Auteur: Aures
Date: 2009-03-13 18:03:37
The Influence of Its Geography on the People of the Aures Massif (suite)- Tiqli3in
On peut bien intituler cette deuxième partie de la conférence de M. Hilton-Simpson « Tiqli3in ». Car après avoir abordé sommairement quelques éléments anthropologiques ainsi que " l'habitat naturel " dans les régions de Maafa et de Tilatou, l'auteur consacre ensuite une grande partie de ses analyses aux villages aurèsiens, tiqli3in n wawras: choix du site, fonctions, rôles économique et social, protection, histoire, etc. ( Cf .Note)
Ses conclusions sont très enrichissantes, e.g. d'après lui, Tiqli3in ou les villages aurésiesn sont des "répliques" quasi exactes des forteresses de Jugurta, ou selon ses propres termes, des « descendants directs » de ses forteresses et maisons de trésors.
Pour aboutir à ce constat M. Hilton-Simpson compare la description de Salluste, daté de plus de 2000 ans, avec celle des villages auresiens du siècle dernier. Il corrobore ses dires en donnant des exemples concrets: trois villages sur lesquels la description de cet auteur antique, Salluste, pourrait s'appliquer presque mot par mot, soit le village des Ouled Mansour n Ighusar en Ighzer Amellal, Jellal dans la région d'Adrar n Cecar et celui de Taberdga.
Bonne lecture.
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THE INFLUENCE OF ITS GEOGRAPHY ON THE PEOPLE OF THE AURES MASSIF, ALGERIA (Suite)
-II-
In the belief that in such an environment as I have attempted to describe we should be likely to find the Berber as little altered by the successive waves of conquest which have swept over North Africa as anywhere in Algeria, my wife and I selected the Aures massif as the field for our ethnographical work. Making our base at the little inn of El Qantara on the railway to the south-west of the hills, we undertook each year a series of journeys in the mountains, returning between them to El Qantara to replenish our stores. We travelled light. Accompanied by no servants other than a native mounted orderly, whose services the French authorities have always kindly placed at our disposal, we carried with us sleeping-valises, and but few stores. Relying for accommodation upon the never failing hospitality of the Qaids and the headmen of smaller villages, we found that we could enjoy better opportunities of studying Berber life by actually living in native houses in the villages than if we encamped outside them, opportunities which fully compensated us for the discomforts we often had to face.
Apart from the physical characteristics of the Shawiya, the fair skins and hair and the blue eyes so commonly to be seen among them, and the old Berber tongue which they speak but can no longer write, with neither of which we were directly concerned, the first outstanding difference between a village of the Aures and one of the plains which forced itself upon our notice lay in the construction of its houses. These are built of stone; mud and straw, sun-dried bricks, as used in the desert, are not to be seen in a true Shawiya village, though from east to west across the southern Aures walls built of such bricks, especially in new houses, may be found, showing how the building of the desert has encroached upon the land of the Berbers, advancing up the course of their streams; but this sign of a tide of foreign’ culture has flowed but a very short distance into the hills, having merely lapped around the edges of this island of Berber culture.
A close examination of dwellings in all parts of the Aures has shown that, within the massif, is exemplified every stage in the evolution of the human habitation from the simple unprotected cave to the multi-storied stone-built defensible granary, known as a "qal'a," which is so noticeable a feature of southern Shawiya settlements to this day.
The Shawiya goatherd, often obliged to spend some time away from his village, usually bivouacs beneath a projecting rock or in a cleft in the rocks on a hillside. Should his stay there be of long duration he will be joined by his family and by his friends with their families, the little colony protecting themselves from the mountain winds by erecting a screen of brushwood in the opening of their cave or cleft. Examples of these caves, occupied during a great part of the year, are to be found in the gorge of Tilatu and near Beni Ferra in the south-west of the massif, as well as in many other districts of the hills. In other cases the screen of bushes is replaced by a wall of stones, partly closing the entrance to the cave, as in many dwellings of the Rasira valley, and this walling-up of the entrance has developed until it reaches the stage of the completely walled-in caverns of Ma'afa and the lateral clefts in the cliff-face of Takarbust, in the Ma'afa defile, which, entirely closed by well-built walls on their open side, form snug and weather-proof cave-dwellings in the almost inaccessible face of a cliff.
The cave-dwelling Shawiya, dissatisfied with the irregular shape of the natural back of his home, at some time began to "square" this by means of masonry at the back and sides of his dwelling, as may be seen at Maafa, thus providing himself with a house of which the roof and floor only were of natural rock. Then, when the ledge on which he lived was wide enough to permit of such an extension, he threw forward his outer wall, connecting the top of this wall with his cave by means of a roof of mud supported upon rafters of juniper and laths of twigs. Such dwellings, half-house, half-cave, are to be found inhabited at Tilatu. And so by easy stages throughout the Aures we find the house gradually extending forward from the cave or excavation in a steep hillside until it stands alone on level ground, the typical rectangular Shawiya house of stone.
The finished house, to the somewhat rickety walls of which stability is lent by the insertion of one or more courses of beams resting upon strata of sticks running transversely through the wall, is usually built of untrimmed stones held together with mud, but trimming of the stone is practised in the Bu Zina valley, where houses are better and more regularly built than elsewhere, possibly owing to the neighbourhood of the Roman centres of Lambessa and Timgad beyond the ridge of Mahmel, whence settlers penetrated the Aures and may well have left their mark upon the buildings.
In dwellings too large to be spanned by single branches of the small local juniper (Juniperus phoenicea) the rafters of the roof are supported upon pillars of that wood. The roof, except in certain cases in the south, where Arab influence may have produced some effect, is not surrounded by a parapet, for the Shawiya do not keep their women from the gaze of passers-by, and a parapet would hinder the removal of snow in the higher villages, with consequent damage to the roof. Beyond cooking-pots, a twin-stone quern, a basket slung from the roof to form a cradle, and a loom, the houses contain nothing which can be termed furniture, the family usually sleeping upon a platform of sticks beneath which their domestic animals pass the night
As regards their general condition we can, from a now considerable experience, thoroughly endorse the statement of Leo Africanus which refers to a Berber people of Morocco : "Their houses are very loathsome, being annoied with the stinking smell of their goates . . . neither sawe I euer, to my remembrance, greater swarms of fleas than among this people."
Before examining the continued growth of the house from one to several stories we may digress for a moment to seek the reason for this expansion. In order to protect themselves and their grain from attentions of roving bands from the hungry desert which might be driven by famine to cross the rugged boundaries of the massif in search of plunder, the Shawiya, especially in the southern portion of the Aures, even now construct their villages with a view to defence, almost invariably placing them high upon the angles formed by the junction of tributary ravines with a main valley, sites with which the geography of their country has liberally supplied them.
In describing Jugurtha's stronghold near the " Muluccha" [Muluya] river (on the Algerian-Morocco border) Sallust has been translated as follows : " There rose amid the surrounding plain a rocky mountain, broad enough at the summit for a fort of moderate size, and reaching to an immense height. A single narrow approach was left; all the rest was as precipitous naturally as if labour and design had been employed to form it." And, farther on, "the path used by the garrison was extremely narrow, with a sheer descent on either side."
There are to be found in the Aures today a large number of Shawiya villages to which this description applies with remarkable accuracy.
-At Ulad Mansur upon the eastern lip of the Rasira cañon, the village is built upon the apex of a rocky angle at the junction of two ravines and can be approached by mules by but one track, winding up from the valley below to the single gateway of the village granary or " qal'a "; though pedestrians in single file can follow a precipitous track resembling a flight of rough-hewn steps up the very knife-edge of the spur, this path ending in a shaft through the rock up which the foot passenger must struggle to emerge in the village itself.
-Jellal, beneath the eastern slopes of the Jebel Shershar, is built, as is Ulad Mansur, with the walls of its houses rising flush with the edges of the precipitous promontory, or rather twin promontories, on which it stands; access to the settlement is possible from one side only, and that side defended by the walls of its rearmost houses.
-Taberdga, a few miles to the north of Jellal, crowns the summit of a steep knoll at the junction of three ravines, this knoll being approachable by means of a path following a cleft in the precipitous side of the mountain to which it is joined by an isthmus of rock, no more than yards in width, a cleft so small that the mule rider must lean low over his animal's withers to protect his head from the overhanging rocks, a chasm some 300 feet in depth yawning beneath him at one side. The isthmus itself is spanned by walls and the village gateway, beside which cliffs fall sheer to the ravines below on either hand.
Any one of these three villages, selected merely as examples, would seem to fall in exactly with Sallust's description of a Numidian stronghold of 2000 years ago,
Obviously the restricted area of the apex of a spur could not long stand the increase of population in one-storied huts. Indeed, the very position of the huts built upon the uneven surface of a spur with the floor of one often upon the same level as the roof of its neighbour below it, would naturally lead the Shawiya to transform the terrace-roof of a single apartment into the floor of a building above it by simply increasing the height of their walls. Houses thus built are very common in the southern Aures; in fact, we lived in such an one at Ulad Mansur.
Need for economy of space also doubtless called the attention of the Shawiya to the fact that it was as easy to throw rafters and floors across their narrow lanes as to put roofs upon their houses, so that it was but a step from the construction of two-storied buildings to the multi-storied structure with covered lanes which, with more or less uniform outer walls and approached as a rule by a single gateway, constitutes the qal'a, or defensible granary, which is a feature of so many southern Aures villages today, and which may fairly be supposed to be the direct descendant, probably but little changed, of Jugurtha's "fort of moderate size" or "treasure house " described by Sallust so many centuries ago; a structure preserved in the fastnesses of the Aures that has disappeared from other more accessible regions of Algeria.
The qal'a, the evolution of which from a single-storied hut seems to be clearly attributable to the natural features of its site, is still used as a storehouse, but to a decreasing extent as a dwelling, for the settled conditions prevailing under the French are inducing the Shawiya to build outside the precincts of their village forts and even to descend into the valleys below them.
(à suivre)
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NOTE:
L’article de Thérèse Rivière «L'Habitation Chez les Ouled Abderrahman Chaouïa de l'Aurès» pourrait être une bonne lecture complémentaire à cette partie de la conférence. L’URL de ce dernier sera posté sous peu au message : Livres et articles berbères à télécharger
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