Auteur: Aures
Date: 2010-07-30 15:18:02
The Influence of Its Geography on the People of the Aures Massif (suite)
Tifeswin d yirar n tkurt
Les deux derniers sujets traités lors de cette conférence sont :
- la fête du printemps à Menaa et en Ighzer n Abdi (Description, analyse et origine probable de cette cérémonie de Tifeswin)
- Irar n tkurt dug Awras (une relation directe avec le jeu du lac Triton décrit par l’historien Hérodote)
Bonne lecture
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THE INFLUENCE OF ITS GEOGRAPHY ON THE PEOPLE OF THE AURES MASSIF, ALGERIA (Suite)
-VI-
(Introduction)
It is well known that in parts of Barbary there exist many ceremonies and rites now believed by the natives who perform them to constitute a part of the ritual of Islam, but which in reality are of much greater antiquity. The persistence of these rites seems due to the physical features of the land, for we have it on the authority of Dozy that at the time of the Arab conquest Sidi Oqba ben Nafi, the eastern general, preferred to work upon the superstitions of the hill people in his efforts to introduce his faith among them, rather than to attempt to carry that faith by force of arms into such natural fortresses as, for example, the Aures massif. In such an environment as I have endeavoured to describe, therefore, relics of a former cult may well be expected to survive.
Sir E. A. Wallis Budge tells us that in Egypt a " very important festival was that kept in the spring, on the birthday of Osiris, the son of Isis-Net, which the late Dr. Brugsch identified with the birthday of the spring sun" ( 'Gods of the Egyptians,’ I, 463).
Dr. Budge, recalling that in ancient times Neith of Saïs had been referred to as the " mighty mother," states (' Gods of the Egyptians,' I, 457) that the chief characteristics of her cult must have been those of a local Delta or Libyan goddess of Nature, probably including ceremonies intended to represent the processes of generation and reproduction.
(Tifeswin di Menaa d Ighzer n Abdi )
We may, therefore, regard as a possible survival of her worship the Spring fête still observed by the Shawiya of Menaa and the Abdi valley. On a date at the end of our February (the Shawiya, incidentally, use the Roman names of the months) the women and girls of Mena'a go overnight to the wooded hills north of the village and pass the night in the open, cutting and tying up into faggots firewood from the stunted trees around.
Next morning a crowd of men and boys from the village go out to escort the women home to the music of drum and hautboy and the firing of blank charges from gun and pistol, the women carrying their loads of faggots and giving vent to the long-drawn quivering cry of joy, identical with that of ancient Greece, which, in the opinion of Herodotus, the Libyan women uttered very sweetly.
Each woman brings with her a fresh young shoot of some mountain tree or bush and wears in her head-dress a few blades of young green corn, the boys also carrying some such emblem of budding life as a shoot of pine. Every now and then the procession halts by the wayside to allow the women to lay down their burdens and to watch the antics of one of the young girls who performs a danse du ventre to the strains of the " band."
Upon arrival at the village the women disperse to attire themselves in their best, while the band, with a goodly number of followers, visits first the zawiya of a celebrated maraboutic family, and, after playing before it and at one or two other places in the village, finally takes up a position in an open space on the steep slope among the houses. Here it is rejoined by the women, who sit in a prominent position—but apart from the men—to listen to the drum and hautboy and watch the efforts of youthful danseuses.
Upon the second and third days of the fête similar ceremonial takes place, but the place of honour at the band concert is given to the very young girls, even the smallest of children being brought to the ceremony attired in bright clean garments and masses of silver ornaments borrowed from their relatives.
(Takurt)
Upon each day, in the evening, is played the ancient game of " koora," which is widely played in the spring in many areas of North Africa. This game resembles a primitive hockey, and is played with heavy clubs or branches of juniper, etc., and a stone.
At Menaa the village is divided into two sections, east playing west, but in other villages of the Wad Abdi a game of married versus single is played before large crowds of both sexes. The game is most violent—I have myself rendered first aid to a number of casualties resulting from it —and it not infrequently degenerates into the battle which, even in its milder forms, it resembles (Voy. Note 4 ) . But though this game is played by men and boys (and sometimes by girls in the seclusion of their houses), elsewhere in North Africa, at Menaa, in the Abdi valley and other parts of the Aures, it is played quite openly and before spectators by the women and girls at the feast of the Spring. If scarcely so violent as the " koora " of the men, the game is played with great vigour and spirit by the gentler sex, and there seems little doubt that it is a persistence of some such ritual as that to which Herodotus (iv. 180) refers when he describes the ceremonies of the natives around Lake Tritonis (the modern Shotts of southern Tunis), some 150 miles to the south-east of the Aures massif.
Prof. J. L. Myres has kindly furnished me with the following translation of Herodotus' passage: " The Ausean maidens keep year by year a feast in honour of Athena, whereat their custom is to divide into two parties and struggle against one another with stones and sticks, saying that they are performing their ancestral rites to the deity who was born in that place whom we (Greeks) call Athena. If any of the girls die of their injuries they say that they are not true maidens. Before the signal is given for them to fight they do this in common: they dress up the prettiest girl on each occasion in a Corinthian helmet and full Greek armour, put her in a car, and draw her all round the lake."
That Herodotus uses the word " stones " in the plural is by no means extraordinary, for I have myself often seen several games in progress at the same time in one of the few available level spaces in an Aures village; while the dressing up of a pretty girl by the Auseans may well be @!#$sidered to have survived in the gaily-decked danseuses who perform to-day at the spring feast of the Shawiya.
Other traces of the worship of Neith or Athena thus referred to by Herodotus some twenty-four centuries ago, may be found by careful examination of the customs of the Shawiya within the ramparts of the Aures massif. But the search for such traces, if it is to be made at all, must not long be delayed. The student who would examine in detail the evidence of the conservative influence of the geography of the Aures upon the culture of its Berber inhabitants—a very few items of which evidence I have endeavoured to put forward in this paper—should lose no time in setting to work. Roads open to vehicular traffic are to be laid through the heart of the hills, thus linking their secluded valleys with the outer world, and many Shawiya, leaving for the first time their mountain homes, have served France upon the fields of Flanders and the Argonne, to bring back with them to their villages among the crags more seeds of change and progress than have penetrated to the cultural island of the Aures for untold ages in the past.
(Conclusion)
I cannot conclude this paper without expressing my deep sense of gratitude for the facilities granted us by the French authorities and for the ready assistance and kindly hospitality which we have ever received at the hands of French officers—military and administrative, European and native—during our wanderings in and around the Aures. Without such assistance, for which we have never appealed in vain, we could scarcely have undertaken our researches at all; with it, difficulties vanished and our path became easy and delightful.
(à suivre......... Période de question & discussion )
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Notes et lectures supplémentaires :
1. Les fêtes saisonnières dans l'Aurès (pp. 254 -270 du livre de Mathéa Gaudry)
2. Irar n tkurt (pp. 171-173 du livre de Basset / Nezzal)
3. Voyez aussi l’article de Masqueray ainsi que le « résumé » de Chenouf Ahmed Boudi, relativement aux mêmes fêtes du printemps. Les deux sont reproduits au thème " Amezruy n Ighzer n Abdi." au site du forum amazigh: mondeberbere(point)com
4. Concernant la violence ou les blessures signalées lors de ce jeu, par le conférencier M. Hilton-Simpson , voyez l’article du capitaine Pétignot : « Crimes et délits dans l’Aurès », Revue de la Gendarmerie, 1938, pp. 49-83 (en plus de décrire la fête de tifeswin à Menaa, l’auteur rapporte un décès survenu lors de ce jeu. En fait, il s’agit d’un règlement de compte, d’un crime prémédité, qu'on tenta de passer pour un accident de jeu afin de détourner la justice de la France coloniale. La Tradition orale a conservé plusieurs cas de " ce type d’accident "! Autrement dit, rien n'a changé depuis l'époque de Hérodote: même jeu, même violence! )
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