned Africans were obviously
Abu Yi'zza's people. But let's see. What would qualify this Sufi Abu Yi'zza to be calledblack-
skinned in tradition? Could it be because he had pretended to be a slave, or was it maybe
because he was a Masmuda, and Sanhaja Berber? Or could it be the 20,000 Masmuda Berbers in
the Fatimid army that Nasir Khusraw mentioned and referred to as black Africans were in
actuality just slaves of the Masmuda?!. Hmmmm ...let us think about this one.
Granted, the racism of Masmuda and other Berbers or Sanhaja towards the inhabitants of
the Sudan probably existed, but it wasn't based on the fact they were black - any more than a
Somali or Tibu despised black Africans they enslaved because of their skin color. Of course the
cultural difference would have been the major factor, but if one is to use the phrase black African
in interpreting disputes between blacks in Africa, an author should have to qualify why one
group should be considered black African and the other not.
 Again, the discrimination or dislike in West Africa between nomadic Peul or Woodabe Fulani
and other blacks would not be analagous or comparable to the kind of color prejudice that exists
now between peoples in places like southern Europe or in the Moroccan rhetoric of anti-
blackness. For, in fact the latter type of racism was directly the outcome of non-black and truly
white-skinned people in the western sense - Europeans, Andalusians (Hispano-Muslims
included) and Middle Eastern peoples - coming in contact with customarily dark brown and
black-complexioned Berbers and Arabs who had first established themselves as aggressors and
colonizers, rather than conquered people.
Referring to the case of Abu Yi'zza Hamel asserts -
This racist anecdote from the Masmuda Berbers is not an isolated example; we find this
attitude among other Berber scholars who thought that biological intermixing with blacks would
contaminate their lineage. For this reason, the Aqit, an important Sanhaja family, migrated from
Masina (presently in Mali), an area whose inhabitants were mainly black Fulani, to Walata (or
Biru, presently in Mauritania.' Seventeenth-century Timbuktu historian Abd ar Rahman as Sa'di
reported: I heard the great scholar jurist Ahmad Baba [] saying that it was only hatred for the
Fulani living in his neighborhood that made him [Muhammad Aqit] move to Biru. He said that
he was absolutely sure he never intermarried with them. But he was afraid that his children
would do so and mix their lineage with them [the Fulani] (El Hamel, 2014, p. 88).
Hamel here mentions the Aqit, a clan closely affiliated with or relatives of the Massufa
Berbers of Walata whom as we have said are the ancestors Tuareg still known by the name
Imesufa and Inusufen (Bernus, S. and Ed., 1972. p. 13). I think most people familiar with
African history are aware pastoralists and settled people have often looked down upon each
other, and were, and for that matter still are in conflict in places. But, the idea that the Imesufa
refused to mix with Fulani because they were black Africans is an inappropriate interpretation.
For one thing, the Fulani were called whites in Massina, like the Sanhaja or Tuareg who
were most likely or for the most part the same color.
Projecting modern attitudes among Moroccans and Europeans on the views of early Berbers
in relation to other dark brown or near black people in Africa can not do anything but confuse
historical matters. Early Berbers in North Africa were generally as dark as other sub-Saharans
(and the Zaghawa, Jarawa and Masmuda may have been among those originally jet black
peoples). Yet, Hamel like Savage, is clearly intent on making a distinction between early Berbers
and sub-Saharans based on an imagined color difference as if the blackness or subjugation of the
latter somehow precluded or made impossible the blackness of the former. Clearly at one time
and not too long ago - that wasn't the case.
In any case many Berbers living in the northern part of the Maghreb like the Sanhaja and
Ketama, i.e. Tuareg, and the Masmuda, and Arabs like the Hassaniyya have become lighter in
complexion over the past half millenium, and the term blacks as used by Hamel and North
Africans in general often appears related to cultural distinction and distain as much as if not more
than the phenotypical distinctions aggravated by Andalusian and then Western European colonial
presence.
Hamel continues projecting modern racial divisions onto early Berber history, clearly
imagining Berbers to have been more like Mediterraneans than like early Berbers. Like many
historians of the Maghreb he appears not to be aware of the biological connection between the
early Sanhaja groups like the Massufa, Jazula and Lamtuna with the Tuareg and Azwagha or
Zawagha and other Zanata and Sanhaja groups with modern Zaghawa. He refers to the Tuareg,
Ibn Khaldun's second race or generation of Berbers ( p. 228), probably a not very modified
people both physically and culturally-speaking over the last 1,000 years as berberophones.

Beriberi or Al-Barabir as Soninke - The First Race of

Berbers of the Arabic and Portuguese Writers

Andreas Massing mentions several variant spellings of Wangara a name originally for Soninke
merchants of Songhai used in the Tarikhs: (es-Sudan, el-Fettach, and Tedzkiret en-Nisian),
including Wakor, Wankori, Ouankori, and Wangarbe. He speaks of the enigma of these people
who are ironically designated in the Tarikhs as blacks from the south, but in other sources e.g.
al-Bakr, al-Idrsi as whites from the North (Massing, p. 297, fn.18).

Soninke or Wangara communities in Africa were originally of the same origin of the Bafur and
Djarawa or Djawara. They were originally people a Nilo-Saharan speech who moving
southward adopted the Mande dialect and absorbed their people.

Africanist Tadeucz Lewicki also noted the tendency of certain Arab and Portuguese authors to
use the name of Barbar or Barabir for the Soninke.

He writes the following:

According to Arab sources of the sixth/twelfth century ( Kitab al Istibsar and al-Zuhri), the
blacks known as the Barbar or Barbara (Arabic plural: Barabir) formed the population of the
Sudanese land of Zafunu, corresponding to present day Diafunu. They counted among the
Djanawa, that is to say the blacks, and also, according to al-Zuhri, lived in the centre of the
desert (probably the deserts and steppes of south-east Mauritania) and in areas in the vicinity of
Ghana and Tadmekka (north of Gao), the inhabitants of which invaded their lands in order to
take slaves. They had their kings and wore animal skins, as was normal for a people partly
composed of nomads. The Barbara believed themselves to be the noblest of the Sudanese peoples
and claimed that the sovereigns of Ghana came from their 'tribe'.
The Barbara would thus appear to be a group of the Soninke. Might not al-Barabir
(Barbara, Barbar) be identified with a black people known as al-Barbar who, so local tradition
has it, formerly inhabited the city of Tichit in south-eastern Mauritania? Some observers identify
this legendary people with a people [sic] of black-skinned agriculturalists referred to as the
Barbaros in the ancient Portuguese chronicles and appearing in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries of the Christian era in the Mauritania Adrar, alongside the 'Azenegues' or Berber
Zenaga (Sanhadja) (Lewicki, Tadeusz, 1988, p. 313).

Gabriel Camps the specialist on archaeological history of the Maghreb proposed in his
Berberes: Aux Marges de'l'Histoire that name Bavares or Bavari was an early form of the name
Barbars (Baadj, Amar S., p. 11). David Goldenberg, one of the West's more trustworthy
historians (in my opinion : ) when it comes to things related to race in the ancient world has
written - Barbares is a variant form of the name Bavares, a people of Mauretania Tingitana
and/or Caesarensis, who possibly appear also under the name Babari. Note the association of
Barbares with Mauretania in the Laterculus Veronensis (Riese, p. 129): 'Item gentes quae in
Mauretania sunt: Mauri [Quinque]gentiani, Mauri Mazices, Mauri Barbares, Mauri
Bacuates...." See pdf of
Rabbinic Knowledge of Black Africa published in 1998 in the Jewish Quarterly, 5. The
mountains of the Bavares were also known as the Grand and Petit Babors, the latter including
Little Kabylia.
According to Lewicki, in fact, Bavares is also thought to be the name of the people that came to
be called the Bafour. According to some traditions Bafour were whites ... belonging to the
Berber group of the Zenata. According to non-Muslim tradition the autochthonous inhabitants of
Adrar Tmar were agriculturalists...The Bafour, might we think, be identified with the Libyan
(Moorish) tribe of the Bavares, active in western part of North Africa in the third to fourth
centuries of the Christian era (Lewicki, Tadeusz, p. 313)
A recent government document in Mauritania sheds some light on the Bafour/Bavari connections
of the Soninke or Wangara. It reads -
From the 3rd to 7th centuries, the migration of Berber tribes from North Africa displaced the
Bafours, the original inhabitants of present-day Mauritania and the ancestors of the Soninke.
Continued Arab-Berber migration drove indigenous black Africans south to the Senegal River or
enslaved them. By 1076, Islamic warrior monks (Almoravid or Al Murabitun) completed the
conquest of southern Mauritania, defeating the ancient Ghana empire. See (2000) Mauritania,
Mineral and Mining Sector Investment and Business Guide, Volume 1, Strategic Business Guide,
p. 19.
Clearly it seems that the Barbares or Soninke of the Sahel and Sudan were the Mauri
Bavares or Babars of Mauritania in what is now Morocco and Algeria possibly pushed down by
the Tuareg "the second race of Berbers" and/or Arab Sulaym/Hilal peoples like the Trarza or
Hassaniya. They were direct ancestors of the black merchants known as Soninke, Sughai
(Isuwaghen or Zawagha) or Wangara who are called whites in early African manuscripts.
The Bafour in fact are considered by some to be the same as the Zenagha or Znaga Berbers who
came to be subject to the Almoravid (Tuareg) nobles. In Mauritania by the 15th century they
were referred to as "tawny and squat" by an slave trader from Venice named Alvice Ca'da Mosto
(Thomas, Hugh, 1997, p. 22). They then fell into low caste status under the Hassaniyya or
Hassan "Moors" (a group formed from the mixture of Arab/Berber peoples) which might explain
how they came to be the first Africans sold out of Lagos to the Portuguese that were brought to
Europe. In Mauritania by the 15th century they were referred to as "tawny and squat" by an
slave trader from Venice named Alvice Ca'da Mosto (Thomas, Hugh, 1997, p. 22).
In 1704 a Willem Bosman of the Dutch West India company describing
the "Gold Coast" wrote -
"Here the Portuguese received a small quantity of gold dust, as well as
some ostrich eggs; and, as Gonalves had always desired, his men also
seized some black Africans, twelve in number, to take back to Portugal
(What a beautiful thing it would be, this commander told his men, 'if we
could capture some of the natives to lay before the face of our Prince').
These people were nearly all Azanaghi, as had been most of
those sold in Lagos in 1444. They seem not to have been carried off to
serve as slavesthough one of them, a woman, was a black slave,
presumably from somewhere in the region of Guinea. They were taken as
exhibits to show Prince Henry, much as Columbus would bring back some
Indians, fifty years later, from his first journey to the Caribbean"
The previous statements give credence to the suggestion by earlier colonial historians that the
Jarawa or Garawan of North Africa were the Wangara or Wakore of the Sudan, and that the name
of Djanawa is in fact derived from the traditional Berber ancestor "Djana". Yves Moderan in Les
Maures et l"Afrique Romain has said they were agriculturalists having some pastoralists, rather
than camel nomads. Dune part, en effet, tous les Zntes ne peuvent tre assimils de grands
nomades chameliers : les plus clbres, les Djarwa, taient, nous lavons vu, des agriculteurs
autant que des pasteurs. The Mauri and Roman Africa link
Of course it is easier to put two and two together when it is realized that the Songhai or Soninke
version of white is not the modern North African or European one.
Nevertheless, not understanding the usage and cultural dimensions of the word white or
abyad in Africa even after much communication with Africans, some historians seem to have
been completely disoriented at the likely entanglement of the enigmatic Bafour/Bavares or
Babars in documents with the ancestors of what today otherwise called black Africans or
"Negroes".
According to Maurice Delafosse the Sanhaja (Tuareg) had pushed their way southward into the
Hodh area of Mauritania founding Aoudoghast. Influenced and confused by the fact the Soninke
considered their ancestors whites he in fact wrote in his African Art the following:

At that distant epoch when they lent themselves to tillage and a sedentary life, the Bagana or
Wagadu and most of the sub-Saharan districts which we unite today under the name of Hodh in
the east and Mauritania in the west, must have been inhabited by the Negroes, more lor less
mixed with Negrillos and white natives of North Africa. These Negroes formed an ensemble,
fairly disparate perhaps in certain aspect, which Moorish traditions generally designate by the
term Bafur; from them have without doubt gone forth by ramification, the Songhoy or Songai
towards the east, the Serers towards the west and towards the centre, a great people called
Gangara (Gangari in the singular) by the Moors, Wangara by Arab authors and writers of
Timbuktu and more recently comprising, as its principal divisions, the Mandinka properly
speaking or the Malinke, the Bambara, and the Jula. It is in this region and among these Bafur,
undoubtedly already ramified, the immigrants of the Semitic race treated in the last chapter
probably settled, as they pass for having colonised particularly the Massina and the Wagadu,
and for having founded the kingdom and the city of Ghana. (Delafosse, M. 2015, numberless
pages)
Delafosse goes on to propose an outlandish-sounding scenario in which
semitic Abyssinians or Beni-Israel whom he calls congeners of the
Carthaginians came into Sudan along with autochthonous white Libyo-
Berbers and influenced the founded the earliest civilization of Ghana. As we
have shown in the previous posts however his statements like many early
colonial-era Africanists have basis in fact in that the early Sughai, Songhai or
Zaghai populations were tied to the otherwise known as Azuagha i.e.,
Zawagha or Zaghawa Berbers (and perhaps the Zaghwe) further east and
north who were in fact called by the Portuguese Malfante the Moors and
founders of Carthage. They are then likely the "Mauri Babares" and Mauri
Bacquates or Berghawata of the early Roman texts. And most of these
Mauri who are the reason the word "Maurus" came to be a synonym for
Niger or black in the Greek and Latin dialects were no more indigenous to
the Maghreb then were the 2nd generation of Berbers (veiled Tuareg).
These Zaghai or "Azanaghi" then are likely the first generation Beriberi
people pushed south by the Tuareg ("second generation") who were the
Moors of the 12th century Itinerarium chronicling the crusades mentioned
previously, and whose very "name meant black" and who were said to have
come up from the scorching south. See link Contemporary Narratives of
King Richard - the Lionheart (Coeur de Lion).Itinerary of Richard I
When Isidore of Seville wrote of the Moors in the 6th century being "black as night" he probably
wasn't exagerrating. This man hails from between the border of modern Mauritania and Senegal.
Such people have very likely been pushed from places further north a remnant of the once
"black African" Masmuda/Zanata clans.

The Baliy portion of the Zaghawa and Bideyat now in Nubia and Sudan by all
accounts had come in remote times from the east from Hadramauti colonies
that established themselves in Abyssinia the "Middle India" of numerous
ancient writers. We have already shown the connection between the Banu
Baliy of Arabia and Bal Qayin or Ka'in two Qudha'a clans that lined the coasts
of the Yemen, Tihama and the Hijaz as smiths clans of the Solaym or Sulaym
(the Roman "Solymi") who appear to have been the Hebrew or Israelitish
smiths called Kenites and "Salmaeans" of the Torah and "Shlamai" of the
Targum Onkolos. Irfan Shahid flat out states the Baliy in Arabia were the
smiths of the Solaym/Solymi. As Moshe Gil stated, "The Kenite, Jethro's tribe,
is identified in the Targum with Bene Salma'a". And just in case one hasn't
recognize the importance of what is being proposed here it should be
remembered Salma "father of Bethlehm" was "son of Caleb" in 1 Chronicles
2:50 of the Torah/Bible. He is made the brother of Othniel in the Talmud, first
judge of Israel.
The part of the Tihama area known as the Wadi Kanauna or valley of the
Kana'ani gave rise to lore about the coming of the Berbers from Canaan as
well as the Biblical references in the Genesis of the Old Testament. (Please
see King Solomon's miners part I, II and III). Those traveling westward over
time kept the myth of their origins in the Yemen alive as well as some of their
Hebraic culture. Clearly many of the Zaghay related peoples in the Maghreb
and Sudan were not just Judaized but - from the tribe of Judah.
The Kanuri who also are referred to as "Beriberi" have descent groups linked
to the Bideyat, Zaghawa and Teda or Tubu (Tibbu-Gor'an) as well
(Wedderburn, Agnes, 1986, p. 74)
Thus, in a sense Delafosse's statements are in agreement with the fact that
the ancient Zaghai or Zaghawa or Baliyy the Balau or Balawi of Nubia,
Abyssinia and Arabia - as they were called- were in fact that group of people
that correspond to the Himyarite Qudha'a or Kudh'a tribes of Djuhayna i.e.
Djana and Qayin or ba'l Kain tradition who certain scholars on Arabia now
identify with the Kenite portion of the "Midianites"(Shahid, Irfan, 1989, 310).
Africanist historian Dierke Lange writes about Canaanite traditions found
across the Sahel mentioned how at the end of the fourteenth century .. the
name Zaghawa in its form Zaghay was once more used in the reports
given by knowledgeable informants from Central Sudan to North Africa
(Lange, D., p. 265)
Today the name Zaghawa, Zawagha or Zauge today is given to the people of
Central Chad, Niger, southern Libya and Sudan who also call themselves
Beri and Beriberi and their language Beri or Barituki (Hopkins and
Levtzion, p. 203). They were related to the Zaghai or Sughay further West.
That is doubtless the reason why according to African historians the names
Barbara and al-Barabir were once attached to the Djanawa or Soninke
(Wangara/Wakore) of Dar Tichitt in early Arab sources and Portuguese
chronicles (See Lewicki, 1988, p. 313)
Such people who once were strung across North Africa came to call
themselves the whites only in the medieval period due to Arabic influence,
but as we have said they were neither indigenous nor autocthones in North
Africa. Nor were they white in the sense the west thinks of. And by Arabic
here we refer to the original black or khudar of the Arabians, like Sulaym
and Hilal occupants of Arabia and the Levant that had moved across North
Africa, and were accustomed to dividing themselves into whites, and
blacks, yellows and greens long before they had conquered the
Syrians, Persians, and Byzantines and others they termed ahmar (red).
Earlier historians acknowledged these connections. The problem in our times
is that most modern academics studying "the Berbers" are not familiar
enough with "black African" history to have paid attention to these
connections. Zaghawa are accepted as black only because they are still a
part of in black Africa and people have not figured out that they are the
Zawagha. Under the name Zawagha or Azouagha in North Africa and Spain,
on the other hand, the same people are somehow imagined as truly white
Berbers more related to the Kabyles than Tubu. Thus, since the goal of a
large number of scholars has been to discover a EuroMediterannean origin of
the Berbers, the idea of early Zaghawa having some Phoenician, "Indian" and
south Arabian origin as mentioned by the medieval Arab and the Andalusians
of Granada is usually assumed to be fantasy, or hogwash so to speak.
As for the Zaghawa, according to specialist Harold MacMichael ..witness is
borne to this connection of the Zaghawa with the Berbers by Ibn Khaldun
(1332-1406) who in speaking of the Tuwarek ('mulethamin - veiled ones)
says they are a section of the Sanhaga Berbers, who include the kindred
tribes of the Lamtuna, Zaghawa, and Lamta, and have frequented the tracts
separating the country of the Berbers from the blacks... However, the word
Ibn Khaldun used "Zanj" is here translated as the blacks and by doing so
the reality that the Zaghawa were also pretty much black is obscured, as
were the other Berbers named.
An Encyclopedia of Islam also reads, The Zaghawa were in part Berber-
speaking (the Sadrata) and were semi-sedentary. They possessed a capital
that was located in the regions of Borkou. The Zawagha were living on the
Tripolitanian Coast " (Abun-Nasr, J., 1987, p. 46). Sadrata is the name for an
either Tuareg or Zaghawa people the latter otherwise called Zawagha
who had named the Gulf of Sidra (the Syrtic Gulf) in modern Libyan coast.
They also had a town named Sidrata, where they lived further south.
As for the city of Sidrata or Sedrata it seems to have been the capital of
the oasis of Wargla between the fourth/tenth and sixth/twelfth centuries B.C.
The name of this city derives from that of the Sadrata Berbers, another
group of which inhabit the Mzab (Peek andYankah, 2004, pp. 59-60).
Historians have been hesitant in connecting the Berber name Zaghawa
with Zawagha. Abun-Nasr and other Arabic-speaking historians more recently
have used the spelling, Zawagha for them. Speaking of the Ibadites he
writes "Khalaf was supported at first by the Zawagha tribe living along the
Tripolitanian coast..." The Ibadites were exclusively Zawagha and Tuareg
(Luwata, Mizrata, Hawwara). The same Berbers that are mentioned in the
article "Berbers and Blacks".
Abun Nasr adds, "Al Bakri says after the foundation of Tahart, groups of the
Lawata, Hawara, Zawagha, Matmata, Zanata, and Miknasa tribes settled in
different localities around it" (Abun-Nasr, 1987, p. 45). These people were
the only so-called Berbers meant by the Arab authors - a combination of
Zaghawa i.e. Zawagha or Beriberi (Tubu = Teda-Daza or Gorane) and Tuareg.
Tahart was the home of the Nafusa Berbers according to Abun-Nasr
although there were many Rustamid Persians settled there as well (p. 48).
After the demise of Tahart in the early part of the tenth century many
Ibadites settled in places like Wargla in Algeria and Ghadamis in Libya. They
were the Tuareg and Wangara or Garawan/Jawara traders (Lydon, Ghislaine,
2009, p. 81)
In speaking of the early Idrisids in Libya another translator from Saudi
Arabia recently wrote Gradually Idris become [sic] popular among Zawagha,
Lawata, Zanata, Sadrota, Meknes and the Ghanaza clans of the Berbers
(Najibabadi, 2001, p. 222).
Africanist historian Dierke Lange writes about how at the end of the
fourteenth century .. the name Zaghawa in its form Zaghay was once
more used in the reports given by knowledgeable informants from Central
Sudan to North Africa (Lange, D., p. 265) As mentioned previously the
name of the kingdom of Sughai or Songhay and its clan of Isuwaghen was
derived from or etymologically related to this name "Zaghay".
The statements give credence to the suggestion by earlier colonial historians
that the Jarawa or Garawan of North Africa were the same people as the
Wa'n'gara or Wakore traders in the Sudan, and that their name of Djanawa is
in fact derived the traditional Zanata Berber ancestor "Djana". Of course, it
is easier to put two and two together when it is realized that the Soninke kind
of white is not a mirror of the modern North African or European one. But
many colonialists apparently prefered to view the significance of the word
white in use among black Africans for themselves as meaning something
connected with Caucasoids.
Today the name Zaghawa, Zawaga or Zauge today is given to the people of
Central Chad, Niger, southern Libya and Sudan who also call themselves
Beri and Beriberi and their language Beri or Barituki (Hopkins and
Levtzion, p. 203). They were related to the Zaghai or Sughay further West
and the Azuaga or Zawagha furthern north. That is the reason why
according to African historians the names Barbara and al-Barabir was
once attached to the peoples called Sughai (Songhai) or Isawaghen, Djanawa
or Soninke (Wangara/Wakore) of Dar Tichitt in early Arab sources and
Portuguese chronicles (See Lewicki, T., 1988, p. 313)
Clearly before the 15th century the term Berber was used exclusively for
ancestors of the people of Soninke Wangara, Wakore/Korowa or Garawan
(possibly Gor'an) origin who were associated with the Sughai, Isuwaghan,
Zaghai or Zaghawa client tribes of the Sanhaja and Zanata, and possibly with
the name of the Ghuerouan (now a nearly white people) of the Masmuda.
At a certain point the Tuareg or confederation of veiled Imoshagh who were
the pre-Islamic Ilaguathes or Luwathes Mauri came to be control a large
portion of the Maghreb. (Luwathes or Ilagwas was the Roman name for the
confederation including the Iforas (Ifuraces or Frexes = the original Ifren,
Ifarik or Afaricani), Inusamani (Nasamones), Imakitan (Micateni) and
Imoshagh (Mauri Mazikes or Mazazeces - an Ethiopian people).
As historian Gsell stated the latter were a people who were met with in the
deserts of Tunisia and Tripolitania that were small in number at the time and
called by the name of "Mezikes" and "Ethiopians" skillful throwers of the
spear. Au Sud de lAfrique [il sagit de lAfrica romaine officielle, cest--dire
de la Tripolitaine et de la Tunisie], stend un dsert trs vaste, qui, dit-on,
est habit sur quelques points par des peuplades barbares peu nombreuses,
appeles Mazices et thiopiens (Gsell, S., 1927, p. 2).
It is in Tunisia that Corippus poetically speaks of how during an officers
meeting the leader Antalus "the Moor " is like "Hades surrounded by 'black
faces' ( nigrae facies) 'a war council of a thousand monsters' lining the 'path
out of Hell'" (Starks, John, 2011, p. 256)
If there are fair-skinned Berbers such as the present occupants of Matmata
and Ait Atta in the Tunisian and Moroccan Souss-Draa region today that fair-
skin could not be due to the early Berber influence. Just as dark skin is not
always the signature of slave identity. The Dra'a had in particular long been
the home of the dark-skinned (black and near black) Sanhaja, Zenata and
Masmuda peoples.
Meanwhile remnants of the Masmuda Berbers in the southern Atlas were also
called Shluh or Chleuh. They were once also well- known black-colored
occupants of the Riff near the coast of Morocco, as much as in the Sous
region. Musa ibn Nusayr had found the Masmuda in the Dra'a region and
allotted 17,000 soldiers to his son. The river Dara is associated with the Wad
Dra'a valley. This is the area where according to William Smith, Pliny once
spoke of the river Daradus or Ethiopis Daratitae (Polyb. ApPlin. Nat.5.1;
Agathem.2.5.) where were the Darae Gaituli andMt. Caphas (Kaphas), 8
degrees to S., from which the Daradas flowed, stretched in a SE. direction far
into the Desert (Smith, W. 1873, p. 179)
An ethnologist of the colonial period wrote
The name of the Daradus river, for which Mr. Migeod can find no modern
equivalent, was undoubtedly first applied to the Draa in the south of
Morocco, the last thing in rivers met with by a coasting explorer coming from
the north till he reached Senegal, the modern boundary between Negro and
non-Negro. The Daradus or Draa was also called the Gir or even Ni-gir. This
name (the origin of our Niger ) was - and is still the local name of a little
stream which rises on the southern slopes of the Atlas not far from the oasis
of Figig.' Johnston goes on to mention that Suetonius Paulinus crossed the
snowy Atlas in 50 A.C., and reached this palm-fringed stream flowing south
into the Sahara Desert, he called it the Ger. (Migeod, F. W. H., and Johnston,
Harry, 1914, p. 424)
The Ghomara population in the Riff region once the largest branch of the
Masmuda, is now almost completely white or nearly European in
appearance. Nevertheless, no Western historian or geneticist has attempted
to explain what happened to the black people so frequently described in the
Riff in Medieval texts and how they went from black to white within the space
of 5-600 years. Instead we are treated to long and frankly irrelevant
discourses and studies on how paleolithic Eurasian genes came to be in
modern coastal Berbers who though they may have Berber genes are in fact
as far as logic and dna studies are concerned closer cogeners of modern
peoples of the Levant and Iberia than they are to the ancient Berbers - like it
or not.
Many modern Ghomara are like the women above indistinguishable from Europeans.
Andalusians are among those of non-Berber origin that have settled in the Riff region of
Morocco. Leo Africanus, an Andalusian himself, claimed the Ghomara of the Masmuda were
related to the Libyan "Birdeoa" or founders and inhabitants of Bardai located today in the Tibesti
region of Chad. (See photo below)
Men of the Tubu surround their chief in the Tibesti region of Chad where were the Birdeoa whom
Leo Africanus links to the "Gumeri" or Ghomara Berbers. Obviously the Ghomara of Leo
Africanus were not the same people biologically as today's Ghomara in Morocco, although the
latter still apparently told Carleton Coon they came originally "from the south".
 I wonder if the directors of the movie "Robin Hood" knew the appropriateness of their choice
to cast actor Morgan Freeman, a man of Tuareg and Isuwaghen Songhai biological origin to play
the Moor. : )

Al-Barabir or the Mauri in Spain

Battle of Spaniards against men dressed or attired in Berber fashion at Puig in Valencia. The
painting dates from the 14th century.
Zanata Berbers of Algeria dressed in their ancient attire perform sacred chants
of the "Ahellil"
"The immigration of Berbers in the eighth through twelfth centuries was so great that they were
soon the majority of the Muslim population. By the end of the tenth century they were already
'the mainstay of the government under the Amirids' and had begun to establish independent
states (Toledo, Badajoz, Malaga, Elvira, Granada, Algericas). By the end of the next century as
we shall see, they already controlled all of Andalus. However the so-called "Arabs" (i.e. Syrians)
generally controlled the government and made significant cultural contributions." p. 45, (1994).
Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain by Norman. Roth

According to the author of The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa and Spain
the biggest of the Berber groups that took part in the 8th century conquest of Spain in the south
of Andalusia were related to the Masmuda or Masamida (Taha, Abdul Wahid, 1988, p. 167).
They were the first of the Berbers to convert to Islam. The so-called southern Masmuda included
the Dukkala, the Haskura, Hintata, Berghawa, and the Haha living in the plain north of the Great
Atlas mountains. To the north of them were the Ghomara of the Riff region. The most
important branches of the Masmuda according to Hussein Mones "were the Ghumara (in the
Tangier region and throughout the Rif) and the Barghawata (Mauri Bacquates) of the Roman era
who ruled the Sebu valley along with the Awraba)" (Mones, 1988, p. 228). It was from the
Tangiers Masmuda or "Moors" of the Moroccan Rif that according to the 8th century Latin
Chronicle ( also called Mozarabic Chronicle of 754) came the Berbers on horseback wearing loin
cloths whose color was so horrifying that even the horses of their enemies were repulsed and
drew back in horror.
 During the end of the 10th century an army of 60,000 Berbers had been raised in Andalusia.
Even leaving out the early Arab and later veiled Berber (Almoravid) element, the Masmuda
group in itself would have reinforced upon the inhabitants of Iberia the already firm belief that
Moors or Mauri were black. They are doubtless among the Berbers referred to when St. Isidore
of Seville wrote that the Mauri were "black as night".
Masmuda were settled by Qurya and Lajdanya in the valley of the River Tagus (Tajo). When
they were threatened by Christians in 874 they moved to Merida and Santarem near the mouth of
this river 78 kilometers north-west of Lisbon in Portugal. Some members of the Masmuda
according to Taha appear to have settled in Lisbon. One group of them settled in the southern
parts of Portugal becoming the rulers of Qulunbira, Colenbiera. They also lived in Qulumriya,
Coimbra ( Taha, p. 173). In this area they traded in salt which constituted the main produce of
this area.
Later the Masmuda founded the Al-Muwahid'un dynasty in 1121 A.D., otherwise known in the
west as the "Almohade dynasty". Ibn Khaldun said the Almohades were made up first and
foremost of the Masmuda.
A number of other tribes of the "Mauri" belonging to the Zenata tribes settled in Al-
Andalus, like the Hawara, Mitghara, Miknasa, Maghrawa, Nafzawa and/or Nafusa, Zawagha,
and Birzal. A huge portion of the Zanata were the Jarawa or Djawara according to Taha, while
one of the more celebrated were known as the Yafren or Banu Ifren. They settled in the south of
Andalusia in places like Algeciras, Sidonia, Seville and Cordoba and within this region in Ronda,
Jaen, and Elvira (Taha, p. 167). It was the largest Berber population in North Africa in the time
of Ibn Khaldun a people whom he and others claimed were doubtless descendants of Canaan son
of Ham and black due to a curse.
Much of where these Africans settled in Spain and Portugal as written here is taken from
Taha's book, The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa and Spain. He says Berbers
tended to settle in rural and in remote areas such as Valencia and with the "Hispano-Muslim"
populations there. Groups of Masmuda came to live in Cordoba and in fahs el-Ballut. Others
lived in Baena 48 kilometres southeast of Cordoba. Prominent families of Masmuda were early
on settled in Guadalajara and Santaver. Some Ghomara of the Masmuda settled in Bengamar,
still situated in the province of Cuenca.
Speaking of Valencia region one writer has asserted, There are numerous specifically Berber
toponyms reflecting the settlement of Sanhaja and Zanata tribal segments but these are
presumably late, referring to population movements in the wake of the Almoravid and Almohad
invasions (Thomas F. Glick . 1992, p. 194).
According to Pierre Guichards, Social History of Muslim Spain the Zanata groups left
their names all over the region of Andalus. The major clans of the Zenata included the Yafran,
Zaghawa or Zawagha, Miknassa, Maghrawa, Hawwara and Nafzawa. It was from the last
Ulhasa clan of the Nafzawa that came the father of famed Tariq bin Ziyad, governor of Maghrib
al Aksa or the western Maghreb and conqueror of Spain.
The towns of "Atzanetas" or Zanatas found in the Levantine province of Spain are thought to
derive from the name of the great tribe of Zanata. Other "place names derived from the name
Zanata are also in Alicante - LAtzeneta And LAtzaneta - in Valencia and Mallorca -LAtzaneta
d'Albaida- -the alquer - as Azenet or Atzenet and Azenet-in Canarrosa districts and Manacor,
respectively,
documented in the thirteenth century"****. The areas of Senija and Soneja, derive from the
rivals in Spain, the confederation of the Sinhaja (Poveda-Sanchez, Angel, 2004, p. 40; Bazzana,
Andre, 1992, p. 27). The town of Santover was a Berbers-stronghold according to Taha.
According to the 12th century Idrisi, Tariq bin Ziyad the Berber was a Zanata, who with his
troops conquered the region later to be known as Old Castile, occupying Astorga, Amaya and
Leon, putting an end to Visigothic rule there. According to Mones, however his army was mainly
composed of men of the Sanhaja (Mones, p. 242).
At Alicante the Zanata branch of the Hawara founded the towns of Lahuara and Alahuar (Taha,
p. 174). The Ulhaca tribe of the Nafzawa branch of Zanata dominated a place called Jatwa
where there is a Nafzies apparently named for the tribe. The town of Santover was a Berber-
stronghold. It had been settled by the Miknasa branch of the Zanata. The tribe was also in
Saragossa and Tortossa as well.
In Africa Zawagha were found next door to the Matghara in Tadla and Fazzaz in Morocco.
The Banu Yafrene or Ifren (modern Kel Iferouan) had come to occupy Ronda, Takurunna,
Moron ,and Seville in Andalusia. They were settled in Jaen and Murcia in Andalusia. Miknassa
were also living in the Ville de los Pedroches to the northwest of Cordoba and in the Saragossa
region where the place name of Mequinensa still recalls its one time inhabitants (Makki, 1992,
p. 56; Ilahiane, Hsain, 2006, p. 87).
Guichard has written the following in his article entitled Social History of Muslim, Spain:
" names of present day towns and large villages, such as Mequinenza in Aragon, Adzaneta in
the Valencia region and Azuagha in the south of the present province of Badajoz, still, for
instance, recall the tribal names Miknasa, Zanata and Zuwagha, of Maghribi origin. There were
undoubtedly many other such cases in the geography of al-Andalus. In fact the geographer al
Istakhri, from the first half of the 4th/10th century, indicates, along the stages of the road from
Cordoba to the Lower Frontier, in regions on the two sides of the Guadiana between the
Guadalquivir and Duero valleys, districts or localities bearing the names of the Miknasa,
Hawwara and Nafza Berber tribes (Guichard, P,. 1992, p. 685).
Large numbers from the Hawwara and Nafza clans of the Zanata were in Teruel in the 11th
century (Taha, p. 175-176). Various tribes were settled in Galicia, Astorga and east of the
Pyrenees (p. 177). Orba in Navarre is named after the Aureba tribe that was settled there.
Another author, citing Guichard, puts it more succinctly, Todays Mequinenza in Aragon,
Azaneta in Valencia and Axuaga in Badajoz are Spanish versions of the Miknasa, Zanata, and
Zuwagha tribes (Fromherz, A. 1992, p. 45). Many other areas in the eastern region of Spain
are still called after Zanata, including Adsaneta de al-Bayd,a Adsaneta de Maestre and Zaneta,
Sanet y Ngrals in Albacete, Gineta and Ginete in Albacete, Azenanat, Ceneta, and Ifre-Yafrun in
the province of Murcia.
In Valencia also relatively numerous place names preserve the memory of settlements by the
Zanata, Sinhaja, Hawwara, etc (Guichard, Pierre, 1992, p. 685).
A great deal of compiled information dealing with where the Berber tribes settled can be
found in the book by Abdulwahid DhanunTaha, entitled The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of
North Africa and Spain. In the town of Algeciras the Zanata had a large region to themselves
called al-Babar. Many of them settled in Sidonia - like the the clan of Maghila. Seville and
nearby regions were occupied by many Berber groups (Taha, p. 168) settled around Seville in
Fuente de Cantos, Shantfila. The Hawwara lived in Marshana, Marchena east of Seville in
considerable numbers and very wealthy. Descendants of Tariq b. Ziyad had settled in Osuna
south of Ecija, where they were similarly rich.
 Zanata groups like the Nafza lived in the valley of the River Guadiana. Others settled in
Barjala and near Merida, where the name Nafza is still found. Miknasa also dwelt in this area
and their place of residence is still in existence in the village, Miknasa (Taha, p. 171). Such
places in Alahuar and Lahuar are named after the tribe of Hawwara. The Nafza dominated the
region of Jativa where they were numerous. There is still a place called Nifzies, after the tribe of
Nafza in that area. Other Zanata lived in the what are now the modern provinces of Valencia,
Murcia and Alicante. One part of Valencia was once called iqlim Zanata.
The Zuwagha clan had its own fort near Badajoz. This place is still called Azuaga after this
clan. Other places in the Badjoz district still bear the names Maguilla, and Gineta named
apparently for the Maghila and Zenata. The Banu Birzal of the Zanata settled in Carmona, Ecija,
Almodovar and other places. (Taha, p. 173). The word jinete coming from the name of the
Zanata means light horseman in Spanish today.

Horsemen of the Zaghawa - once considered a tribe of the Zenata

Another historian says about the Zanata in Africa correctly noted that at one time the Zanata
(or Zanatians) inhabited Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, extending southward as far as Djabal
Nafusa and the oases of Fezzan, the predominant confederations of kabilas being those of the
Hawwara, Luwata, Nafusa, and Zaghawa (Mones, H. 1988, p. 228)
 Some 100 kilometers west of Malaga was the settlement of Masmuda and Nafza in Takarunna
a mountainous area around the city of Ronda originally called Izna Rand Onda which later
came to be ruled by the Zanata tribe of Iforen (Tuareg Ifren). During the time of the Almoravid
and Almohad rule it sprung up as an important Moorish town - Madinat Randa. At least two
famous poets surnamed al-Rundi came from the town.
In the central part of Spain they stretched north of Toledo and Talavera through the valleys of
the River Tajoa towards the south over the Guadiana, where Merida, Medellin and other more
populated areas in the western parts of the Iberian Peninsula were situated. Maghila were also
found in Toledo. : Cordoba was inhabited by Masmuda, Hawwara, Kutama and Maghila.
The Kutama whom some sources consider Sanhaja others Masmuda also settled in Shaqunda,
Secunda, on the left bank of the River Guadalaquivir, 5 kilometers from Cordoba. The most
densely populated area being El Valle de los Pedroches and the Santaver. As well Kutuma was
the most representative of the Berber tribes in the district of Elvira (Taha, p.170). West of
Cordoba were settled some Luwata in a place called iqlim Luwata. Some Sanhaja also dwelt in
Ecija.
In the 11th century The most powerful Berber state, however, was that of the Banu Ziri of the
Sinhaja in Granada Zawi bin Ziri and his Sanhaja followers settled in Elvira and founded the
city of Grenada. According to Ibn Khaldun he belonged to the Matmata still a name used in
Africa for certain Tuareg peoples. The name should not be confused with the people of the
present town of Matmata in Libya. They established the Zirid dynasty which fell only with the
coming of the Almoravid dynasty, and their army which had entered Almeria also took Seville
from the deposed ruler there in the 11th century. Soon afterwards other Andalusian capitals fell
into Almoravid hands (Guichard, 1992, p. 685; Makki, 1992, p. 60 and 63).
As mentioned previously the ancestors of the Tuareg that entered the Iberian peninsula as
members of the Sanhaja included the Tuareg called Inusufen or Massufa, the Auelemidden or
Lamtuna and Lamta, Imakitan or Kitama (or Kutama), and the Igdalen or Goddala. The
Igdalen are a subgroup of the Tuareg in Niger and Mali. These groups of Tuareg depending on
the region can be considered the major portion of the Sanhaja. Sanhaja lived in the provinces of
Castellon, Alicante and Murcia (Taha, p. 174), and in this Castellon region are towns named for
them including Ceneja, Soneja, and Senija in Alicante.
One guidebook of Oriental studies discussing the government and administration of the Middle
East in the Islamic period says the following:
...under the Almoravids there were cadis in Seville, Granada, Almeria, Malaga, Jaen,
Algeciras, Niebla, Carmona, Ronda, Ecija, Preigo, Ubeda, Baeza, Baza, Guadix, and Almunecar
in the south of Andalus; Saragossa, Lerida, Tortosa, Denia, Majorca, Valencia, Murcia, Al
Puente, Santa Maria de Levante ( Albarracin), Valencia, Jativa, Murviedro, Chiprana, Onda,
Alcira, Orihuela, Berja and Almeria in the Levant (Sarq); and Silves and Santa Maria de
Algarve, Beja and some other places in the west of al-Andalus. All these cities were the capital
of a judicial area..." (Vila, Jacinto B., 1988, p.128).
According to Hugh Kennedy's Muslim Spain and Portugal:: A Political History of Al-Andalus
the Almoravid Tuareg men were well-known for their face veils even in Iberia.
They were remarkable too for their veils which they wore like the Touareg of today, so that only
their eyes were visible. It was said that they thought it indecent to expose the mouth and that
none of them would recognise a comrade if they saw them unveiled. The veils, so practical in the
dusty desert conditions, were very noticeable in the streets of Andalusi towns, and the
Almoravids were frequently singled out and described as al-mulathimun, the veiled ones (from
Arabic litham, a veil). (Kennedy, Hugh, 2014 p. 155).

Another of the veiled Tuareg groups were the Gezula or Jazula who are often thought of as
the same people as the Joddala. The latter were the people who in an ancient period was Gaituli
or Melano-Gaituli meaning literally "black partridge" or snake. The Tuareg ancestors are rather
often referred to both in Andalusia and in North Africa as the Philistines in Arab and Hebrew
sources. The Gazula were even called Philistines by a Portuguese traveler who wrote - In the
lands of the blacks, as well as here, dwell the Philistines [the Tuareg], who live like the Arabs in
tents. They are without number and hold sway over the land of Gezola from the borders of Egypt
to the shores of the Ocean... (Duiker, W. and Spielvogel, J., 2010, p. 189).

According to historian Taha the names of the veiled Gazula clan are still traceable in Spanish
place names; for example between Granada and the sea, the massif where the Jazula lived is
called the Sierra de los Gazules (p. 79) There was also a place in the province of Cadiz in Spain
called Gazula.
In the time of the first Arab invasion of Africa some Banu Joddala were also located in
Tiklasiyen or Takrur under the name of Banu Warith or Waritan Sanhaja. And Levtzion says that
in spite of the inter-tribal tension in the desert, thousands of Juddala and Massufa took part in
the military exploits of the Almoravids in the Maghrib and in Spain (Hopkins and Levtzion,
2000, p. 212).
Both the Sanhaja and the Zanata group of Hawwara came to live in Jaen and its
surroundings, and the latter had their own settlement in Jaen. Banu Hibr of Sanhaja dwelt in
Bulkuna south of the road between Cordoba and Jaen (Taha, p. 170).
The Town of Elvira or Illiberis was capital of a kingdom or Taifa of Granada established by
the Sanhaja under the Zirids. The Lamaya another Tuareg group of the Sanhaja took up
residence in Rayya in iqlim Lamaya.
Taha writes, The mountains of Almaden were thickly populated with Berbers. It was an area
rich in mineral resources. Further to the east were the Mistasa a sub-tribe of Wazdaja. Where
they had their own iqlim and region not too far from the present village of Mestanza. To the west
of this was a large region populated by Berbers called bilad al-Barabir, where were the towns of
Medellin and Merida.
They were mainly of Masmuda, Miknasa, Hawwara and Kutama affiliation. Many of the
Hawwara became governors in Medellin where they were wealthy and powerful (Taha, p.
172).
In the east of Andalusia in the Valencia and Murcia regions were mainly Sanhaja, Aureba,
Kutama, Hawwara and Masmuda. One district was called juz Masmuda. Kutama settled in
Albunt, Alpuente. Members of the Auraba settled in Alicante which is now called Orba. In the
northeast stretching over the Pyrenees Mountains as far as the provinces of Guadalajara, and
Teruel lived mainly Berbers except for Saragossa inhabited by clans of Arabs. In Saragossa the
Berber minority consisted of Zuwagha, Sanhaja and Miknasa. Maghila was among the first
Berber tribes to settle in the region of Guadalajara.
Maghila also lived in Muntaniya and Shantabariya, Castro de Santaver. Hawwara took control
of Toledo making it their capital in the 11th century.
 It is actually estimated that a total of over 900,000 Berbers at one time or another had settled
in Iberia during the period of Islamic rule there.

REFT OF THE MOORS : Racial Animosity towards the Berbers during their stay in Spain

Whatever the Berbers called themselves in Africa it is clear that in Spain or Iberia and the
Middle East they were often recognized as blacks, and faced plenty of discrimination in Iberia
because of it. It was in fact noticeable in the 11th century when there was a great rebellion that
was in part racial or ethnic against the Berbers called the fitna al- Andalucia Berberiyya. There
came a time that certain leaders were calling on people to kill the Berbers, and anyone that
looked like them. This reaction occurred because a leader named Al-Mansur who had taken over
the Cordoban caliphate began importing many Berber mercenaries who had become recognized
as a favored class. He brought in many of the Zirid, Hammudid and Sanhaja Berbers (mainly
branches of the Zaghawa or Zaghai and Tuareg peoples) used for military campaigns against the
Christian Europeans of Navarre, Leon and Castille.
Cordoba was filled at the time with a lot of Muslim Spaniards often called Hispano-Muslims
and it had also been a large slave state in the early years. The early slaves in Iberia according to
Thomas Arnold were mostly of Slavonic in origin and the Muslims preferred the mothers of
their children to be those fair-complexioned slaves captured in the north of Spain, rather than,
or in addition to, their own womenfolk Frankish (Afrangi) women too were especially sought
after because of their blond hair. In the earliest periods most of those slaves were largely of
Turkish, Persian, Slavic, French/Frank, Persian and other European origin.
Many of the Muslims of the Cordoban caliphate were descendants of the Slavic slaves. The
9th century Abd-al Rahman of Cordoba had a harem of 6,300 women (Mann, John. 1999, p. 72 )
Abdal Rahman III was said to have been half -Basque himself with red hair which was also
characteristic of the Slavs. There were over 13,000 Slavic slaves in Cordoba in his time. The
Slavs in particular became very numerous after a time in the Cordoba caliphate and became
rulers of various Taifas, along with the Berbers and a few Arab rulers. Some say the Hispano-
Muslim population made up the majority of Muslims in the Andalusian region. But according to
Norman Roth, "The immigration of Berbers in the eighth through twelfth centuries was so great
that they were soon the majority of the Muslim population (Roth, Norman, 1994, p. 45). In
addition one 8th century campaign brought 300,000 captives in from North Africa (Man, John,
1999, p. 72). As a result historians speak of Moorish Spain, a name derived from the fact that
the Berbers were descendants of the Mauri or Moors.
According to historian Peter C. Scales in The Fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba, there was a
racial aspect to the rebellion of Andalusians against the Berbers.
"The fitna in Cordoba between the Berbers and the people flared up. The mob was given free
reign to attack the Berber suburbs. They burnt houses and killed their women about 70 men from
Tlemecen, and others from Khurasan and Egypt. It was presumably in this pogrom that Abd Al
Malik al Muzaffar's old teacher Ahmad bin Abda'l Azziz bin Faraj Ibn al-Hubab, a grammarian
had died. Ibn Bashkuwal tells us that he was a Berber of the Masmuda tribe. It would seem that
the murder of North Africans encouraged by Muhammed al-Mahdi's request to be brought
Berber heads was not restricted to the capital" (Scales, p. 70).
{ In this period the northern Algerian town of Tlemcen in northern Algeria mentioned above
was occupied by the Banu Yifren, Ifren or Iferuan, a major clan of the Zenata Berbers and the
same as the modern Iferouan or Ferwan Tuareg. They were also known as Ait Ifran or Iforaces.
The name Iferouan, an oasis in Niger is named for them, and the Kel Ferouan still reside there in
Air.}
Later we read Ibn abdal Jabbar a Hispano-Muslim ordered any who had a similar
appearance to a Berber to be killed (Scales, p. 74). Ibn al-Raqiq spoke of this racial animosity
that existed in Spain between Berbers and Muslim Hispano-Cordobans, and of Berbers that were
killed because they were looking like Berbers, i.e. blacks.
After the defeat of al-Mahdi at Guadiaro, it is again Ibn al Raqiq whom Ibn al-Idhari uses for
anecdotal references to the punishment metted out to any Berbers by Ibn 'Abd al Jabbar, in
vengeance for his defeat. He ordered any who even had a similar appearance to a Berber to be
killed...We are told of a woman, returning from the oven with a pot, which she dropped thus
attracting attention to herself" (Scales, p. 75).
We are also informed in Scales text of the fate of another Berber man of the Jarawa called
Wangara and Wakore further south in sub-Saharan Africa. There are certainly 2 instances
documented of innocent Maghrebis being caught up in the racial animosity vented by the local
populations in the south of al-Andalus. In Elvira a pilgrim from Ceuta, a certain Khalaf b. Ali b.
Nasir b. Mansur al Balawi al Sabti, was set upon while trying to flee from Elvira as he was
planning to return to Mecca fleeing from the fitna....
"Another Khalaf (b. Masud al-Jarawi) a faqir from Melilla was murdered by the people of
Malaga 'during the Andalusi revolt against the Berbers at the time of the al-Mahdi's uprising.'"
(p. 70 ).
Thus, people of the Djerawa or Djawara tribe (i.e. Garawan or Wangara in Sudan) who were
a great portion of the tribe of Zanata (along with Tuareg Iforas and Maghrawa) were among
those who lost their lives in the uprising.
In fact an al-Qasim b. Hammud a caliph of 1020 AD set out to try and pacify the war-torn
peninsula. Scales adds, He executed those who had abused their positions and sent out a
proclamation, promising protection to all 'whether fair-skinned or dark-skinned' (Scales, P.,
1993, 102).
What happened in Spain may be reminiscent of what happened in time more recent times in
Libya when many fair-skinned Libyans began to attack many black Africans that were actually
autocthonous Berbers who had had the support of the leader Qaddafi.
 Photo of son of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi with the Tuareg (found on-line ; )

It was not long afterwards in 1062 that a group of Tuareg men from the Auelimmiden or
Lamtuna of the Sanhadja took power in Africa including a large part of the Maghreb extending
into the Sudan and brought a number of other Tuareg clans along with their vassal or client
groups and slaves along with them to Andalusia. These men - called Almoravids - invaded Spain,
complete with camel and drums, taking control over the region by 1090 and proceeded to
distribute different portions of it to various tribes akin to themselves. Some of the Sanhaja
received Elvira (in Grenada), the Maghrawa branch of the Zanata received areas north of
Cordoba. The Banu Yafran or Ifren just mentioned received Jaen. Other Zanata received other
fiefs. After this time the Berbers had obtained control over all of Andalusia.
Later came to power a number of leaders from the African or Berber group of Masmuda
forming the dynasty of the Al-Muwahhid'un or Almohades. Ibn Khaldun says during that time
a ruler named Abd'Al-Mumin, a Zanata member of the mostly Masmuda ruled dynasty had hired
a poet (non-Berber) named Abd' al-Ghafar. Al-Mumin's son was in love with the girl that al-
Ghafar was smitten by. He had been working for Abd-al Mumin, but had complained about his
employer in his writings, and finally made the mistake of mockingly insulting Abdal-Mumin's
son saying "What do you see in that black fellow? If you wish, I could buy you ten better ones in
the slave market" (Monroe, James T., 1974, p. 323). The author of Hispano-Arabic Poetry James
Monroe informs, hearing that he was to be imprisoned the poet fled to Malaga" where he was
not long afterwards executed.

To be continued in "THE AFRICAN HIMYARITES"

NOTES
* Tuarek (Tuwarek or Tuareg) people refer to themselve by the name Imoshagh, but for the
purposes of this book we are using it to refer to all veiled Berber nomads as do many Western
observers. They are closely related groups biologically and culturally.

**...who to my recent surprise according to ancestry.com and books on British peerage are many
times over the same individuals I've been referencing in Spain, France and Italy that expelled the
Moors.
And finally to my ex-husband's Kabyle ancestors and grandfather from the Djurjura mountains
who told him his people came in early times from Sicily. His grandfather adopted and groomed
one of the leaders of Algeria's National Liberation Front helping to expell colonialists from their
ancient Kabyle homeland and regain their country's independence.

I thank them all for their guidance and may they be always reconciled and find happiness, peace
and harmony in forthcoming lives. : )

Mohammed Cherif Mesaadiya - a modern Kabyle from Souk Ahras, Algeria (1924-2002)

*** Along with eyewitness accounts, genetic studies on male dna in southern populations have
confirmed the presence of men from early Mauritania with east African lineages in southern
Europe, and in particular Iberia and Sicily.
Another study says the following about North African inhabitants of southern Europe:

We screened more than 2300 South European samples (Figure 1; Table 1) to identify those
haplotypes which are evolutionary close to NW African chromosomes. Total frequencies for these
chromosomes range between 0 and 19% across southern Europe, the highest being in Cantabria
and comprising a sample from the Pas Valley, previously shown to have an extremely high
frequency of the North African haplogroup E1b1b1b. Our estimates of NW African chromosome
frequencies were highest in Iberia and Sicily, in accordance with the long-term Arab rule in
these two areas. Moors and Saracens in Europe: Estimating the North African Male Legacy in
Southern Europe". European Journal of Genetics, June 2009,

**** Translated from the original in Spanish "topnimos derivados del nombre Zanta se
encuentran tambin en Alicante -LAtzeneta y LAtzaneta-, en Valencia -LAtzaneta dAlbaida-
y en Mallorca -las alquer- as Azenet o Atzenet y Azenet-en los distritos de Canarrosa y Manacor,
respectivamente, documentados en el siglo XIII"

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