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Ancient Man and His First Civilizations

North African History

(Excluding Egypt)

 

In many cases, the demographic history of North Africa closely parallels that of the United States: In that Europeans, and in this case Turks also: first colonize, and then the descendants of the colonizers fight a war of liberation from their original homelands, for sole claim to the conquered territories. And as in the Americas, the native populations were massacred, marginalized, impoverished, and relegated to the hinterlands. The difference being that Americans don't claim to be the native and original people. Okay, okay: Yes there are Albinos in the Americas who claim to be "Native Americans": but that's mainly for gain in terms of land theft and such, it is assumed that they don't really believe their own "One drop - maybe" so I'm an Indian lies.

 

 

As we can clearly see, the people European Albinos claim to be "Native" Middle-easterners, are really just Albinos just like themselves, and their Albino Mulattoes. In North Africa it's even more complicated, because not only must the Turks be accounted for, but Also the branches of the Central Asian Albinos who took over Europe: namely the Germanic Visigoth's, Alan's, and Vandals. Then to make it even more complicated, in current times: Albinos from Spain, France, and Italy have RE-invaded North Africa and established Government and societies. {Not counting the latest usurpation of Libya}.

Thus one of the oddities of modern times is found in North Africa: where the Mulattoes, Quadroons, and Octoroons of the White invaders, and even the White invaders themselves: proclaim themselves BERBERS and the INDEGENOUS inhabitants of North AFRICA!!!

To make the ridiculous even more ridiculous; many of these people also practice racial prejudice against Africans IN Africa!

In North Africa, many of these people declare themselves Berber under the banner of "Amazigh" possibly meaning "free people" or "free and noble men" (the word has probably an ancient parallel in the Roman name for some of the Berbers, "Mazices").

 

The Amazigh

 

 

This has apparently so distressed one actual Berber group - the Touareg: that they are now disavowing their Berber heritage, and are instead proclaiming themselves to be ARABS!!

 

Touareg

 

February 4, 2011

Touareg reject allegations of the Congress Amazigh World
(Computer translation of the letter)


Link to letter

From: Mr. Mansour Mohamed Ali Ag Hudyata his capacity as Chairman of the Assembly of Mali called "Youth Society North of the Republic of Mali", rejects the allegations of the World Amazigh Congress, that the Tuareg people are Amazigh.

The Assembly of the Republic of Mali Youth North strongly rejects such nonsense and false stories claimed by Congress Amazigh World through the media that the Tuareg of Mali and Niger, are Amazigh, and stresses that this claim is false is not based on a scientific basis.

And that Mr. Belkacem Lyons specializes in chemistry who viewed this trend shameless does not have any historical background to prove this myth, but proven by all history books, trusted that the Tuareg are of Arab descent, and crafts Targi has to do with Arabic calligraphy, this is the asset Targip known since a long time immemorial, and we believe such stories would fall within the Tuareg of the elements of client-related third-party suspicious.

And thus confirm and strongly that we will not allow the Congress of the World Amazigh has nothing to do with us as an intervention in our affairs and talk about our origins, this we, children of the Tuareg in Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, we are proud Bootanna (Mali and Niger) to which we belong, and our religion, Islam, and declare that our is to achieve security and stability, peace and development in the Sahara for the happiness of our peoples and coexistence with the sons of the tribes of the Sahara, and that this is the position of all the Tuareg, who are struggling to achieve, and to work strenuously for it in every time and place.

Mansour Mohamed Ali Ag Hudyata
President of the General Assembly

(There is no telling what will happen when the Touareg find out that the very SAME type of invader descends people, are in the north and Arabia, also proclaiming themselves to be ARABS).

 

Before going on, let us first investigate another term for Berbers - MOORS!

"Moor" is problematic because of its shifting significance. Isidore of Seville, who died well before Islam came to Iberia, follows Roman usage in referring to northwest Africa as Mauritania (from which maurus/moro is derived) on account, he says, of its inhabitants' blackness. Similarly, the Visigothic chronicler John of Biclaro refers to the inhabitants of pre-Islamic North Africa as Moors (Wolf 1990: 64). The so-called Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, written by a Christian living in al-Andalus under Muslim rule, and the earliest surviving account of the events of 711, speaks of the invading force of Muslims without racial animus as "Arabs and Moors" (Wolf 1990: 131). These texts suggest that early on "Moor" signified "Berber." African origin is clearly marked in this usage. Later documents authored in the Christian kingdoms of Iberia attest to the complete transformation of "Moor" from a term signifying "Berber" into a general term for Muslims living in Iberian territory, lands conquered recently by Chrisitans, and secondarily, for Muslims residing in what was, or was since left of al-Andalus.

For example, the Chronicle of Najera (twelfth-century Leon) refers to Abd al-Rahman I, the Umayyad amir of mid-eighth century al-Andalus, as "King of the Mauri," and to Abd al-Rahman III, the tenth-century Umayyad Caliph, as "the (consummate) Maurus." An elegiac passage from the thirteenth century Primera cronica general (Chapter 559 General Chronicle of Spain) recounts the events of 711 for what is construed as the (temporary) downfall of "Spain" in that year. The text testifies that semantic transformation of "Moor" was not nearly as benign as some readers have assumed: their faces were black as pitch, the handsomest among them was black as a cooking pot, and their eyes blazed like fire; their horses swift as leopards, their horsemen more cruel and hurtful than the wolf that comes at night to the flock of sheep. The vile African people... (Smith 1988: 19) Here the historiography sponsored by Alphonso X of Castile shares a vocabulary developed across the Pyrenees in the early twelfth-century Chanson de Roland, wherein the Saracen Abisme is stigmatized as brutish on account of his race ("In all that host was none more vile than he, With evil vice and crimes he's dyed full deep and black is he as melted pitch to see. Better he loves murder and treachery Than all the gold that is in Galicie..." [Song of Roland, 113; Sayers 1975: 108].

All of the above gives us good examples of how the word "Moor" was used, but not what the word Moor originally meant. Logically, the word Moor could not possibly have meant "Black" because that would make no sense. We know that the original Iberian's (Spain/Portugal) were Black people. We know without a doubt that North Africans (including Egyptians) were Black people. We know that at the earlier times mentioned, the people of the Levant (Phoenicians and others) were purely Black people. Question: If Moor, Maure, and the other words mean "Black", then how would that differentiate anyone from anyone? Obviously Moor meaning "Black" doesn't work. Also it should be obvious that the Berbers didn't call themselves Moors, that is what others called them.

From - Etymological Dictionary of Modern English:

MOOR - "waste ground," Old English mor "morass, swamp," from Proto-Germanic *mora- (cf. Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Dutch meer "swamp," Old High German muor "swamp," also "sea," German Moor "moor," Old Norse mörr "moorland," marr "sea"), perhaps related to mere (n.), or from root *mer- "to die," hence "dead land."

In the languages of the people who called the Berbers Moors: we see a common thread that the word "Moor" relates to a Topographical feature of the Earth - i.e. "Wasteland" "Dead Land" . BEING MINDFUL THAT NORTH AFRICA IS MAINLY DESERT: It would seem that Moor originally meant "People of the North African Wastelands/Deadlands" (Deserts).

 

 
     
 

 

Certainly no Blondes or Mulattoes there;

so let us investigate how this sad and strange state of affairs came to be. But first...

 

 

This is a long historical presentation,

so for those uncomfortable with long reading,

we present this short prologue and the scientific evidence first.

 

The Human Race is split-up into several sections: The original Black Humans and the Albinos of the original Black Humans. In the modern World, humanity is controlled by the Albinos of Dravidian Indian Blacks (Europeans) and the Albinos and Mulattoes of Northeast Asian Mongol Blacks (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc. The Mongol Albinos expanded South into South Asia and the Pacific. The Dravidian Albinos migrated West into Europe, Anatolia (Turkey), North Africa (several times), Arabia: and finally 500 years ago, into the Americas. And in all of those places, modern Albinos have claimed to be the original people, and when those claims are deemed to be toooo ridiculous, their Mulattoes have taken up the bogus claim. This section is about their movements into North Africa: but first, here we present the scientific evidence to back-up what we say regarding North Africa.

 

As we all know, Y-dna haplogroup "R" is the most common

haplogroup of Europe's Albinos, let us now find it's origins.

 

 

 

 

 

Dravidian Man
Dravidian Woman
Central Asian Albino Invader aka Indo-Europeans
Mulatto Indian

 

Source - CIA World Factbook

Notice how the Albinos have used their control over media to perpetuate the false myth that "THEY" are the dominate population in India? Today, the best selling cosmetic product in India is "SKIN BLEACH". This is the Albinos modus all over the World. That is to say, indoctrinate ignorant Natives to want to be like their pigmentless Rulers or former Rulers. Irrespective of the dangers and limitations of being Allergic to the Sun, in a strong Sunlight environment. (The original reason for Dravidian Albinos to leave India and go into Central Asia in the first place).

In the past the Indian Census asked for RACE, CLASS, or CASTE. Now everyone is allowed to be "Classed" as WHITE (Indo-Aryan). Proud people wanting no part of that are allowed to be described by the categories "Scheduled caste (SC)/Scheduled Tribe(ST)".

 

 

The area of the Yamna culture (in Yellow) corresponds to modern Russia and Kazakhstan. These are areas the Albinos settled on their way to Europe.

 

 

The above, plus many successive invasions of Albinos

(you will read about below) resulted in the "Mulatto Soup"

you find in North Africa today - as evidenced by the"Amazigh".

 

Note: the Central Asian Albinos (Dravidian Albinos) reached Europe circa 1,200 B.C. What this study is saying is that the Albinos mixed with the Native Blacks of Africa to form this "New" haplogroup of today, (E-M81).

 

 

 

 

 

PREHISTORY OF CENTRAL NORTH AFRICA

 

 

Early inhabitants of the central Maghrib have left behind significant remains. Early remnants of hominid occupation in North Africa, were found in Ain el Hanech, near Saïda Algeria (ca. 200,000 B.C.). Later, Neanderthal tool makers produced hand axes in the Levalloisian and Mousterian styles (ca. 43,000 B.C.) similar to those in the Levant. According to some sources, North Africa was the site of the highest state of development of Middle Paleolithic flake-tool techniques. Tools of this era, starting about 30,000 B.C., are called Aterian (after the site Bir el Ater, south of Annaba) and are marked by a high standard of workmanship, great variety, and specialization.

 

The cave paintings at Tassili-n-Ajjer

 

 

 

 

 

 

So far so good: at least we know that Whites first showed up AFTER the Tassili N'Ajjer art was created.

 

 

The cave paintings found at Tassili-n-Ajjer, north of Tamanrasset (an oasis city and capital of Tamanrasset Province in southern Algeria, in the Ahaggar Mountains. It is the chief city of the Algerian Tuareg), and at other locations depict vibrant and vivid scenes of everyday life in the central Maghrib (the fertile coastal plain of North Africa, west of Tunisia) between about 8000 B.C. and 4000 B.C. They were executed by a hunting people in the Capsian period (named after the town of Gafsa in Tunisia - it was a Mesolithic culture of the Maghreb, which lasted from about 10,000 to 6,000 B.C.). It was concentrated mainly in modern Tunisia, Algeria and Cyrenaica (part of ancient Libya), with some sites attested in southern Spain to Sicily). These were people of the Neolithic age, who lived in a savanna region teeming with giant buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, animals that no longer exist in the now-desert area.

 

Tamanrasset

 

 

The Tassili N'Ajjer was ranked a World Heritage in 1982 by the UNISCO. The Tassili N'Ajjer is located in the Central Sahara to the southeast of Algeria. It is limited by the Libyan border to the east, and that of Niger in the south. The name Tassili means tray Tamashek (Berber language) and designates a huge sandstone plateau of 350 000 Km2 whose height ranges between 500 and 2200 meters. It includes 10,000 rock art sites and more than 15,000 drawings and etchings , since 6,000 B.C.

 

Tamanrasset

 

The earliest blade industries in North Africa are called Ibero-Maurusian or Oranian (after a site near Oran - northwestern Mediterranean coast of Algeria). The industry appears to have spread throughout the coastal regions of the Maghrib between 15,000 and 10,000 B.C. Between about 9,000 and 5,000 B.C, the Capsian culture began influencing the IberoMaurusian, and after about 3,000 B.C. the remains of just one human type can be found throughout the region. Neolithic civilization (marked by animal domestication and subsistence agriculture) developed in the Saharan and Mediterranean Maghrib between 6,000 and 2,000 B.C. This type of economy, so richly depicted in the Tassili-n-Ajjer cave paintings, predominated in the Maghrib until the classical period.

 

Tamanrasset

 

 

The amalgam of peoples of North Africa coalesced eventually into a distinct native population that came to be called Berbers. Distinguished primarily by cultural and linguistic attributes, the Berbers lacked a written language and hence tended to be overlooked or marginalized in historical accounts. Roman, Greek, Byzantine, and Arab Muslim chroniclers typically depicted the Berbers as "barbaric" enemies, troublesome nomads, or ignorant peasants. They were, however, to play a major role in the area's history.

 

Tamanrasset

 

 

Like all Blacks in their native innocence: The Tamanrassetites take everyone and everything at face value. They are unconcerned that their ancestral lands are ruled by the descendants of the invading conquers of their lands, and killers of their people. They see only the good in everyone and everything.

 

 

 

 

Obama Rally

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just as there is always ancient Black art, there are always degenerate White people who will create fake artifacts so as to make the claim that White people were a part of the ancient population. This is of course impossible, except for parts of Central Asia, but that fact has never stopped Whites from pursuing the fantasy. Such a person is the Frenchman Henri Lhote.

In 1933, a French soldier remembered as "Lieutenant Brenans" ventured into a deep wadi in the Tassili-n-ajjer plateau and discovered the rock art. Lhote, a pupil of "the great expert on prehistoric cave art in France" Abbe Breuil, was in Algeria at the time and heard about the discovery. He met the soldier at Djanet, learned all he could, then and mounted an expedition to investigate it. Working with the support of the Musée de l'Homme, Lhote and his associates discovered about 800 paintings, many of which he later made images of with the aid of painters and photographers. These images were presented in 1957 and 1958 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and were, in the opinion of André Malraux. "one of the most defining exhibitions of the mid-century".

After thoroughly exploring and uncovering many more images, Lhote publicized the hypothesis that the humanoid drawings represented space aliens. In The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The story of the prehistoric rock-paintings of the Sahara (first published in France in 1958 and in London in 1959), Lhote called one particularly large and "curious figure" as "Jabbaren" and described him as the "great Martian god." The popular press gave much attention to Lhote's hypothesis of a prehistoric close encounter and it was later incorporated into the '"sensationalist claims" made by Erich von Däniken that ancient extraterrestrial astronauts visited prehistoric Earth.

 

 

Some of the rock art faked by Henri Lhote

 

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica a "vivid dance scene" that Lhote discovered in 1956 can be attributed on stylistic grounds to Neolithic hunters that lived in the Sahara circa 6000 to 4000 B.C. Mainstream scientists regard the "great Martian god" and other rock art figures that are similar to it as representations of ordinary humans in ritual masks and costumes rather than the representations of extraterrestrial lifeforms. The value of Lhote's scholarship was also challenged by The Journal of North African Studies, an academic journal affiliated with the University of East Anglia:

Many of the claims of the expedition's leader, Henri Lhote, were misleading, a number of the paintings were faked, and the copying process was fraught with errors. The 'discovery' can only be understood within the political and cultural context of the time, namely the Algerian Revolution, France's attempt to partition Algeria, and the prevailing views of the Abbé Breuil, the arch-advocate of foreign influence in African rock art. The expedition's methods caused extensive damage to the rock art while the accompanying looting of cultural objects effectively sterilized the archaeological landscape. Any restitution process must necessarily include a full recognition of what was done and the inappropriateness of the values.

 

 

Fake artifacts made to look like White people are NOT harmless!

The racist fake artwork of the South African painter Winifred Brunton, created in the early 20th century, fueled the myth of White Egyptians. Winifred Brunton was there, she saw first-hand what the ancient Egyptians actually looked like. But seeking to benefit monetarily from the yearnings of Whites to have an ancient history, she cynically created fake artwork of White Egyptians to satisfy their need. Even today, many ignorant Whites still believe that ancient Egyptians were White people.

Winifred Brunton (1880 - 1959) was a painter and the daughter of Charles Newberry (1841-1922) who immigrated to South Africa in 1864, and became a major sharholder in Cecil Rhodes Central Mining Company, which later became De Beers. She was also the South African wife of British Egyptologist Guy Brunton, who excavated at Lahun with Sir Flinders Petrie, as well as at other sites later in his career. Later, Guy Brunton served as Assistant Keeper of the Cairo Museum in 1931.

Winifred illustrated many of the objects in her husband's excavation reports, including items from the Tomb of Tutankhaman discovered by Howard Carter. Most Egyptian enthusiasts will be familiar with her artwork that, relative to Egypt, mostly consists of portraits. Her work was carried out in the early part of the 20th century and published as illustrations in two volumes consisting of Kings and Queens of Ancient Egypt (1926) and Great Ones of Ancient Egypt (1929). Today these books are highly collectable.

 

Examples of Winifred Brunton's racist and false handiwork

 

King Tutankhamen (Tut)
 
King Tut's wife Queen Ankhesenamen
King Horemheb's wife Queen Mutnedjmet
  Queen Nefertiti
King Pepi I
Queen Hatshepsut
Queen of Teta?
King Tuthmosis III
      Queen Tye
King Seti I
Queen Tetisheri

 

 

 

 

 

For Comparison:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TUNISIA

Carthage and the Berbers

Phoenician traders arrived on the North African coast around 900 B.C. and established Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) around 800 B.C. By the sixth century B.C, a Phoenician presence existed at Tipasa (east of Cherchell in Algeria). From their principal center of power at Carthage, the Carthaginians expanded and established small settlements (called emporia in Greek) along the North African coast; these settlements eventually served as market towns as well as anchorages. Hippo Regius (modern Annaba) and Rusicade (modern Skikda) are among the towns of Carthaginian origin on the coast of present-day Algeria.

 

 

As Carthaginian power grew, its impact on the indigenous population increased dramatically. Berber civilization was already at a stage in which agriculture, manufacturing, trade, and political organization supported several states. Trade links between Carthage and the Berbers in the interior grew, but territorial expansion also resulted in the enslavement or military recruitment of some Berbers and in the extraction of tribute from others. By the early fourth century B.C., Berbers formed the single largest element of the Carthaginian army. In the Revolt of the Mercenaries, Berber soldiers rebelled from 241 to 238 B.C. after being unpaid following the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War. They succeeded in obtaining control of much of Carthage's North African territory, and they minted coins bearing the name Libyan, used in Greek to describe natives of North Africa. The Carthaginian state declined because of successive defeats by the Romans in the Punic Wars.

 

 

 

The Third Punic War

In the spring of 146 B.C. Roman General Scipio Aemilianus launched his final assault. On the seventh day Carthage surrendered wholesale, 50,000 men, women, and children giving themselves up to slavery. Scipio rewarded his men with time to plunder the city at their leisure. That done, the remainder of the city was set ablaze and burned for ten days. Rome decreed that no house should be built nor crop planted there. But a hundred and two years later, the city was refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 B.C, and became the capital of the enlarged province of Africa. By the second century A.D, Carthage had become the largest city in the west after Rome. The "New" Roman Carthage became first a famous educational centre, especially for law and rhetoric, and then a focus for Christianity in the west, especially in the time of Tertullian and Cyprian (second and third centuries A.D.). Carthage fell to the Vandals in 439 A.D, and became the capital of their king Gaiseric, but after the victory of Belisarius (Byzantine general) in 533, it remained loyal to the Roman empire in the east, until the Arab conquest at the end of the seventh century, when it was destroyed a second time in 698 A.D.

 

Please note: Phoenician Carthage was completely DESTROYED! Often White historians will show statues from ROMAN Carthage, to suggest that Phoenicians were White people. Click here for the history of Carthage and Hannibal: Click >>>

 

As Carthaginian power waned, the influence of Berber leaders in the hinterland grew. By the second century B.C, several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. Two of them were established in Numidia, behind the coastal areas controlled by Carthage. West of Numidia lay Mauretania, which extended across the Moulouya River in Morocco to the Atlantic Ocean. The high point of Berber civilization, unequaled until the coming of the Almohads and Almoravids more than a millennium later, was reached during the reign of Masinissa in the second century B.C. After Masinissa's death in 148 B.C, the Berber kingdoms were divided and reunited several times. Masinissa's line survived until A.D. 24, when the remaining Berber territory was annexed to the Roman Empire.

 

Please note: Henri Lhote's creation of fake rock art, in order to claim an ancient White presence in North Africa, was not new or unique. Whites create fake artifacts in order to claim a White presence in ALL ancient Black cultures and civilizations. Sometimes instead of actually creating a fake White artifact, they simply misidentify artifacts from a later time, when the Black people are under White hegemony, and claim those artifacts to be from the original Black people. Consequently there is no end, to the number of coins with White faces, claiming to be Berber coins.

 

 

 

LIBYA

 

The Wan Muhuggiag Mummy (the Black Mummy of Muhuggiag)

 

The term (the "Black" mummy) is derived from the fact that the mummified child is a Black African, but was found in times (1958) when the Albino people claimed that the Albinos and Mulattoes of North Africa were indigenous peoples (The Mediterranean Race). Thus making the finding of a Black child there "unique" in the rather warped world of their fantasized reality. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but in their delusional state, they actually considered finding a Black child in Africa, unusual).

 

 

The Mummy is of a small child, discovered in a small cave in Wan Muhuggiag, in the Acacus massif (Tadrart Acacus), Fezzan, Libya, by Professor Fabrizio Mori in 1958. The mummy is currently on display at the Assaraya Alhamra Museum (gallery 4) in Tripoli.

The cave showed signs of being occupied at different periods, and its walls were painted with images of people, animals, cattle, and scratched with graffiti. As the cave's floor was sandy and soft to dig, not far from the surface Mori found what appeared to be a strange bundle of some sort. Upon careful investigation it turned out to be of a mummy of a child carefully wrapped in a goatskin, with its entrails replaced by wild herbs, probably to aid preservation.

The child is thought to have been 3 years old at the time of death. Using radiocarbon 14 method, the mummy was thought to be between 5,400 and 5,600 years old, which makes it much older than any of the mummies found in (neighboring) ancient Egypt. It was believed that the makers of the mummy were cattle herders, who occupied much of North Africa, at a time when the Sahara was a savannah. Later research showed that the mummy was placed in a fetal position, embalmed, covered with antelope skin, and wrapped with leaves.

Archaeological finds at the site indicate that it was occupied by humans at different times. The most recent layer contained stone tools, such as querns, and a horned cattle skull, probably as an emblem of the sun; while the oldest layer contained stone slabs, typically used during that period for burial.

Periods: 5400 years ago, 7850 years ago, 7600 years ago.

 

 

 

Cyrenaica and the Greeks

THE FIRST WHITES IN AFRICA

 

Like the Phoenicians, Minoan and Greek seafarers had for centuries probed the North African coast, which at the nearest point, lay 300 kilometers/186 miles, from Crete. The Greek historian Herodotus, is the only source for the history of the founding of Cyrene Libya, and even his account, he freely admits is hearsay.

The Persian Wars by Herodotus, Written circa 440 B.C.

Translated by George Rawlinson

Book 4 - MELPOMENE

[4.143] Darius, having passed through Thrace, reached Sestos in the Chersonese, whence he crossed by the help of his fleet into Asia, leaving a Persian, named Megabazus, commander on the European side. This was the man on whom Darius once conferred special honour by a compliment which he paid him before all the Persians. was about to eat some pomegranates, and had opened the first, when his brother Artabanus asked him "what he would like to have in as great plenty as the seeds of the pomegranate?" Darius answered - "Had I as many men like Megabazus as there are seeds here, it would please me better than to be lord of Greece." Such was the compliment wherewith Darius honoured the general to whom at this time he gave the command of the troops left in Europe, amounting in all to some eighty thousand men.

[4.144] This same Megabazus got himself an undying remembrance among the Hellespontians, by a certain speech which he made. It came to his knowledge, while he was staying at Byzantium, that the Chalcedonians made their settlement seventeen years earlier than the Byzantines. "Then," said he, "the Chalcedonians must at that time have been labouring under blindness - otherwise, when so far more excellent a site was open to them, they would never have chosen one so greatly inferior." Megabazus now, having been appointed to take the command upon the Hellespont, employed himself in the reduction of all those states which had not of their own accord joined the Medes.

[4.145] About this very time another great expedition was undertaken against Libya, on a pretext which I will relate when I have premised certain particulars. The descendants of the Argonauts in the third generation, driven out of Lemnos by the Pelasgi who carried off the Athenian women from Brauron, took ship and went to Lacedaemon, where, seating themselves on Mount Taygetum, they proceeded to kindle their fires. The Lacedaemonians, seeing this, sent a herald to inquire of them "who they were, and from what region they had come"; whereupon they made answer, "that they were Minyae, sons of the heroes by whom the ship Argo was manned; for these persons had stayed awhile in Lemnos, and had there become their progenitors."

On hearing this account of their descent, the Lacedaemonians sent to them a second time, and asked "what was their object in coming to Lacedaemon, and there kindling their fires?" They answered, "that, driven from their own land by the Pelasgi, they had come, as was most reasonable, to their fathers; and their wish was to dwell with them in their country, partake their privileges, and obtain allotments of land. It seemed good to the Lacedaemonians to receive the Minyae among them on their own terms; to assign them lands, and enrol them in their tribes. What chiefly moved them to this was the consideration that the sons of Tyndarus had sailed on board the Argo. The Minyae, on their part, forthwith married Spartan wives, and gave the wives, whom they had married in Lemnos, to Spartan husbands.

[4.146] However, before much time had elapsed, the Minyae began to wax wanton, demanded to share the throne, and committed other impieties: whereupon the Lacedaemonians passed on them sentence of death, and, seizing them, cast them into prison. Now the Lacedaemonians never put criminals to death in the daytime, but always at night. When the Minyae, accordingly, were about to suffer, their wives, who were not only citizens, but daughters of the chief men among the Spartans, entreated to be allowed to enter the prison, and have some talk with their lords; and the Spartans, not expecting any fraud from such a quarter, granted their request. The women entered the prison. gave their own clothes to their husbands, and received theirs in exchange: after which the Minyae, dressed in their wives' garments, and thus passing for women, went forth. Having effected their escape in this manner, they seated themselves once more upon Taygetum.own land

[4.147] It happened that at this very time Theras, son of Autesion (whose father Tisamenus was the son of Thersander, and grandson of Polynices), was about to lead out a colony from Lacedaemon This Theras, by birth a Cadmeian, was uncle on the mother's side to the two sons of Aristodemus, Procles and Eurysthenes, and, during their infancy, administered in their right the royal power. When his nephews, however, on attaining to man's estate, took the government, Theras, who could not bear to be under the authority of others after he had wielded authority so long himself, resolved to leave Sparta and cross the sea to join his kindred. There were in the island now called Thera, but at that time Calliste, certain descendants of Membliarus, the son of Poeciles, a Phoenician. (For Cadmus, the son of Agenor, when he was sailing in search of Europe, made a landing on this island; and, either because the country pleased him, or because he had a purpose in so doing, left there a number of Phoenicians, and with them his own kinsman Membliarus. Calliste had been inhabited by this race for eight generations of men, before the arrival of Theras from Lacedaemon.)

Thera = Santorini - Islands in the southern Aegean Sea, 68 miles north of Crete.
Lacedaemon = Sparta - A city-state in ancient Greece
Cadmeian - From Cadmus or Kadmos, in Greek, Roman and Phoenician mythologies, was a Phoenician prince, the son of king Agenor and queen Telephassa of Tyre and the brother of Phoenix, Cilix and Europa. Cadmus founded the Greek city of Thebes, the acropolis of which was originally named Cadmeia in his honor.

[4.148] Theras now, having with him a certain number of men from each of the tribes, was setting forth on his expedition hitherward. Far from intending to drive out the former inhabitants, he regarded them as his near kin, and meant to settle among them. It happened that just at this time the Minyae, having escaped from their prison, had taken up their station upon Mount Taygetum; and the Lacedaemonians, wishing to destroy them, were considering what was best to be done, when Theras begged their lives, undertaking to remove them from the territory. His prayer being granted, he took ship, and sailed, with three triaconters, to join the descendants of Membliarus. He was not, however, accompanied by all the Minyae, but only by some few of them. The greater number fled to the land of the Paroreats and Caucons, whom they drove out, themselves occupying the region in six bodies, by which were afterwards built the towns of Lepreum, Macistus, Phryxae, Pyrgus, Epium, and Nudium; whereof the greater part were in my day demolished by the Eleans.

[4.149] The island was called Thera after the name of its founder. This same Theras had a son, who refused to cross the sea with him; Theras therefore left him behind, "a sheep," as he said, "among wolves." From this speech his son came to be called Oeolycus, a name which afterwards grew to be the only one by which he was known. This Oeolycus was the father of Aegeus, from whom sprang the Aegidae, a great tribe in Sparta. The men of this tribe lost at one time all their children, whereupon they were bidden by an oracle to build a temple to the furies of Laius and Oedipus; they complied, and the mortality ceased. The same thing happened in Thera to the descendants of these men.

[4.150] Thus far the history is delivered without variation both by the Theraeans and the Lacedaemonians; but from this point we have only the Theraean narrative. Grinus (they say), the son of Aesanius, a descendant of Theras, and king of the island of Thera, went to Delphi to offer a hecatomb on behalf of his native city. He was accompanied by a large number of the citizens, and among the rest by Battus, the son of Polymnestus, who belonged to the Minyan family of the Euphemidae. On Grinus consulting the oracle about sundry matters, the Pythoness gave him for answer, "that he should found a city in Libya." Grinus replied to this: "I, O king! am too far advanced in years, and too inactive, for such a work. Bid one of these youngsters undertake it." As he spoke, he pointed towards Battus; and thus the matter rested for that time. When the embassy returned to Thera, small account was taken of the oracle by the Theraeans, as they were quite ignorant where Libya was, and were not so venturesome as to send out a colony in the dark.

{The Minyans and the Pelasgians were the original Black inhabitants of Greece}.

[4.151] Seven years passed from the utterance of the oracle, and not a drop of rain fell in Thera: all the trees in the island, except one, were killed with the drought. The Theraeans upon this sent to Delphi, and were reminded reproachfully that they had never colonised Libya. So, as there was no help for it, they sent messengers to Crete, to inquire whether any of the Cretans, or of the strangers sojourning among them, had ever travelled as far as Libya: and these messengers of theirs, in their wanderings about the island, among other places visited Itanus, where they fell in with a man, whose name was Corobius, a dealer in purple. In answer to their inquiries, he told them that contrary winds had once carried him to Libya, where he had gone ashore on a certain island which was named Platea. So they hired this man's services, and took him back with them to Thera. A few persons then sailed from Thera to reconnoitre. Guided by Corobius to the island of Platea, they left him there with provisions for a certain number of months, and returned home with all speed to give their countrymen an account of the island.

[4.152] During their absence, which was prolonged beyond the time that had been agreed upon, Corobius provisions failed him. He was relieved, however, after a while by a Samian vessel, under the command of a man named Colaeus, which, on its way to Egypt, was forced to put in at Platea. The crew, informed by Corobius of all the circumstances, left him sufficient food for a year. They themselves quitted the island; and, anxious to reach Egypt, made sail in that direction, but were carried out of their course by a gale of wind from the east. The storm not abating, they were driven past the Pillars of Hercules, and at last, by some special guiding providence, reached Tartessus.

This trading town was in those days a virgin port, unfrequented by the merchants. The Samians, in consequence, made by the return voyage a profit greater than any Greeks before their day, excepting Sostratus, son of Laodamas, an Eginetan, with whom no one else can compare. From the tenth part of their gains, amounting to six talents, the Samians made a brazen vessel, in shape like an Argive wine-bowl, adorned with the heads of griffins standing out in high relief. This bowl, supported by three kneeling colossal figures in bronze, of the height of seven cubits, was placed as an offering in the temple of Juno at Samos. The aid given to Corobius was the original cause of that close friendship which afterwards united the Cyrenaeans and Theraeans with the Samians.

[4.153] The Theraeans who had left Corobius at Platea, when they reached Thera, told their countrymen that they had colonised an island on the coast of Libya. They of Thera, upon this, resolved that men should be sent to join the colony from each of their seven districts, and that the brothers in every family should draw lots to determine who were to go. Battus was chosen to be king and leader of the colony. So these men departed for Platea on board of two penteconters.

[4.154] Such is the account which the Theraeans give. In the sequel of the history their accounts tally with those of the people of Cyrene; but in what they relate of Battus these two nations differ most widely. The following is the Cyrenaic story. There was once a king named Etearchus, who ruled over Axus, a city in Crete, and had a daughter named Phronima. This girl's mother having died, Etearchus married a second wife; who no sooner took up her abode in his house than she proved a true step-mother to poor Phronima, always vexing her, and contriving against her every sort of mischief. At last she taxed her with light conduct; and Etearchus, persuaded by his wife that the charge was true, bethought himself of a most barbarous mode of punishment.

There was a certain Theraean, named Themison, a merchant, living at Axus. This man Etearchus invited to be his friend and guest, and then induced him to swear that he would do him any service he might require. No sooner had he given the promise, than the king fetched Phronima, and, delivering her into his hands, told him to carry her away and throw her into the sea. Hereupon Themison, full of indignation at the fraud whereby his oath had been procured, dissolved forthwith the friendship, and, taking the girl with him, sailed away from Crete. Having reached the open main, to acquit himself of the obligation under which he was laid by his oath to Etearchus, he fastened ropes about the damsel, and, letting her down into the sea, drew her up again, and so made sail for Thera.

[4.155] At Thera, Polymnestus, one of the chief citizens of the place, took Phronima to be his concubine. The fruit of this union was a son, who stammered and had a lisp in his speech. According to the Cyrenaeans and Theraeans the name given to the boy was Battus: in my opinion, however, he was called at the first something else, and only got the name of Battus after his arrival in Libya, assuming it either in consequence of the words addressed to him by the Delphian oracle, or on account of the office which he held. For, in the Libyan tongue, the word "Battus" means "a king." And this, I think, was the reason the Pythoness addressed him as she did: she he was to be a king in Libya, and so she used the Libyan word in speaking to him. For after he had grown to man's estate, he made a journey to Delphi, to consult the oracle about his voice; when, upon his putting his question, the Pythoness thus replied to him:-

Battus, thou camest to ask of thy voice; but Phoebus Apollo
Bids thee establish a city in Libya, abounding in fleeces;

which was as if she had said in her own tongue, "King, thou camest to ask of thy voice." Then he replied, "Mighty lord, I did indeed come hither to consult thee about my voice, but thou speakest to me of quite other matters, bidding me colonise Libya - an impossible thing! what power have I? what followers?" Thus he spake, but he did not persuade the Pythoness to give him any other response; so, when he found that she persisted in her former answer, he left her speaking, and set out on his return to Thera.

[4.156] After a while, everything began to go wrong both with Battus and with the rest of the Theraeans, whereupon these last, ignorant of the cause of their sufferings, sent to Delphi to inquire for what reason they were afflicted. The Pythoness in reply told them "that if they and Battus would make a settlement at Cyrene in Libya, things would go better with them." Upon this the Theraeans sent out Battus with two penteconters, and with these he proceeded to Libya, but within a little time, not knowing what else to do, the men returned and arrived off Thera. The Theraeans, when they saw the vessels approaching, received them with showers of missiles, would not allow them to come near the shore, and ordered the men to sail back from whence they came. Thus compelled to return, they settled on an island near the Libyan coast, which (as I have already said) was called Platea. In size it is reported to have been about equal to the city of Cyrene, as it now stands.

[4.157] In this place they continued two years, but at the end of that time, as their ill luck still followed them, they left the island to the care of one of their number, and went in a body to Delphi, where they made complaint at the shrine to the effect that, notwithstanding they had colonised Libya, they prospered as poorly as before. Hereon the Pythoness made them the following answer:-

Knowest thou better than I, fair Libya abounding in fleeces?
Better the stranger than he who has trod it? Oh! Clever Theraeans!

Battus and his friends, when they heard this, sailed back to Platea: it was plain the god would not hold them acquitted of the colony till they were absolutely in Libya. So, taking with them the man whom they had left upon the island, they made a settlement on the mainland directly opposite Platea, fixing themselves at a place called Aziris, which is closed in on both sides by the most beautiful hills, and on one side is washed by a river.

[4.158] Here they remained six years, at the end of which time the Libyans induced them to move, promising that they would lead them to a better situation. So the Greeks left Aziris and were conducted by the Libyans towards the west, their journey being so arranged, by the calculation of their guides, that they passed in the night the most beautiful district of that whole country, which is the region called Irasa. The Libyans brought them to a spring, which goes by the name of Apollo's fountain, and told them - "Here, Grecians, is the proper place for you to settle; for here the sky leaks."

[4.159] During the lifetime of Battus, the founder of the colony, who reigned forty years, and during that of his son Arcesilaus, who reigned sixteen, the Cyrenaeans continued at the same level, neither more nor fewer in number than they were at the first. But in the reign of the third king, Battus, surnamed the Happy, the advice of the Pythoness brought Greeks from every quarter into Libya, to join the settlement. The Cyrenaeans had offered to all comers a share in their lands; and the oracle had spoken as follows:-

He that is backward to share in the pleasant Libyan acres,
Sooner or later, I warn him, will feel regret at his folly.

Thus a great multitude were collected together to Cyrene, and the Libyans of the neighbourhood found themselves stripped of large portions of their lands. So they, and their king Adicran, being robbed and insulted by the Cyrenaeans, sent messengers to Egypt, and put themselves under the rule of Apries, the Egyptian monarch; who, upon this, levied a vast army of Egyptians, and sent them against Cyrene. The inhabitants of that place left their walls and marched out in force to the district of Irasa, where, near the spring called Theste, they engaged the Egyptian host, and defeated it. The Egyptians, who had never before made trial of the prowess of the Greeks, and so thought but meanly of them, were routed with such slaughter that but a very few of them ever got back home. For this reason, the subjects of Apries (Wahibre - reigned 589-570 B.C.), who laid the blame of the defeat on him, revolted from his authority.

 

Note: Herodotus identifies the Spartans, not as Whites, but as a combination of Phoenicians and Minyae (Minyans).

 

 

Herodotus' identification of the founders of Cyrene as Minyans, appears to be supported by this Etruscan bowl below, which clearly depicts the Cyrenean king as a Black man, with a Kouros hairstyle. (Contrary to the nonsense of Whites, "Black figure Ware" depicted actual skin color, as there are depictions of White Men and Women, together with Blacks, on other bowls).

 

 

Minyan and Pelasgian Kouros

 

Herodotus' statement "the advice of the Pythoness brought Greeks from every quarter into Libya, to join the settlement." Is supported by Persian depictions of the Cyreneans at the time of Darius the Greats death (486 B.C.). The Persians chose to depict the Cyreneans separately from the Berber Libyans (though both with the same national dress). On the Apadana staircase, the Cyreneans are depicted as the typical Greek Mulatto. Whereas on Darius' tomb, the Berber Libyan is depicted.

 

 

 

 

 

After Cyrene's victory, four more important Greek cities were established in the area: Barce (Al Marj); Euhesperides (later Berenice, present-day Benghazi); Teuchira (later Arsinoe, present-day Tukrah); and Apollonia (Susah), the port of Cyrene. Together with Cyrene, they were known as the Pentapolis (Five Cities). Often in competition, they found cooperation difficult even when confronted by common enemies. From Cyrene, the mother city and foremost of the five, derived the name of Cyrenaica for the whole region.

In 525 B.C. the Persian army of Cambyses (son of Cyrus the Great), fresh from the conquest of Egypt, overran Cyrenaica, which for the next two centuries remained under Persian or Egyptian rule. After Alexander the Great had conquered Persia and taken it territories, he was greeted warmly by the Greeks when he entered Cyrenaica in 331 B.C. When Alexander died in 323 B.C, his empire was divided among his Macedonian generals. Egypt, with Cyrene, went to Ptolemy, a general under Alexander who took over his African and Syrian possessions; the other Greek citystates of the Pentapolis retained their autonomy. However, the inability of the city-states to maintain stable governments led the Ptolemies to impose workable constitutions on them. Later, a federation of the Pentapolis was formed that was customarily ruled by a king drawn from the Ptolemaic royal house. Ptolemy Apion, the last Greek ruler, bequeathed Cyrenaica to Rome, which formally annexed the region in 74 B.C. and joined it to Crete as a Roman province.

 

 

Libyans

 

 

This history deals with North Africa exclusive of Egypt. In Egyptian history proper, the first Black/White encounter is recorded at about twenty years earlier.

 

The first Whites in Africa

Even though those ancient Blacks with a written language, recorded everything. There are no Egyptian sources which tell of the first Black/White encounter in Egypt. If these writings still exist, they are being withheld by Whites: For good reason, if there is an account of the first Black/White encounter, the myth of White Egyptians could not exist. Therefore, our only source for this first Greek/Egyptian encounter, is the Greek historian Herodotus, in his book "The Persian Wars" Written 440 B.C. (He says that these things were told to him by the Egyptians). However, Herodotus is known to have been rather loose with the truth. By the time of this account (664–610 B.C.), Whites had been in Europe for at least 500 years, and had been marauding in the Mediterranean for 400 years. Egyptians had a close relationship with Cretans and Mycenaean's, and kept close tabs on the goings-on in the north: therefore they would have known about the White invaders, as soon as they arrived. On the Greek side: Whites came into Europe from Central Asia as illiterate nomads, therefore they had no clue of their past history, except through oral myth passed down from generation to generation. It was not until about 525-456 B.C, that they learned to read and write and began to produce their own writing. In these early writings, they wrote down their founding myths, as a substitute for their history. In many of these founding myths, such as the "Myth of Danaus" Egyptians are central figures. Click here for more: Click >>>

In Book 2 - EUTERPE, Herodotus writes:

[2.152] This was the second time that Psammetichus  (Psamtik I, reign 664–610 B.C. 26th dynasty) had been driven into banishment. On a former occasion he had fled from Sabacos the Ethiopian (Nubian), who had put his father Necos to death; and had taken refuge in Syria (Assyria) from whence, after the retirement of the Ethiop in consequence of his dream, he was brought back by the Egyptians of the Saitic canton. Now it was his ill-fortune to be banished a second time by the eleven kings, on account of the libation which he had poured from his helmet; on this occasion he fled to the marshes.

Feeling that he was an injured man, and designing to avenge himself upon his persecutors, Psammetichus sent to the city of Buto, where there is an oracle of Latona, the most veracious of all the oracles of the Egyptians, and having inquired concerning means of vengeance, received for answer that "Vengeance would come from the sea, when brazen men should appear. Great was his incredulity when this answer arrived, for never, he thought, would brazen men arrive to be his helpers. However, not long afterwards certain Carians (Black Anatolians) and Ionians (Greeks), who had left their country (a colony in Anatolia), on a voyage of plunder, were carried by stress of weather to Egypt where they disembarked, all equipped in their brazen armour, and were seen by the natives, one of whom carried the tidings to Psammetichus, and, as he had never before seen men clad in brass, he reported that brazen men had come from the sea and were plundering the plain. Psammetichus, perceiving at once that the oracle was accomplished, made friendly advances to the strangers, and engaged them, by splendid promises, to enter into his service. He then, with their aid and that of the Egyptians who espoused his cause, attacked the eleven and vanquished them.


 

The economic and cultural development of the Pentapolis was unaffected by the turmoil its political life generated. The region grew rich from grain, wine, wool, and stockbreeding and from silphium, an herb that grew only in Cyrenaica and was regarded as an aphrodisiac. Cyrene became one of the greatest intellectual and artistic centers of the Greek world, famous for its medical school, learned academies, and architecture, which included some of the finest examples of the Hellenistic style. The Cyrenaics, a school of thinkers who expounded a doctrine of moral cheerfulness that defined happiness as the sum of human pleasures, also made their home there and took inspiration from the city's pleasant climate.

Fezzan and the Garamentes

Throughout the period of Punic and Greek colonization of the coastal plain, the area known as Fezzan was dominated by the Garamentes, a tribal people. In the desert they established a powerful kingdom astride the trade route between the western Sudan and the Mediterranean coast. The Garamentes left numerous inscriptions in tifinagh, the ancient Berber form of writing still used by the Tuareg. Beyond these, and the observations of Herodotus and other classical writers on their customs and dealings with the coastal settlements, little was known of this extraordinary and mysterious people until the advent of modern archaeological methods.

The Garamentes' political power was limited to a chain of oases about 400 kilometers long in the Wadi Ajal, but from their capital at Germa, they controlled the desert caravan trade from Ghadamis south to the Niger River, eastward to Egypt, and west to Mauretania. The Carthaginians employed them as carriers of goods; gold and ivory purchased in exchange for salt, from the western Sudan to their depots on the Mediterranean coast. The Garamentes were also noted as horsebreeders and herders of longhorned cattle. They succeeded in irrigating portions of their arid lands for cultivation by using foggares, a vast underground networks of stone-lined water channels. Their wealth and technical skill are also attested to by the remains of their towns, which were built of stone, and more than 50,000 of their pyramidal tombs. Rome sent several punitive expeditions against the Garamentes before concluding a lasting commercial and military alliance with them late in the first century A.D.

Herodotus on the Garamentes

Book 4 - MELPOMENE

[4.183] Ten days' journey from Augila there is again a salt-hill and a spring; palms of the fruitful kind grow here abundantly, as they do also at the other salt-hills. This region is inhabited by a nation called the Garamantians, a very powerful people, who cover the salt with mould, and then sow their crops. From thence is the shortest road to the Lutophagi, a journey of thirty days. In the Garamantian country are found the oxen which, as they graze, walk backwards. This they do because their horns curve outwards in front of their heads, so that it is not possible for them when grazing to move forwards, since in that case their horns would become fixed in the ground. Only herein do they differ from other oxen, and further in the thickness and hardness of their hides. The Garamantians have four-horse chariots, in which they chase the Troglodyte Ethiopians, who of all the nations whereof any account has reached our ears are by far the swiftest of foot. The Troglodytes feed on serpents, lizards, and other similar reptiles. Their language is unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.

 

MOROCCO

Phoenician traders, who had penetrated the western Mediterranean before the 12th century B.C, set up depots for salt and ore along the coast and up the rivers of the territory that is now Morocco. The arrival of Phoenicians heralded many centuries of rule by foreign powers for the north of Morocco. Major early substantial settlements of the Phoenicians were at Chellah, Lixus and Mogador, with Mogador being a Phoenician colony as early as the early 6th century B.C. Carthage developed commercial relations with the Berber tribes of the interior and paid them an annual tribute to ensure their cooperation in the exploitation of raw materials.

By the 5th century B.C, Carthage had extended its hegemony across much of North Africa. By the 2nd century B.C, several large, although loosely administered, Berber kingdoms had emerged. But after the fall of Carthage, the area was annexed to the Roman Empire in AD 40. Rome controlled the vast, ill-defined territory through alliances with the tribes rather than through military occupation, expanding its authority only to those areas that were economically useful, or that could be defended without additional manpower. Hence, Roman administration never extended outside the restricted area of the northern coastal plain and valleys. This strategic region formed part of the Roman Empire, governed as Mauretania Tingitana.

Roman historians (like Ptolemeus) considered that all actual Morocco until the Atlas mountains was part of the Roman Empire, because in the Augustus times, Mauretania was a vassal state and his rulers (like Juba II) controlled all the areas south of Volubilis (archaeological site in Morocco situated near Meknes between Fez and Rabat. Volubilis features the best preserved Roman ruins in this part of northern Africa). During the reign of Juba II, Emperor Augustus (who created a total of 12 colonies with retired Roman legionaries), had already founded three colonies in Mauretania close to the Atlantic coast: Iulia Constantia Zilil, Iulia Valentia Banasa, and Iulia Campestris Babba. This western part of Mauretania was to become the province called "Mauretania Tingitana" shortly afterwards, with its capital, the rich emporium of Volubilis. Around 278 A.D. Romans moved their regional capital to Tanger and Volubilis started to loss importance.

 

The Kingdom of Numidia

 

The Massylii were a Berber federation of tribes of eastern Numidia which was formed by an amalgamation of smaller tribes during the 4th century B.C. On their loosely defined western frontier was the powerful rival kingdom of the Masaesyli. To their east lay the territory of the rich and powerful Carthaginian Republic. Their relationship to Carthage resembled that of a protectorate. Carthage maintained its dominance over the Berber tribes by skillful diplomatic manoeuvering, playing off local tribal and kingdom rivalries.

 

 

 

Masinissa

Masinissa was the son of the chieftain Gala of a Numidian tribal group, the Massylii. He was brought up in Carthage, an ally of his father. At the start of the Second Punic War, Masinissa fought for Carthage against Syphax, the King of the Masaesyli of western Numidia (present day Algeria), who had allied himself with the Romans. Masinissa, then 17 years old, led an army of Numidian troops and Carthaginian auxiliaries against Syphax's army and won a decisive victory.

 

 

 

After his victory over Syphax, Masinissa commanded his skilled Numidian cavalry against the Romans in Spain, where he was involved in the Carthaginian victories of Castulo and Ilorca in 211 BC. After Hasdrubal Barca departed for Italy, Masinissa was placed in command of all the Carthaginian cavalry in Spain, where he fought a successful guerrilla campaign against the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio (Scipio Africanus) throughout 208 and 207, while Mago Barca and Hasdrubal Gisgo levied and trained new forces. In 206, with fresh reinforcements, Mago and Hasdrubal Gisgo — supported by Masinissa's Numidian cavalry — met Scipio at the Battle of Ilipa, where Carthage's power over Hispania was forever broken in arguably Scipio Africanus's most brilliant victory.

When Gaia died in 206, his sons Masinissa and Oezalces quarreled about the inheritance, and Syphax — now an ally of Carthage — was able to conquer considerable parts of the eastern Numidia. Meanwhile, with the Carthaginians having been driven from Hispania, Masinissa concluded that Rome was winning the war against Carthage and therefore decided to defect to Rome. he promised to assist Scipio in the invasion of Carthaginian territory in Africa. This decision was aided by the move by Scipio Africanus to free Masinissa's nephew, Massiva, whom the Romans had captured when he had disobeyed his uncle and ridden into battle. Having lost the alliance with Masinissa, Hasdrubal started to look for another ally, which he found in Syphax, who married Sophonisba, Hasdrubal's daughter who until the defection had been betrothed to Masinissa. The Romans supported Masinissa's claim to the Numidian throne against Syphax, who was nevertheless successful in driving Masinissa from power until Scipio invaded Africa in 204. Masinissa joined the Roman forces and participated in the victorious Battle of the Great Plains (203), after which Syphax was captured.

At the Battle of Bagbrades (203), Scipio overcame Hasdrubal and Syphax and while the Roman general concentrated on Carthage, Gaius Laelius and Masinissa followed Syphax to Cirta, where he was captured and handed over to Scipio. After the defeat of Syphax, Masinissa married Syphax's wife Sophonisba, but Scipio, suspicious of her loyalty, demanded that she be taken to Rome and appear in the triumphal parade. To save her from such humiliation, Masinissa sent her poison, with which she killed herself. Masinissa was now accepted as a loyal ally of Rome, and was confirmed by Scipio as the king of the Massylii.

At the Battle of Zama Masinissa commanded the cavalry (6,000 Numidian and 3,000 Roman) on Scipio's right wing, Scipio delayed the engagement for long enough to allow for Masinissa to join him. With the battle hanging in the balance, Masinissa's cavalry, having driven the fleeing Carthaginian horsemen away, returned and immediately fell onto the rear of the Carthaginian lines. This decided the battle and at once Hannibal's army began to collapse. The Second Punic War was over and for his services Masinissa received the kingdom of Syphax, and became king of Numidia.

Masinissa was now king of both the Massylii and the Masaesyli. He showed unconditional loyalty to Rome, and his position in Africa was strengthened by a clause in the peace treaty of 201 between Rome and Carthage prohibiting the latter from going to war even in self-defense without Roman permission. This enabled Masinissa to encroach on the remaining Carthaginian territory as long as he judged that Rome wished to see Carthage further weakened.

With Roman backing, Masinissa established his own kingdom of Numidia, west of Carthage, with Cirta — present day Constantine — as its capital city. All of this happened in accordance with Roman interest, as they wanted to give Carthage more problems with its neighbours. Masinissa’s chief aim was to build a strong and unified state from the semi-nomadic Numidian tribes. To that end, he introduced Carthaginian agricultural techniques and forced many Numidians to settle as peasant farmers. Masinissa and his sons possessed large estates throughout Numidia, to the extent that Roman authors attributed to him, quite falsely, the sedentarization of the Numidians. Major towns included Capsa, Thugga (modern Dougga), Bulla Regia and Hippo Regius.

All through his reign, Masinissa extended his territory, and he was cooperating with Rome when, towards the end of his life, he provoked Carthage to go to war against him. Any hopes he may have had of extending his rule right across North Africa were dashed, however, when a Roman commission headed by the elderly Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Elder) came to Africa about 155 BC to decide a territorial dispute between Masinissa and Carthage. Animated probably by an irrational fear of a Carthaginian revival, but possibly by suspicion of Masinissa’s ambitions, Cato thenceforward advocated, finally with success, the destruction of Carthage. Based on descriptions from Livy, the Numidians began raiding around seventy towns in the southern and western sections of Carthage's remaining territory. Outraged with their conduct, Carthage went to war against them, in defiance of the Roman treaty forbidding them to make war on anyone, thus precipitating the Third Punic War (149–146 BC). Masinissa showed his displeasure when the Roman army arrived in Africa in 149 BC, but he died early in 148 BC without a breach in the alliance. Ancient accounts suggest Masinissa lived beyond the age of 90 and was apparently still personally leading the armies of his kingdom when he died.

After his death, Numidia was divided into several smaller kingdoms ruled by his sons. His last dynastic descendants were the Juba I of Numidia (85–46 B.C.) and Juba II (52 B.C. - 23 A.D.) of Mauretania.

Juba I

Juba I of Numidia (85–46 B.C.) was the son and successor to King of Numidia Hiempsal II.

In 81 B.C. Hiempsal II had been driven from his throne by the Numidians themselves; soon afterwards, Pompey was sent to Africa by Sulla to reinstate him as king in Numidia, and because of this Hiempsal II and later his son Juba I became Pompey’s ally. It is unknown when Hiempsal II died. The alliance was strengthened during a visit by Juba to Rome, when Julius Caesar insulted him by pulling on his beard as Juba made accusations against Caesar, and still further in 50 B.C, when the tribune Gaius Scribonius Curio openly proposed that Numidia should be sold privately, and when his wife became Caesar's lover In August 49 B.C, Caesar sent Curio to take Africa from the Republicans.

Curio was overconfident and holding the governor of Africa, Publius Attius Varus (Varus) in low esteem, Curio took fewer legions than he had been given. In the Battle of the Bagradas River (49 B.C.), Curio led his army in a bold, uphill attack which swiftly routed Varus' army and in the process wounded Varus. Encouraged by this success, Curio acted on what proved to be faulty intelligence, and attacked what he believed to be a detachment of Juba's army. In fact, the bulk of the Juba's forces were there, and after an initial success, Curio's forces were ambushed and virtually annihilated by Saburra (Juba's military commander). Curio died in the fighting, and only a few were able to escape on their ships. King Juba took several senators captive for display and execution in Numidia .

With the arrival of Caesar in Africa, Juba originally planned to join forces with Publius Cornelius Scipio Salvito, but his kingdom was invaded from the west by Caesar's ally Bocchus II and an Italian adventurer, Publius Sittius. He therefore left 30 elephants behind and marched home to defend his country. Scipio however found that he couldn't fight without more troops, and sent a desperate message to Juba for assistance. Juba immediately left the command of his kingdom's defence with his commander Sabura, and joined Scipio with 3 legions, around 15,000 light infantry, 1,000 cavalry and 30 elephants for the Battle of Thapsus. However, he camped away from Scipio's main lines. Surveying the battlefield and seeing the certain defeat of Scipio's army, Juba did not take part in the battle, and fled with his 30,000 men. Having fled with the Roman general Petreius and finding their retreat cut off, they made a suicide pact and engaged in one on one combat. The idea was that one would meet an honourable death. Sources vary on the outcome, but it is most likely that Petreius killed Juba and then committed suicide with the assistance of a slave.

 

 

 

 

Juba II

Juba II was the only child and heir to King Juba I of Numidia - his mother is unknown. In 46 BC, his father committed suicide as he was defeated by Julius Caesar (in Thapsus, North Africa). Numidia became a Roman Province. His father was an ally to the Roman General Pompey.

Juba II was brought to Rome by Julius Caesar and took part in Caesar’s triumphal procession. In Rome, he learned Latin and Greek, became romanized and was granted Roman citizenship. Through dedication to his studies, he is said to have become one of Rome's best educated citizens, and by age 20 he wrote one of his first works entitled Roman Archaeology. He was raised by Julius Caesar and later by his great-nephew Octavian (future Emperor Caesar Augustus). While growing up, Juba II accompanied Octavian on military campaigns, gaining valuable experience as a leader. He fought alongside Octavian in the battle of Actium in 31 BC. They became longtime friends.

Augustus restored Juba II as the king of Numidia between 29 BC – 27 BC. Juba II established Numidia as an ally of Rome. Juba II would become one of the most loyal client kings that served Rome. Between 26 BC – 20 BC, Augustus arranged for him to marry Cleopatra Selene II (daughter to Greek Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Roman triumvir Mark Antony), giving her a large dowry and appointing her queen. It was probably due to his services with Augustus in a campaign in Spain that led Augustus to make him King of Mauretania.

Juba's First marriage was to Cleopatra Selene II (40 BC – 6 AD). Their children were: Ptolemy of Mauretania born in ca 10 BC – 40 A.D. A daughter of Cleopatra and Juba, whose name has not been recorded, is mentioned in an inscription. It has been suggested that Drusilla of Mauretania was that daughter, but she may have been a granddaughter instead. Drusilla is described as a granddaughter of Antony and Cleopatra, or may have been a daughter of Ptolemy of Mauretania.

Juba's second marriage to Glaphyra, a princess of Cappadocia, and widow of Alexander, son of Herod the Great. Alexander was executed in 6 A.D. Glaphyra then married Juba II in 6 AD or 7 AD. She then fell in love with Herod Archelaus, another son of Herod the Great and Ethnarch of Judea. Glaphyra divorced Juba to marry him in 7 AD. Juba had no children with Glaphyra.


 

 

 

Christianity was introduced in the 2nd century and gained converts in the towns, and among slaves and Berber farmers. By the end of the 4th century, the Romanized areas had been Christianized, and inroads had been made as well among the Berber tribes, who sometimes converted en masse. But schismatic and heretical movements also developed, usually as forms of political protest. The area had a substantial Hebrew population as well. It was during this time that Morocco became a Hebrew kingdom until the arrival of Islam.

In the 5th century, as the Roman Empire declined, the region fell to White tribes fresh from Central Asia, (as all Whites tribes are originally from), the Germanic Vandals, Visigoths, and then the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire), in rapid succession. During this time however, the high mountains of most of modern Morocco remained unsubdued, and stayed in the hands of their Berber inhabitants.

 

MAURITANIA

 

 

False translating, editing, and manipulation of ancient Texts

 

The Albinos have been desperate to demonstrate that they were the original creators of civilizations, or at least there, and a part of the founding of original civilizations. That is of course a lie, and White remains have never been found among the remains of any of those ancient founding people anywhere – including Europe. But the Albinos are determined in their efforts to insert themselves into history; and one of the ways they do it is to take Blacks “Out-of-History”. That is, they remove all references to Black skin color from ancient writings - where they deem it appropriate - thus inviting the reader to assume that it is Albinos that they are reading about.

In ancient times, as now, one of the first things that the author of a travelogue/history does is to DISCRIBE the people that he is talking about. Yet this feature is mysteriously (said sarcastically) missing from the translations that the Albinos give us of the works of ancient writers as relates to Blacks.

So how ridiculous it is that Strabo’s Geography of North Africa, circa 22 A.D. does not mention any Blacks. Or that Herodotus account of Mauretania (circa 430 B.C.) does not describe any Blacks. It is only with Procopius of Caesarea: History of the Wars, account of Mauretania, c. 550 A.D. that we see mention of Blacks, AND THEN ONLY TO INTRODUCE THE LIE THAT ALBINOS WERE NATIVE TO A NEIGHBORING LAND!

 

Procopius of Caesarea: History of the Wars, c. 550 CE

Books III.xxv.3-9; IV.vi.10-14, vii.3, xi.16-20, xiii.26-29

For all those who ruled over the Mauretanii in Mauretania and Numidia and Byzacium sent envoys to Belisarius saying that they were slaves of the emperor and promised to fight with him. There were some also who even furnished their children as hostages and requested that the symbols of office be sent with them from him according to the ancient custom. For it was a law among the Mauretanii that no one should be a ruler over them, even if he was hostile to the Romans, until the emperor of the Romans should give him the tokens of the office. And though they had already received them from the Vandals, they did not consider that the Vandals held the office securely. Now these symbols are a staff of silver covered with gold, and a silver cap---not covering the whole head, but like a crown and held in place on all sides by bands of silver---a kind of white cloak gathered by a golden brooch on the right shoulder in the form of a Thessalian cape, and a white tunic with embroidery, and a gilded boot. And Belisarius sent these things to them, and presented each one of them with much money. However, they did not come to fight along with him, nor, on the other hand, did they dare give their support to the Vandals, but standing out of the way of both contestants, they waited to see what would be the outcome of the war. . . .

The Mauretanii live in stuffy huts both in winter and in summer and at every other time, never removing from them either because of snow or the heat of the sun or any other discomfort whatever due to nature. And they sleep on the ground, the prosperous among them, if it should so happen, spreading a fleece under themselves. Moreover, it is not customary among them to change their clothing with the seasons, but they wear a thick cloak and a rough shirt at all times. And they have neither bread nor wine nor any other good thing, but they take grain, either wheat or barley, and, without boiling it or grinding it to flour or barley-meal, they eat it in a manner not a whit different from that of animals. . . .A certain Mauretanian woman had managed somehow to crush a little grain, and making of it a very tiny cake, threw it into the hot ashes on the hearth. For thus it is the custom among the Mauretanii to bake their loaves. . .

Now there are lofty mountains there, and a level space near the foothills of the mountains, where the Mauretanii had made preparations for the battle and arranged their fighting order as follows. They formed a circle of their camels, just as, in the previous narrative, I have said Cabaon did, making the front about twelve deep. And they placed the women with the children within the circle; for among the Mauretanii it is customary to take also a few women, with their children, to battle, and these make the stockades and huts for them and tend the horses skillfully, and have charge of the camels and the food; they also sharpen the iron weapons and take upon themselves many of the tasks in connection with the preparation for battle; and the men themselves took their stand on foot in between the legs of the camels, having shields and swords and small spears which they are accustomed to hurl like javelins. And some of them with their horses remained quietly among the mountains. . . .

And there are fortresses also on the mountain [called "Clypea" by the Romans], which are neglected, by reason of the fact that they do not seem necessary to the inhabitants. For since the time when the Mauretanii wrested Aurasium from the Vandals, not a single enemy had until now ever come there or so much as caused the barbarians to be afraid that they would come, but even the populous city of Tamougadis [Timgad], situated against the mountain on the east at the beginning of the plain, was emptied of its population by the Mauretanii and razed to the ground, in order that the enemy should not only not be able to camp there, but should not even have the city as an excuse for coming near the mountains. And the Mauretanii of that place held also the land to the west of Aurasium, a tract both extensive and fertile. And beyond these dwelt other nations of the Mauretanii, who were ruled by Ortaïas, who had come, as was stated above, as an ally of Solomon and the Romans. And I have heard this man say that beyond the country which he ruled there was no habitation of men, but desert land extending to a great distance, and that beyond that there are men, not black-skinned like the Mauretanii, but very white in body and fair-haired.

 

 

In the area that is now Mauritania, the Bafour, a proto-Berber people, whose descendants may be the coastal Imraguen fishermen, were hunters, pastoralists, and fishermen. Valley farmers, who may have been ancestors of the riverine Toucouleur and Wolof peoples, lived alongside the Bafour. Climatic changes, and perhaps overgrazing and overcultivation as well, led to a gradual desiccation of the Sahara and the southward movement of these peoples.

 

The Imraguen

 

 

In the third and fourth centuries A.D, this southward migration was intensified by the arrival of Berber groups from the north who were searching for pasturage or fleeing political anarchy and war. The wide-ranging activities of these turbulent Berber warriors were made possible by the introduction of the camel to the Sahara in this period. This first wave of Berber invaders subjugated and made vassals of those Bafour who did not flee south. Other Berber groups followed in the seventh and eighth centuries, themselves fleeing in large numbers before the Arab conquerors of the Maghrib.

 

THE ROMAN ERA

 

Note: Roman place names are quite different from the modern

 

 

Increases in urbanization, and Whites in the areas under cultivation during Roman rule, caused wholesale dislocations of Berber society. Nomadic tribes were forced to settle or move from traditional rangelands: Sedentary tribes lost their autonomy and connection with the land. Berber opposition to the Roman presence was nearly constant. The Roman emperor Trajan (r. A.D. 98-117) established a frontier in the south by encircling the Aurès and Nemencha mountains and building a line of forts from Vescera (modern Biskra Algeria) to Ad Majores (Hennchir Besseriani, southeast of Biskra). The defensive line extended at least as far as Castellum Dimmidi (modern Messaad, southwest of Biskra), Roman Algeria's southernmost fort. Romans settled and developed the area around Sitifis (modern Sétif) in the second century, but farther west the influence of Rome did not extend beyond the coast and principal military roads until much later.

The Roman military presence in North Africa was relatively small, consisting of about 28,000 troops and auxiliaries in Numidia and the two Mauretanian provinces. Starting in the second century A.D, these garrisons were manned mostly by local inhabitants.

Aside from Carthage, urbanization in North Africa came in part with the establishment of settlements of veterans under the Roman emperors Claudius (reigned 41-54 A.D.), Nerva (r. 96-98 A.D.), and Trajan. In Algeria such settlements included Tipasa, Cuicul (modern Djemila, northeast of Sétif), Thamugadi (modern Timgad, southeast of Sétif), and Sitifis. The prosperity of most towns, depended on agriculture. Called the granary of the empire, North Africa, according to one estimate, produced 1 million tons of cereals each year, one-quarter of which was exported. Other crops included fruit, figs, grapes, and beans. By the second century A.D, olive oil rivaled cereals as an export item.

The beginnings of the decline of the Roman Empire were less serious in North Africa than elsewhere. There were uprisings, however. In A.D. 238, landowners rebelled unsuccessfully against the emperor's fiscal policies. Sporadic tribal revolts in the Mauretanian mountains followed from 253 to 288 A.D. The towns also suffered economic difficulties, and building activity almost ceased.

The towns of Roman North Africa had a substantial Hebrew population. Some Hebrews were deported from Palestine in the first and second centuries A.D. for rebelling against Roman rule; others had come earlier with Punic settlers. In addition, a number of Berber tribes had converted to Judaism.

Christianity arrived in the second century and soon gained converts in the towns and among slaves. More than eighty bishops, some from distant frontier regions of Numidia, attended the Council of Carthage in 256. By the end of the fourth century, the settled areas had become Christianized, and some Berber tribes had converted en masse.

A division in the church that came to be known as the Donatist controversy began in 313 A.D, among Christians in North Africa. The Donatists stressed the holiness of the church and refused to accept the authority to administer the sacraments of those who had surrendered the scriptures when they were forbidden under the Emperor Diocletaian (r. 284-305). The Donatists also opposed the involvement of Emperor Constantine (r. 306-37) in church affairs, in contrast to the majority of Christians who welcomed official imperial recognition.

The occasionally violent controversy has been characterized as a struggle between opponents and supporters of the Roman system. The most articulate North African critic of the Donatist position, which came to be called a heresy, was Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius (Annaba, Algeria). Augustine (354-430) maintained that the unworthiness of a minister did not affect the validity of the sacraments because their true minister was Christ. In his sermons and books Augustine, who is considered a leading exponent of Christian truths, evolved a theory of the right of orthodox Christian rulers to use force against schismatics and heretics. Although the dispute was resolved by a decision of an imperial commission in Carthage in 411 A.D, Donatist communities continued to exist through the sixth century.

By the late classic period, both Greece and Rome were fundamentally Mulatto societies. The Romans occupying the Mediterranean parts of the African Continent left their traces in these beautiful mosaics, featuring the four seasons. The stamps below, from Algeria (1977), feature Roman mosaics from the now ruined city of Timgad, founded by the Roman emperor Trajan in 100 A.D.

 

 

 

 

THE NEXT WAVE OF WHITE INVADERS

 

The Visigoths

The Visigoths (western Goths); were an Asian Albino people, and are the ancestors of the modern Spanish and Portugese. They were one of two main branches of the Goths, the Ostrogoths being the other. Together these tribes were among the Germanic peoples from Central Asia who spread through the late Roman Empire during the Migration Period. The Romanized Visigoths first emerged as a distinct people during the 4th century, initially in the Balkans, where they participated in several wars with Rome. A Visigothic army under Alaric I eventually moved into Italy and famously sacked Rome in 410.

Eventually the Visigoths were settled in southern Gaul as foederati of the Romans, the reasons for which is still a subject for debate among scholars. They soon fell out with their hosts and established their own kingdom with its capital at Toulouse. They then slowly extended their authority into Hispania, displacing the Vandals and Alans. Their rule in Gaul was cut short at the Battle of Vouillé in 507 when they were defeated by the Franks under Clovis I. Thereafter the only territory north of the Pyrenees that the Visigoths held was Septimania, such that their kingdom became limited to Hispania. In 711 or 712 the Visigoths, were defeated in the Battle of Guadalete by a force of invading Arabs and Berbers (the Moors).

Click here for a history of the Moors in Spain: Click >>>


The Alans

The Alans or Alani were a group of White Asian tribes of nomadic pastoralists of the 1st millennium A.D. They spoke a Scytho-Sarmatian language. In 418 (or 426) the Alan king, Attaces, was killed in battle against the Visigoths in Iberia (Spain), and this branch of the Alans subsequently appealed to the Asding Vandal king Gunderic to accept the Alan crown. The separate ethnic identity of Respendial's Alans then dissolved. Although some of these Alans are thought to have remained in Iberia, most went to North Africa with the Vandals in 429. Later Vandal kings in North Africa styled themselves Rex Wandalorum et Alanorum ("King of the Vandals and Alans").

The Vandals

The Vandals were an Germanic tribe from Asia, that entered the late Roman Empire during the 5th century, perhaps best known for their sack of Rome in 455. Although they were not notably more destructive than other invaders of ancient times, Renaissance and Early Modern writers who idealized Rome tended to blame the Vandals for its destruction. According to Procopius, the Vandals came to Africa at the request of Bonifacius, the military ruler of the region. However, it has been suggested that the Vandals migrated to Africa in search of safety; they had been attacked by a Roman army in 422 and had failed to seal a treaty with them. Led by their king, Gaiseric, some 80,000 Vandals, crossed into Africa from Spain in 429. Advancing eastwards along the coast, the Vandals lay siege to Hippo Regius in 430. Inside Saint Augustine and his priests prayed for relief from the invaders, knowing full well that the fall of the city would spell conversion or death for many Roman Christians. On 28 August 430, three months into the siege, St. Augustine (who was 75 years old) died, perhaps from starvation or stress, as the wheat fields outside the city lay dormant and unharvested. After 14 months, hunger and the inevitable diseases were ravaging both the city inhabitants and the Vandals outside the city walls.

Peace was made between the Romans and the Vandals in 435 through a treaty giving the Vandals control of coastal Numidia. Geiseric chose to break the treaty in 439 when he invaded the province of Africa Proconsularis and laid siege to Carthage. The city was captured without a fight; the Vandals entered the city while most of the inhabitants were attending the races at the hippodrome. Genseric made it his capital, and styled himself the King of the Vandals and Alans, to denote the inclusion of the Alans of north Africa into his alliance. The Goth leader Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths and regent of the Visigoths, was allied by marriage with the Vandals as well as with the Burgundians and the Franks under Clovis I. Like the Goths, the Vandals, were continuators rather than violaters of Roman culture in Late Antiquity. Soon independent kingdoms emerged in mountainous and desert areas, towns were overrun, and the Berbers, who had previously been pushed to the edges of the Roman Empire, returned. Although the Vandals fended off attacks from the Romans and established hegemony over the islands of the western Mediterranean, they were less successful in their conflict with the Berbers. Situated south of the Vandal kingdom, the Berbers inflicted two major defeats on the Vandals in the period 496–530

The Byzantines

Belisarius, general of the Byzantine emperor Justinian based in Constantinople, landed in North Africa in 533 with 16,000 men and within a year destroyed the Vandal kingdom. Local opposition delayed full Byzantine control of the region for twelve years, however, and imperial control, when it came, was but a shadow of the control exercised by Rome. Although an impressive series of fortifications were built, Byzantine rule was compromised by official corruption, incompetence, military weakness, and lack of concern in Constantinople for African affairs. As a result, many rural areas reverted to Berber rule.

 

 

 

The Kabyles

The largest group of the mulatto peoples who call themselves Berbers, are the Kabyles or Kabylians of Algeria. Though the White man always calls them indigenous peoples, or cryptically says "their origins are uncertain" their origins are of course, well known. They are the Mulattoes of the Berber Numidians and the Germanic Alans and Vandals. The early history of Numidia can be found in "The Jugurthine War" (112-105 B.C.) by the Roman historian Gaius Crispus Sallust (86 - 35 B.C.).  Click here for link to "The Jugurthine War" Click >>>

Surprisingly, one of the new bastions of White lies and nonsense, Wikipedia: has one of the few somewhat accurate histories of the Kabyles.

 

Wikipedia

Kabyle people

Brief People's History (edited for grammar)

Kabylia is a series of villages on the peaks of the eastern part of the Atlas mountains (100 km east of Algiers) - In ancient times, Kabylia was a empty, rocky and wild area inhabited by various animals including bears, wild boars, wolfs, monkeys, eagles and even hayens. No Human settlement is mentioned in any historical books documenting the peaceful period between Numedians and Rome through the alliance and dating back to 500 B.C, against the Phoenicians.

It is not until the death of King Massinissa when his protege' nephew and General of Numedian Armies Jugurtha rebelled against Rome, from which he wanted separation, that the inaccessible highlands became inhabited. They are known as Jugurtha and followers' hiding, training and camping grounds.

These once forts of Jugurtha's warriors slowly became small villages with tradition of self-sustainability as hunters and farmers after the capture of Jugurtha. It is also where rebellion against Rome's attempt to administer Christianity was instigated, leading to the birth of the Protestant church under various denominations, amongst which Baptists, Donatists, Presbyterians, all of whom opposed Catholicism. for no less than three centuries, the relation between Roman Administration and the highlanders is one which can be characterized as a conflict of low intensity, through physical separation - The 1st (Rome) controlled the coastal areas and the valleys and, the second the highlands.

Then late third century, the Geiserics also known as the Vandals, a Germanic Klan and sworn enemy of Rome, cornered in the Iberia (Spain) peninsula had to find a place and an ally to escape the Roman chase through the Gaul (France) and west-southwest. The snowy, cold and inaccessible highlands of Kabylia and its likewise enemy of Rome is thus a natural match. The population of the villages of the Highlands, also known as Djurdjura, suddenly doubled as no less than 80,000 Vandal warriors with wife and children, i.e. families, filled the villages of Kabylia. Whereas the military forts were set on the lowers peaks closest to the sea known as Lower Kabylia, around the modern Algerian province of Bejia (Vgayet in Kabyle), the residential quarters in the higher lands of the Dhurdjura, also known as Great Kabylia. Thus, began the dense population of Kabylia.

Just days away by horse from Carthage, the Vandal-Numedian coalition successfully evicted Rome from North Africa. While this alliance earned the Numedians the Barbarians (Berberes fr.), by extension from their new allies, it also created the largest clan in the region. Kabylians to whom the term was exclusively assigned amongst north-Africans are indeed the largest ethnic group in North Africa. The term Berber, progressively was applied to all native north Africans, starting their invasion in 1871. Until then, and for centuries since the departure of Rome, North African is a vast territory occupied by a confederation of various Peoples and city-States, without a central power. Of these the Libyans to the Mauritanians, the Moors (Morocco), the Tunisians, the Touaregs (Sahel/Desert), the Mzab, the Chenouas, the Chaouis and Kabylians.

Numerous with their warrior-like, Kabylians are the only People on whom the Moslem invasion of north Africa had no effect. The nominal Moslem attribute assigned to them in modern times is the result of colonial French ignorant and random classification, as well as the creation of the territory called Algeria by decree of General Sneider, French Minister of war, in 1871. This assignment as well as the term Arabs to Numedians and north Africans in general is a colonial construction followed by its maintenance by the alliance of the regime alliance to the Baath ideologie, along a membership into the Arab League - Source of all Algerian post-colonial ills, including continual rebellion by the Kabylians, til today.

 

 

Kabyle People

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISLAM AND THE ARABS - 642-1830

 

Note: From here onward things become very tricky. With the coming of Islam, which was "First" spread by Arabs, all North Africans became Arabized in names, just as the Turks had before them. It was during the rule of Abbasid caliph Harun ar-Rashid, that the caliphs began assigning Egypt to Arabized Turks rather than to Arabs. The first Turkish dynasty in Egypt was that of Ibn Tulun who entered Egypt in 868 A.D. The last Black Arab caliph was Abbasid al-Qa'im (reigned 1031–75) he was deposed by the Seljuq Turk Sultan Toghril Beg, after which time, unto today, the realm of Islam was actually controlled by Turks, NOT ARABS! This was reinforced with the coming to North Africa of the Ottoman Turks.

Complicating matters even more: Arabs and Berbers too, interbred extensively with Whites. So though the following people have Arab names, there is no way of knowing, except by picture or inference, if they are Black or White, Arab, Turk, African, European, or somewhere in between. Interlopers have used this reality shamelessly. It has always been common for a usurper to claim Berber or Arab heritage: sometimes, even descent from the Prophet Mohammad himself, all the while, showing no discernible Black blood at all.

 

 

Unlike the invasions of previous religions and cultures, the coming of Islam, which was spread by Arabs, was to have pervasive and longlasting effects on the Maghrib. The new faith, in its various forms, would penetrate nearly all segments of society, bringing with it armies, learned men, and fervent mystics, and in large part, replacing tribal practices and loyalties with new social norms and political idioms. Nonetheless, the Islamization and Arabization of the region was a complicated and lengthy processes. Whereas nomadic Berbers were quick to convert and assist the Arab invaders, not until the twelfth century, under the Almohad Dynasty, did the Christian and Hebrew communities become totally marginalized.

The first Arab military expeditions into the Maghrib, between 642 and 669 A.D, resulted in the spread of Islam. These early forays from a base in Egypt occurred under local initiative rather than under orders from the central caliphate. When the seat of the caliphate moved from Medina to Damascus however, the Umayyads (a Muslim dynasty ruling from 661 to 750) recognized that the strategic necessity of dominating the Mediterranean, dictated a concerted military effort on the North African front. In 670, an Arab army under Uqba ibn Nafi established the town of Al Qayrawan about 160 kilometers south of present-day Tunis and used it as a base for further operations.

Abu al Muhajir Dina, Uqba's successor, pushed westward into Algeria and eventually worked out a modus vivendi (way of living) with Kusayla, the ruler of an extensive confederation of Christian Berbers. Kusayla, who had been based in Tilimsan (Tlemcen), became a Muslim and moved his headquarters to Takirwan, near Al Qayrawan. This harmony was short-lived however. Arab and Berber forces controlled the region in turn, until 697. By 711 Umayyad forces helped by Berber converts to Islam, had conquered all of North Africa. Governors appointed by the Umayyad caliphs ruled from Al Qayrawan the new wilaya (province) of Ifriqiya: which covered Tripolitania (the western part of present-day Libya), Tunisia, and eastern Algeria.

Paradoxically, the spread of Islam among the Berbers did not guarantee their support for the Arab-dominated caliphate. The ruling Arabs alienated the Berbers by taxing them heavily; treating converts as second-class Muslims; and at worst, by enslaving them. As a result, widespread opposition took the form of open revolt in 739-40 under the banner of Kharijite Islam. The Kharijites objected to Ali, the fourth caliph, making peace with the Umayyads in 657, and left Ali's camp (khariji means "those who leave"). The Kharijites had been fighting Umayyad rule in the East, and many Berbers were attracted by the sect's egalitarian precepts. For example, according to Kharijism, any suitable Muslim candidate could be elected caliph without regard to race, station, or descent from the Prophet Muhammad.

After the revolt, Kharijites established a number of theocratic tribal kingdoms, most of which had short and troubled histories. Others however, like Sijilmasa and Tilimsan, which straddled the principal trade routes, proved more viable and prospered. In 750 the Abbasids, who succeeded the Umayyads as Muslim rulers, moved the caliphate to Baghdad and reestablished caliphal authority in Ifriqiya, appointing Ibrahim ibn Al Aghlab as governor in Al Qayrawan. Although nominally serving at the caliph's pleasure, Al Aghlab and his successors ruled independently until 909, presiding over a court that became a center for learning and culture.

Just to the west of Aghlabid lands, Abd ar Rahman ibn Rustum ruled most of the central Maghrib from Tahirt, southwest of Algiers. The rulers of the Rustumid imamate, which lasted from 761 to 909, each an Ibadi Kharijite imam, who were elected by leading citizens. The imams gained a reputation for honesty, piety, and justice. The court at Tahirt was noted for its support of scholarship in mathematics, astronomy, and astrology, as well as theology and law. The Rustumid imams however, failed by choice or by neglect, to organize a reliable standing army. This important factor, accompanied by the dynasty's eventual collapse into decadence, opened the way for Tahirt's demise under the assault of the Fatimids.

Fatimids

In the closing decades of the ninth century, missionaries of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam converted the Kutama (Sanhaja confederation) Berbers of what was later known as the Petite Kabylie region, and led them in battle against the Sunni rulers of Ifriqiya. Al Qayrawan fell to them in 909. The Ismaili imam Ubaydallah, declared himself caliph and established Mahdia as his capital. Ubaydallah initiated the Fatimid Dynasty, named after Fatima, daughter of Muhammad and wife of Ali, from whom the caliph claimed descent.

The Fatimids turned westward in 911, destroying the imamate of Tahirt and conquering Sijilmasa in Morocco. Ibadi Kharijite refugees from Tahirt fled south to the oasis at Ouargla beyond the Atlas Mountains, whence in the eleventh century they moved southwest to Oued Mzab. Maintaining their cohesion and beliefs over the centuries, Ibadi religious leaders have dominated public life in the region to this day.

For many years, the Fatimids posed a threat to Morocco, but their deepest ambition was to rule the East, the Mashriq, which included Egypt and Muslim lands beyond: By 969 they had conquered Egypt. In 972 the Fatimid ruler Al Muizz established the new city of Cairo as his capital. The Fatimids left the rule of Ifriqiya and most of Algeria to the Zirids (972-1148). This Berber dynasty, which had founded the towns of Miliana, Médéa, and Algiers, and centered significant local power in Algeria for the first time, turned over its domain west of Ifriqiya to the Banu Hammad branch of its family. The Hammadids ruled from 1011 to 1151, during which time Bejaïa became the most important port in the Maghrib.

This period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline. The Hammadids, by rejecting the Ismaili doctrine for Sunni orthodoxy and renouncing submission to the Fatimids, initiated chronic conflict with the Zirids. Two great Berber confederations, the Sanhaja and the Zenata, engaged in an epic struggle. The fiercely brave, camelborne nomads of the western desert, and steppe as well as the sedentary farmers of the Kabylie to the east, swore allegiance to the Sanhaja. Their traditional enemies, the Zenata, were tough, resourceful horsemen from the cold plateau of the northern interior of Morocco and the western Tell in Algeria.

In addition, raiders from Genoa, Pisa, and Norman Sicily attacked ports and disrupted coastal trade. Trans-Saharan trade shifted to Fatimid Egypt and to routes in the west leading to Spanish markets. The countryside was being overtaxed by growing cities.

Contributing to these political and economic dislocations was a large incursion of Arab beduin from Egypt, starting in the first half of the eleventh century. Part of this movement was an invasion by the Banu Hilal, and Banu Sulaym tribes, apparently sent by the Fatimids to weaken the Zirids. These Arab beduin overcame the Zirids and Hammadids, and in 1057 A.D, sacked Al Qayrawan. They sent farmers fleeing from the fertile plains to the mountains and left cities and towns in ruin. For the first time, the extensive use of Arabic spread to the countryside. Sedentary Berbers who sought protection from the Hilalians were gradually Arabized.

Almoravids

The Almoravid movement developed early in the eleventh century among the Sanhaja of the western Sahara, whose control of trans-Saharan trade routes was under pressure from the Zenata Berbers in the north, and the state of Ghana in the south. Yahya ibn Ibrahim al Jaddali, a leader of the Lamtuna tribe of the Sanhaja confederation, decided to raise the level of Islamic knowledge and practice among his people. To accomplish this, on his return from the hajj (Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca) in 1048-49, he brought with him Abd Allah ibn Yasin al Juzuli, a Moroccan scholar. In the early years of the movement, the scholar was concerned only with imposing moral discipline and a strict adherence to Islamic principles among his followers. Abd Allah ibn Yasin also became known as one of the marabouts, or holy persons (from al murabitun, "those who have made a religious retreat." Almoravids is the Spanish transliteration of al murabitun.

 

 

The Almoravid movement shifted from promoting religious reform to engaging in military conquest after 1054 A.D, and was led by Lamtuna leaders: first Yahya, then his brother Abu Bakr, and then his cousin Yusuf ibn Tashfin. With Marrakech (Morocco) as their capital, the Almoravids had conquered Morocco, the Maghrib as far east as Algiers, and Spain up to the Ebro River by 1106 A.D. Under the Almoravids, the Maghrib and Spain acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, reuniting them temporarily with the Islamic community in the Mashriq (Arabic-speaking countries to the east of Egypt).

Although it was not an entirely peaceful time, North Africa benefited economically and culturally during the Almoravid period, which lasted until 1147. Muslim Spain (Andalus in Arabic) was a great source of artistic and intellectual inspiration. The most famous writers of Andalus worked in the Almoravid court, and the builders of the Grand Mosque of Tilimsan, completed in 1136, used as a model the Grand Mosque of Córdoba.

 

Almohads

Like the Almoravids, the Almohads found their initial inspiration in Islamic reform. Their spiritual leader, the Moroccan Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Tumart, sought to reform Almoravid decadence. Rejected in Marrakech and other cities, he turned to his Masmuda tribe in the Atlas Mountains for support. Because of their emphasis on the unity of God, his followers were known as Al Muwahhidun (unitarians, or Almohads).

Although declaring himself mahdi, imam, and masum (infallible leader sent by God), Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Tumart consulted with a council of ten of his oldest disciples. Influenced by the Berber tradition of representative government, he later added an assembly composed of fifty leaders from various tribes. The Almohad rebellion began in 1125 with attacks on Moroccan cities, including Sus and Marrakech.

Upon Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Tumart's death in 1130, his successor Abd al Mumin took the title of caliph and placed members of his own family in power, converting the system into a traditional monarchy. The Almohads entered Spain at the invitation of the Andalusian amirs, who had risen against the Almoravids there. Abd al Mumin forced the submission of the amirs and reestablished the caliphate of Córdoba, giving the Almohad sultan supreme religious as well as political authority within his domains. The Almohads took control of Morocco in 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib and advanced to Tripolitania. Nonetheless, pockets of Almoravid resistance continued to hold out in the Kabylie for at least fifty years.

After Abd al Mumin's death in 1163, his son Abu Yaqub Yusuf (r. 1163-84) and grandson Yaqub al Mansur (r. 1184-99) presided over the zenith of Almohad power. For the first time, the Maghrib was united under a local regime, and although the empire was troubled by conflict on its fringes, handcrafts and agriculture flourished at its center and an efficient bureaucracy filled the tax coffers. In 1229 the Almohad court renounced the teachings of Muhammad ibn Tumart, opting instead for greater tolerance and a return to the Maliki school of law. As evidence of this change, the Almohads hosted two of the greatest thinkers of Andalus: Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).

The Almohads shared the crusading instincts of their Castilian adversaries, but the continuing wars in Spain overtaxed their resources. In the Maghrib, the Almohad position was compromised by factional strife and was challenged by a renewal of tribal warfare. The Bani Merin (Zenata Berbers) took advantage of declining Almohad power to establish a tribal state in Morocco, initiating nearly sixty years of warfare there that concluded with their capture of Marrakech, the last Almohad stronghold in 1271 A.D. Despite repeated efforts to subjugate the central Maghrib, however, the Merinids were never able to restore the frontiers of the Almohad Empire.

 

Zayanids

From its capital at Tunis, the Hafsid Dynasty made good its claim to be the legitimate successor of the Almohads in Ifriqiya, while in the central Maghrib, the Zayanids founded a dynasty at Tlemcen (town in Northwestern Algeria). Based on a Zenata tribe, the Bani Abd el Wad, which had been settled in the region by Abd al Mumin, the Zayanids also emphasized their links with the Almohads.

For more than 300 years, until the region came under Ottoman suzerainty in the sixteenth century, the Zayanids kept a tenuous hold in the central Maghrib. The regime, which depended on the administrative skills of Andalusians, was plagued by frequent rebellions but learned to survive as the vassal of the Merinids or Hafsids or later as an ally of Spain.

Many coastal cities defied the ruling dynasties and asserted their autonomy as municipal republics. They were governed by their merchant oligarchies, or by tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or by the privateers who operated out of their ports.

Nonetheless, Tlemcen prospered as a commercial center and was called the "pearl of the Maghrib." Situated at the head of the Imperial Road through the strategic Taza Gap to Marrakech, the city controlled the caravan route to Sijilmasa, gateway for the gold and slave trade with the western Sudan. Aragon came to control commerce between Tlemcen's port Oran, and Europe beginning about 1250. An outbreak of privateering out of Aragon, however, severely disrupted this trade after about 1420.

 

Marabouts

The successor dynasties in the Maghrib: Merinids, Zayanids, and Hasfids, did not base their power on a program of religious reform as their predecessors had done. Of necessity they compromised with rural cults that had survived the triumph of puritanical orthodoxy in the twelfth century, despite the efforts of the Almoravids and Almohads to stamp them out.

The aridity of official Islam had little appeal outside the mosques and schools of the cities. In the countryside, wandering marabouts, or holy people, drew a large and devoted following. These men and women were believed to possess divine grace (baraka) or to be able to channel it to others. In life, the marabouts offered spiritual guidance, arbitrated disputes, and often wielded political power. After death, their cults, some local, others widespread, erected domed tombs that became sites of pilgrimage.

Many tribes claimed descent from marabouts. In addition, small autonomous republics led by holy men became a common form of government in the Maghrib. In Algeria, the influence of the marabouts continued through much of the Ottoman period, when the authorities would grant political and financial favors to these leaders to prevent tribal uprisings.

 

MOROCCO

In 670 AD, the first Islamic conquest of the North African coastal plain took place under Uqba ibn Nafi, a general serving under the Umayyads of Damascus, bringing their civilization and Islam, to which many of the Berbers converted. While part of the larger Islamic Empire, client states such as the Kingdom of Nekor were formed. Arab conquerors converted the indigenous Berber population to Islam, but Berber tribes retained their customary laws. The Arabs abhorred the Berbers as barbarians, while the Berbers often saw the Arabs as only an arrogant and brutal soldiery bent on collecting taxes. Once established as Muslims, the Berbers shaped Islam in their own image and embraced schismatic Muslim sects, which in many cases were simply folk religion thinly disguised as Islam, as their way of breaking from Arab control. In about 788 A.D, the region soon broke away from the control of the distant Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad under the Arab Idris ibn Abdallah (who was appointed by the Awraba Berbers of Volubilis to be their representative), he founded the Idrisid Dynasty. The Idrisids established Fes as their capital and Morocco became a centre of learning and a major regional power.

The 11th and 12th centuries witnessed the founding of several great Berber dynasties led by religious reformers and each one was based on a tribal confederation that dominated the Maghrib and Al-Andalus for more than 200 years. The Berber dynasties (Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids and Wattasids) gave the Berber people some measure of collective identity and political unity under a native regime for the first time in their history. They created the idea of an “imperial Maghrib” under Berber aegis that survived in some form from dynasty to dynasty. But ultimately each of the Berber dynasties proved to be a political failure because none managed to create an integrated society out of a social landscape dominated by tribes that prized their autonomy and individual identity. In 1559, the region fell to successive Arab tribes claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad: first the Saadi Dynasty who ruled from 1511 to 1659 A.D, and then the Alaouites, who founded a dynasty that has remained in power since the 17th century.


MAURITANIA

One of the Berber groups arriving in Mauritania in the eighth century was the Lemtuna. By the ninth century, the Lemtuna had attained political dominance in the Adrar and Hodh regions. Together with two other important Berber groups, the Messufa and the Djodala, they set up the Sanhadja Confederation. From their capital, Aoudaghast, the Lemtuna controlled this loose confederation, and the western routes of the Saharan caravan trade that had begun to flourish after the introduction of the camel. At its height, from the eighth to the end of the tenth century, the Sanhadja Confederation was a decentralized polity based on two distinct groups: the nomadic and very independent Berber groups, who maintained their traditional religions, and the Muslim, urban Berber merchants, who conducted the caravan trade.

Although dominated by the Sanhadja merchants, the caravan trade had its northern terminus in the Maghribi commercial city of Sijilmasa and its southern terminus in Koumbi Saleh, capital of the Ghana Empire. Later, the southern trade route ended in Timbuktu, capital of the Mali Empire. Gold, ivory, and slaves were carried north in return for salt (ancient salt mines near Kediet Ijill in northern Mauritania are still being worked), copper, cloth, and other luxury goods.

Important towns developed along the trade routes. The easiest though not the shortest routes between Ghana and Sijilmasa were from Koumbi Saleh, through Aoudaghast, Oualâta, Tîchît, and Ouadane. These towns along the route grew to be important commercial as well as political centers. The eleventh century Arab chronicler, Al Bakri, describes Aoudaghast, with its population of 5,000 to 6,000, as a big town with a large mosque and several smaller ones, surrounded by large cultivated areas under irrigation. Oualâta was a major relay point on the gold and salt trade route, as well as a chief assembly point for pilgrims traveling to Mecca. Koumbi Saleh was a large cosmopolitan city comprising two distinct sections: the Muslim quarter, with its Arab-influenced architecture, and the native quarter of traditional thatch and mud architecture, where the non-Muslim king of Ghana resided. Another important Mauritanian trade city of the Sanhadja Confederation was Chinguetti, later an important religious center. Although Koumbi Saleh did not outlive the fall of the Ghana Empire, Aoudaghast and particularly Oualâta maintained their importance well into the sixteenth century, when trade began shifting to the European-controlled coasts.

By the eleventh century, Islam had spread throughout the west Sahara under the influence of Berber and Arab traders and occasional Arab migrants. Nevertheless, traditional religious practices thrived. The conquest of the entire west Saharan region by the Almoravids in the eleventh century, made possible a more orthodox Islamization of all the peoples of Mauritania.

The breakup of the Sanhadja Confederation in the early eleventh century, led to a period of unrest and warfare among the Sanhadja Berber groups of Mauritania. In about 1039, a chief of the Djodala, Yahya ibn Ibrahim, returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca bringing with him a Sanhadja theologian, Abdallah ibn Yassin, to teach a more orthodox Islam. Rejected by the Djodala two years later - after the death of Ibn Ibrahim - Ibn Yassin and some of his Sanhadja followers retired to a secluded place where they built a fortified religious center, a ribat, which attracted many Sanhadja. In 1042 the al murabitun (men of the ribat), as Ibn Yassin's followers came to be called, launched a jihad, or holy war, against the nonbelievers and the heretics among the Sanhadja, beginning what later become known as the Almoravid movement. The initial aim of the Almoravids was to establish a political community in which the ethical and juridical principles of Islam would be strictly applied.

First, the Almoravids attacked and subdued the Djodala, forcing them to acknowledge Islam. Then, rallying the other Berber groups of the west Sahara, the Almoravids succeeded in recreating the political unity of the Sanhadja Confederation and adding to it a religious unity and purpose. By 1054 the Almoravids had captured Sijilmasa in the Maghrib and had retaken Aoudaghast from Ghana.

With the death of Ibn Yassin in 1059, leadership of the movement in the south passed to Abu Bakr ibn Unas, amir of Adrar, and to Yusuf ibn Tashfin in the north. Under Ibn Tashfin, the Berbers captured Morocco and founded Marrakech as their capital in 1062. By 1082 all of the western Maghrib (to at least present-day Algiers) was under Almoravid domination. In 1086 the Andalusian amirates, under attack from the Spanish Christian king Alfonso, seeking the Christian reconquest of Spain: called on Ibn Tashfin and his Berber warriors to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and come to their rescue. The Almoravids defeated the Spanish Christians, and by 1090, imposed Almoravid rule and the Maliki school of Islamic law in Muslim Spain.

In Mauritania, Abu Bakr led the Almoravids in a war against Ghana (1062-76), culminating in the capture in 1076 of Koumbi Saleh. This event marked the end of the dominance of the Ghana Empire. But after the death of Abu Bakr in 1087, and Ibn Tashfin in 1106, traditional rivalries among the Sanhadja and a new Muslim reformist conquest led by the Zenata Almohads (1133-63) destroyed the Almoravid Empire.

For a short time, the Mauritanian Sanhadja dynasty of the Almoravid Empire controlled a vast territory stretching from Spain to Senegal. The unity established between Morocco and Mauritania during the Almoravid period continued to have some political importance in the 1980s, as it formed part of the basis for Morocco's claims to Mauritania. But the greatest contribution of the Sanhadja and the Almoravids was the Islamization of the western Maghrib. This process would remain a dominant factor in the history of the area for the next several centuries.

Although the Almoravids had substantial contacts with the Maghrib, influences from the Sudanic (Sudanic languages was a generic term for African languages spoken in the Sahel belt from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west), kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai played an important role in Mauritania's history for about 700 years - from the eighth to the fifteenth century. Ghana, the first of the great West African Sudanic kingdoms, included in its territory all of southeastern Mauritania extending to Tagant. Ghana reached its apogee in the ninth and tenth centuries with the extension of its rule over the Sanhadja Berbers. This large and centralized kingdom controlled the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade in gold, ivory, and salt.

The capture of Koumbi Saleh in 1076 by the Almoravids marked the end of Ghana's hegemony, although the kingdom continued to exist for another 125 years. The Mandé, under the leadership of the legendary Sundiata, founded the second great Sudanic kingdom, Mali. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Mali Empire extended over that part of Mauritania previously controlled by Ghana, as well as over the remaining Sahelian regions and the Senegal River Valley. Sundiata and his successors took over Ghana's role in the Saharan trade and in the administration and collection of tribute from vast stretches of the Sudan and the Sahel.

The slow decline of the Mali Empire that started at the end of the fourteenth century, came about through internal discord and revolts by the inhabitants of vassal states, including the Songhai of Gao. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Songhai Empire had replaced the Mali Empire and extended to Mauritania and the upper Senegal River Valley. At the end of the sixteenth century, a large Moroccan force defeated the Songhai, bringing to an end the seven centuries of domination of the western Sudan (and a large part of Mauritania) by strong, centralized kingdoms.

Beginning with the Arab conquest of the western Maghrib in the eighth century, Mauritania experienced a slow but constant infiltration of Arabs and Arab influence from the north. The growing Arab presence pressed the Berbers, who chose not to mix with other groups, to move farther south into Mauritania, forcing out the native inhabitants. By the sixteenth century, most natives had been pushed to the Senegal River. Those remaining in the north became slaves cultivating the oases.

After the decline of the Almoravid Empire, a long process of arabization began in Mauritania, one that until then had been resisted successfully by the Berbers. Several groups of Yemeni Arabs who had been devastating the north of Africa, turned south to Mauritania. Settling in northern Mauritania, they disrupted the caravan trade, causing routes to shift east, which in turn led to the gradual decline of Mauritania's trading towns. One particular Yemeni group, the Bani Hassan, continued to migrate southward until, by the end of the seventeenth century, they dominated the entire country. The last effort of the Berbers to shake off the Arab yoke, was the Mauritanian Thirty Years War (1644-74), or Sharr Bubba, led by Nasir ad Din, a Lemtuna imam. This Sanhadja war of liberation was however, unsuccessful; the Berbers were forced to abandon the sword and became vassals to the warrior Arab groups.

 

The Spanish Offensive

In Iberia (Spain), as a result of the Moor conquest, many of the ousted White nobles took refuge in the unconquered north Asturian highlands. From there they aimed to reconquer their lands from the Moors: this war of reconquest is known as the Reconquista. It began in about 900 A.D. when a small Christian enclave of Visigoths in northwestern Spain, named Asturias; initiated conflicts between Christians and Muslims. Soon after, Christian states based in the north and west slowly; in fits and starts, began a process of expansion and reconquest of Iberia over the next several hundred years. The end for the Moors came on January 2, 1492: the leader of the last Moorish City "Granada" (located in southern Spain) surrendered to armies of a recently united Christian Spain (after the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile). This ended the 800 year reign of the Moors in Iberia. This victory was accompanied by the forced conversion of Spanish Muslims (Moriscos) and Khazar Jews. As a result of the Inquisition, thousands of Khazar Jews fled or were deported to the Maghrib, where many gained influence in government and commerce.

Without much difficulty, Christian Spain imposed its influence on the Maghrib coast by constructing fortified outposts (presidios) and collecting tribute during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. On or near the Algerian coast, Spain took control of Mers el Kebir in 1505, Oran in 1509, and Tlemcen, Mostaganem, and Ténès, all west of Algiers, in 1510. In the same year, the merchants of Algiers handed over one of the rocky islets in their harbor, where the Spaniards built a fort. The presidios in North Africa turned out to be a costly and largely ineffective military endeavor, that did not guarantee access for Spain's merchant fleet. Indeed, most trade seemed to be transacted in the numerous free ports. Moreover, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, sailing superior ships and hammering out shrewd concessions, merchants from England, Portugal, Holland, France, and Italy, as well as Spain, dominated Mediterranean trade.

 

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Privateers

Privateering was an age-old practice in the Mediterranean. North African rulers engaged in it increasingly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century because it was so lucrative, and because their merchant vessels, formerly a major source of income, were not permitted to enter European ports. Although the methods varied, privateering generally involved private vessels raiding the ships of an enemy in peacetime under the authority of a ruler. Its purposes were to disrupt an opponent's trade and to reap rewards from the captives and cargo.

 

 

 

These Pirates destroyed thousands of French, Spanish, Italian and British ships, and long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, discouraging settlement until the 19th century. From the 16th to 19th century, pirates captured an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans as slaves, mainly from seaside villages in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but also from France, Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland and as far away as Iceland and North America.

 

 

 

Privateering was a highly disciplined affair conducted under the command of the rais (captain) of the fleets. Several captains became heros in Algerian lore for their bravery and skill. The captains of the corsairs banded together in a selfregulating taifa (community) to protect and further the corporate interests of their trade. The taifa came to be ethnically mixed, incorporating those captured Europeans who agreed to convert to Islam and supply information useful for future raids. The taifa also gained prestige and political influence because of its role in fighting the infidel and providing the merchants and rulers of Algiers with a major source of income. Algiers became the privateering city-state par excellence, especially between 1560 and 1620. And it was two privateer brothers who were instrumental in extending Ottoman influence in Algeria.

 

 

 

TURKISH OTTOMAN RULE

 

In 1510, a band of Turkish pirates, lead by Khair ad Din, known to the Europeans as Barbarossa (Redbeard), made Tunis their base, with the permission if Bey Mulay Muhammad. The pirates also gained control over other cities on the North African coast, amongst them Algiers. From there they undertook raids against christian ships and coastal settlements; abducted christians were sold as slaves on the markets of North Africa, or held for ransom. In 1516 Aruj moved his base of operations to Algiers, but was killed in 1518 during his invasion of Tlemcen. Khair ad Din succeeded him as military commander of Algiers. The Ottoman sultan gave him the title of beylerbey (provincial governor) and a contingent of some 2,000 janissaries, well-armed Ottoman soldiers. With the aid of this force, Khair ad Din subdued the coastal region between Constantine and Oran (although the city of Oran remained in Spanish hands until 1791).

Under Khair ad Din's regency, Algiers became the center of Ottoman authority in the Maghrib, from which Tunis, Tripoli, and Tlemcen would be overcome, and Morocco's independence would be threatened. So successful was Khair ad Din at Algiers that he was recalled to Constantinople in 1533 by the sultan, Süleyman I (r. 1520-66), known in Europe as Süleyman the Magnificent, and appointed admiral of the Ottoman fleet. The next year he mounted a successful seaborne assault on Tunis. Barbarossa ousted Mulay Muhammad's successor, Mulay Hassan, and assumed the title of Bey of Tunis for himself (1534).

The ousted Bey of Tunis, Mulay Hassan, plead to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. who agreed to equip an expedition against Tunis, not only to restore Mulay Hassan to the throne, but also to curb the piracy undertaken from there. A fleet consistying of 62 galleys and 150 other vessels left Barcelona March 29th. The Imperial & Spanish troops, commanded by Genoese Andrea Doria, supported by the Maltese Knights, landed near Carthago, took Tunis and Goletta. Tunis was taken July 21st 1535. Mulay Hassan was restored, and 20,000 christian slaves liberated. The Spanish garrisoned Tunis and Goletta. Mulay Hassan ruled Tunis as a Spanish vassal, and had to agree to end christian slavery and to introduce religious toleration. The expedition also took Bone and Biserta, both of which were garrisoned by the Spanish. The Portuguese navy participated in the expedition.

 

 

 

 

The policy he was forced to implement resulted in Mulay Hassan's unpopularity. In 1543 he was overthrown by his son, Mulay Ahmad. In 1570 Tunis was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. In 1573 Don Juan d'Austria reconquered it, but he was recalled by his half-brother, Philip II King of Spain, and in 1574 the Ottoman troops, when taking Tunis, encountered no resistance. Except for Ceuta, Melilla, and Oran, the Spanish hold over ports in North Africa was temporary. Piracy from the "Barbary Coast" was not effectively brought under control until into the 19th century.

 

 

The next beylerbey was Khair ad Din's son Hassan, who assumed the position in 1544. Until 1587 the area was governed by officers who served terms with no fixed limits. Subsequently, with the institution of a regular Ottoman administration, governors with the title of pasha ruled for three-year terms. Turkish was the official language, and Arabs and Berbers were excluded from government posts.

The pasha was assisted by janissaries, known in Algeria as the ojaq and led by an agha. Recruited from Turkish peasants, they were committed to a lifetime of service. Although isolated from the rest of society and subject to their own laws and courts, they depended on the ruler and the taifa for income. In the seventeenth century, the force numbered about 15,000, but it was to shrink to only 3,700 by 1830. Discontent among the ojaq rose in the mid-1600s because they were not paid regularly, and they repeatedly revolted against the pasha. As a result, the agha charged the pasha with corruption and incompetence and seized power in 1659.

The taifa had the last word, however, when in 1671 it rebelled, killed the agha, and placed one of its own in power. The new leader received the title of dey, which originated in Tunisia. After 1689 the right to select the dey passed to the divan, a council of some sixty notables. The divan at first was dominated by the ojaq, but by the eighteenth century it became the dey's instrument. In 1710 the dey persuaded the sultan to recognize him and his successors as regent, replacing the pasha in that role. Although Algiers remained a part of the Ottoman Empire, the Sublime Porte, or Ottoman government, ceased to have effective influence there.

The dey was in effect a constitutional autocrat, but his authority was restricted by the divan and the taifa, as well as by local political conditions. The dey was elected for a life term, but in the 159 years (1671-1830) that the system survived, fourteen of the twenty-nine deys were removed from office by assassination. Despite usurpation, military coups, and occasional mob rule, the day-to-day operation of government was remarkably orderly. In accordance with the millet system applied throughout the Ottoman Empire, each ethnic group: Turks, Arabs, Kabyles, Berbers, Hebrews, Europeans, was represented by a guild that exercised legal jurisdiction over its constituents.

The dey had direct administrative control only in the regent's enclave, the Dar as Sultan (Domain of the Sultan), which included the city of Algiers and its environs and the fertile Mitidja Plain. The rest of the territory under the regency was divided into three provinces (beyliks): Constantine in the east; Titteri in the central region, with its capital at Médéa; and a western province that after 1791 had its seat at Oran, abandoned that year by Spain when the city was destroyed in an earthquake. Each province was governed by a bey appointed by the dey, usually from the same circle of families.

A contingent of the ojaq was assigned to each bey, who also had at his disposal the provincial auxiliaries provided by the privileged makhzen tribes, traditionally exempted from paying taxes on condition that they collect them from other tribes. Tax revenues were conveyed from the provinces to Algiers twice yearly, but the beys were otherwise left to their own devices. Although the regency patronized the tribal chieftains, it never had the unanimous allegiance of the countryside, where heavy taxation frequently provoked unrest. Autonomous tribal states were tolerated, and the regency's authority was seldom applied in the Kabylie.

In 1510 Tripoli Libya was taken by Don Pedro Navarro, Count of Oliveto for Spain, and in 1523, it was assigned to the Knights of St. John, who had lately been expelled by the Ottoman Turks from their stronghold on the island of Rhodes. The knights kept the city with some trouble until 1551, when they were compelled to surrender to the Ottomans, led by Greek Muslim Turgut Reis. After the capture by the Ottoman Turks, Tripoli once again became a base of operation for Barbary pirates.

 

 

 

 

 

The Pirate Ship

 

The favorite ship type of Barbary pirates was the Xebec, these were ships similar to galleys, but having both lateen sails (a triangular sail) and oars for propulsion. Small early Xebecs had two masts; later ones three. Xebecs featured a distinctive hull with pronounced overhanging bow and stern, and rarely displaced more than 200 tons, making them slightly smaller and with slightly fewer guns than frigates of the period.

They built them with a narrow floor to achieve a higher speed than their victims, but with a considerable beam in order to enable them to carry an extensive sail-plan. The lateen rig of the xebec allowed for the ship to sail close-hauled to the wind (as close to the wind direction as it can), often giving it an advantage in pursuit or escape. The use of oars or sweeps allowed the xebec to approach vessels who were becalmed (unable to move because there was no wind). When used as corsairs they carried a crew of 300 to 400 men and mounted perhaps 16 to 40 guns according to size. In peacetime operations, the xebec could transport merchandise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli

 

Wiki article:

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni (1871-April 1925[?]) was the Sharif (descendant of Mohammed) of the Jebala tribe in Morocco at the turn of the 20th Century, and considered by many to be the rightful heir to the throne of Morocco. While regarded by foreigners and the Moroccan government as a brigand, some Moroccans considered him a heroic figure, fighting a repressive, corrupt government, while others considered him a thief. Historian David S. Woolman referred to Raisuni as "a combination Robin Hood, feudal baron and tyrannical bandit." He was considered by many as "The last of the Barbary Pirates".

 

 

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni was born in the village of Zinat sometime in 1871. Due to his place of origin and his reportedly handsome visage, one of his other nicknames was "the Eagle of Zinat." He was the son of a prominent Caid, and began following in his father's footsteps. However, Raisuni eventually drifted into crime, stealing cattle and sheep and earning the ire of Moroccan authorities. He was also widely known as a womanizer. By most accounts, the formative event in Raisuni's life was his arrest and imprisonment by Abd-el-Rahman Abd el-Saduk, the Pasha of Tangier, who was Raisuli's cousin and foster brother. The Pasha had invited Raisuni to dinner in his home in Tangier, only for his men to capture and brutalize Raisuni when he arrived. He was sent to the dungeon of Mogador and chained to a wall for four years; fortunately, his friends were allowed to bring him food, and he managed to survive. Raisuni was released from prison as part of a general clemency early in the reign of Sultan Abdelaziz - ironically, soon to become Raisuni's greatest enemy. Raisuni was hardened by his imprisonment, and returned to criminality after his release. However, he became more ambitious than before, growing to resent the Sultan's fealty to the various European powers - Britain, France, Spain and Germany - jockeying for influence in Morocco. With a small but devoted band of followers, Raisuni embarked on a second career: kidnapping prominent officials and holding them for outrageous ransoms.

Raisuni's first victim was Walter Harris, an Englishman who already knew Raisuni. Raisuni demanded not money, but the release of several of Raisuni's men held in prison; Harris was released after only three weeks captivity. Many of Raisuni's other victims of this time were Moroccan military and political officials; his men only rarely kidnapped Europeans. In between kidnappings, Raisuni extorted villagers living in territories controlled by his followers, executing those who refused to pay. Raisuni also periodically maintained a small fleet of boats for seagoing piracy; however, he was less successful in this endeavor than in his kidnapping and extortion schemes.

Raisuni had a mixed reputation. He became known for his chivalry and respectful attitude towards his hostages; he pledged Ion Perdicaris that he would defend him from any harm, and was known to have befriended many of his other hostages. He was also known as a well-educated man who enjoyed reading any book he could, and was extremely generous to his family and followers. However, towards those who were not worthy of ransom, emissaries of the Pasha and the Sultan, or disloyal to him, he was known for cruelty. A favorite punishment of Raisuni's was burning out an enemy's eyes with heated copper coins. On one occasion, he returned the head of an envoy to the Pasha in a basket of melons.

In 1904, Raisuni was propelled onto the international stage during what was to be known as the "Perdicaris Incident." This is when he kidnapped the Greek-American expatriate Ion Perdicaris and his stepson Cromwell Varley and held them for a ransom of $70,000. American President Theodore Roosevelt, then running for re-election, made political capital out of the incident, sending a squadron of warships to Morocco to force Abdelaziz's compliance with Raisuni's demands, famously proclaiming "Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead!" After a near-confrontation between the government of Morocco and troops of the United States of America, Raisuni received his ransom money and concessions; he was appointed Pasha of Tangier and Governor of Jibala province, and all of his imprisoned followers were released. However, Raisuni was ousted from the post in 1906 due to corruption and cruelty to his subjects; a year later he was again declared an outlaw by the Moroccan government.

Shortly after his dismissal, Raisuni kidnapped Sir Harry "Caid" Maclean, a British army officer serving as a military aide to the Sultan's army. Raisuni ransomed Maclean for £20,000 from the British government. For years, Raisuni continued to antagonize the Moroccan government, even after Abdelaziz's forced abdication. He briefly regained favor with the Moroccan government, by siding with Mulay Hafid's overthrow of Abdelaziz, and was restored again as Pasha of Tangier. However, at the instigation of the Spanish government, the Sultan removed Raisuni from his post in 1912.

In 1913, Raisuni led several Rif tribes in a bloody revolt against the Spanish, and continued a sanguine guerilla conflict against them for almost eight years. His men were finally defeated by Colonel Manuel Fernandez Silvestre, later infamous as the Spanish commander at the Battle of Annual. During World War I, Raisuni was reportedly in contact with agents of the German government to lead a tribal rebellion against France. Responding to these rumors, French troops launched a punitive expedition into Spanish Morocco in May 1915, which dispersed Raisuni's followers but failed to capture Raisuni himself. In September 1922, and after an interview with Colonel José Villalba Riquelme he submitted to the Spanish authorities and subsequently was one of Spanish leaders in the Rif War of the 1920s. He was intensely jealous of Abd el Krim and his growing popularity with the Rif peoples, hoping to gain control of Western Morocco with a Spanish victory.

In January 1925, Krim's followers attacked Raisuni's palace, killing most of his guards and capturing Raisuni. He was reportedly dead by the end of April 1925, having suffered from dropsy for several years. Rumors of his survival persisted, however, as Raisuni had been erroneously reported dead in 1914 and 1923.

 

An American film titled "The Wind and the Lion" ( 1975): was made about the last of the Berber Barbary pirates, Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli. Of course in the "Fantasy" world of Albino history, there were no Blacks, only Albinos and their "close" mulattoes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1711 Ahmed Karamanli killed the Ottoman governor, the "Pasha", and established himself as ruler of the Tripolitania region. By 1714 he had asserted a sort of semi-independence from the Ottoman Sultan, heralding in the Karamanli dynasty. In 1835, the Ottoman Empire took advantage of an internal struggle and re-established its authority.

 


Relations with the United States

European maritime powers paid the tribute demanded by the rulers of the privateering states of North Africa (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco) to prevent attacks on their shipping by corsairs. No longer covered by British tribute payments after the American Revolution, United States merchant ships were seized and sailors enslaved in the years that followed independence. In 1794 the United States Congress appropriated funds for the construction of warships to counter the privateering threat in the Mediterranean. Despite the naval preparations, the United States concluded a treaty with the dey of Algiers in 1797, guaranteeing payment of tribute amounting to US$10 million over a twelve-year period in return for a promise that Algerian corsairs would not molest United States shipping. Payments in ransom and tribute to the privateering states amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

The Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century diverted the attention of the maritime powers from suppressing what they derogatorily called piracy. But when peace was restored to Europe in 1815, Algiers found itself at war with Spain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Denmark, Russia, and Naples. In March of that year, the United States Congress authorized naval action against the Barbary States, the then-independent Muslim states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Commodore Stephen Decatur was dispatched with a squadron of ten warships to ensure the safety of United States shipping in the Mediterranean and to force an end to the payment of tribute. After capturing several corsairs and their crews, Decatur sailed into the harbor of Algiers, threatened the city with his guns, and concluded a favorable treaty in which the dey agreed to discontinue demands for tribute, pay reparations for damage to United States property, release United States prisoners without ransom, and prohibit further interference with United States trade by Algerian corsairs. No sooner had Decatur set off for Tunis to enforce a similar agreement than the dey repudiated the treaty. The next year, an Anglo-Dutch fleet, commanded by British admiral Viscount Exmouth, delivered a punishing, nine-hour bombardment of Algiers. The attack immobilized many of the dey's corsairs and obtained from him a second treaty that reaffirmed the conditions imposed by Decatur. In addition, the dey agreed to end the practice of enslaving Christians.

 

LIBYA COLONY OF ITALY

Italy, which became a unified state only in 1860, was a late starter in the race for colonies. For the Italians, the marginal Turkish provinces in Libya seemed to offer an obvious compensation for their humiliating acquiescence to the establishment of a French protectorate in Tunisia, a country coveted by Italy as a potential colony. Italy intensified its long-standing commercial interests in Libya and, in a series of diplomatic manuevers, won from the major powers their recognition of an Italian sphere of influence there. It was assumed in European capitals that Italy would sooner or later seize the opportunity to take political and military action in Libya as well.

In September 1911 Italy engineered a crisis with Turkey charging that the Turks had committed a "hostile act" by arming Arab tribesmen in Libya. When Turkey refused to respond to an ultimatum calling for Italian military occupation to protect Italian interests in the region, Italy declared war. After a preliminary naval bombardment, Italian troops landed and captured Tripoli on October 3, encountering only slight resistance. Italian forces also occupied Tobruk, Al Khums, Darnah, and Benghazi.

In the ensuing months, the Italian expeditionary force, numbering 35,000, barely penetrated beyond its several beachheads. The 5,000 Turkish troops defending the provinces at the time of the invasion withdrew inland a few kilometers, where officers such as Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) organized the Arab tribes in a resistance to the Italians that took on the aspects of a holy war. But with war threatening in the Balkans, Turkey was compelled to sue for peace with Italy. In accordance with the treaty signed at Lausanne in October 1912, the sultan issued a decree granting independence to Tripolitania and Cyrenaica while Italy simultaneously announced its formal annexation of those territories. In the end, the Turks accepted a peace settlement, and Libya was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. The Italians also occupied the island of Rhodes. Several hundred thousand Sicilians and other southern Italians settled in Tripoli and its environs in the decades to come. The sultan, in his role as caliph (leader of Islam), was to retain his religious jurisdiction there and was permitted to appoint the qadi of Tripoli, who supervised the sharia courts. But the Italians were unable to appreciate that no distinction was made between civil and religious jurisdiction in Islamic law. Thus, through the courts, the Turks kept open a channel of influence over their former subjects and subverted Italian authority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Libyan Berbers of the early 20th century

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the Berbers were not done, in 1912 the Libyan hero Omar Mukhtar (1862 - September 16, 1931), of the Mnifa tribe, near Tobruk in eastern Barqa (Cyrenaica). Organized and for nearly twenty years, led a Berber resistance to Italian occupation of Libya.

 

 

During the Italian war and occupation of Libya, about 50% (YES 50%!) of the Libyan population, mostly Blacks, died in the struggle for independence, mainly in prison camps.

 

Victims of the Italian Genocide in Libya

 

While the Italians regularly massacred civilians and prisoners alike.

The Libyans were generally reluctant to follow suit. When a Berber soldier suggested to Mukhtar that he should authorize the killing of a prisoner:

Mukhtar refused, saying

"We are their teachers, they are not ours!"

 

 

WORLD WAR II AND INDEPENDENCE

As Europe prepared for war, Libyan nationalists at home and in exile perceived that the best chance for liberation from colonial domination lay in Italy's defeat in a larger conflict. Such an opportunity seemed to arise when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, but Mussolini's defiance of the League of Nations and the feeble reaction of Britain and France dashed Libyan hopes for the time being. Planning for liberation resumed, however, with the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939. Libyan political leaders met in Alexandria, Egypt, in October to resolve past differences in the interest of future unity. Idris was accepted as leader of the nationalist cause by Tripolitanians as well as Cyrenaicans, with the proviso that he designate an advisory committee with representatives from both regions to assist him. Differences between the two groups were too deep and long held, however, for the committee to work well.

When Italy entered the war on the side of Germany on June 10, 1940, the Cyrenaican leaders, who for some months had been in contact with British military officers in Egypt, immediately declared their support for the Allies. In Tripolitania, where Italian control was strongest, some opinion initially opposed cooperation with Britain on the ground that if the Allies lost-- which seemed highly possible in 1940--retribution would be severe. But the Cyrenaicans, with their long history of resistance to the Italians, were anxious to resume the conflict and reminded the timid Tripolitanians that conditions in the country could be no worse than they already were. Idris pointed out that it would be of little use to expect the British to support Libyan independence after the war if Libyans had not cooperated actively with them during the war.

After the Italians were expelled by allied forces in 1943, Libya was governed by British forces until independence in 1951. With Omar Mukhtar dead, and so many ethnic Berbers dead, it probably opened the door for Idris I, Emir of Cyrenaica, and Chief of the Senussi Muslim order (founded in Mecca in 1837 by the Algerian Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali Senussi - Idris was his grandson) to assume a leadership role. In 1944, Idris returned from exile in Cairo, and on November 21, 1949 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution stating that Libya should become independent before January 1, 1952.

 

The United Nations and Libya

Disposition of Italian colonial holdings was a question that had to be considered before the peace treaty officially ending the war with Italy could be completed. Technically, Libya remained an Italian possession administered by Britain and France, but at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the Allies--Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States--agreed that the Italian colonies seized during the war should not be returned to Italy. Further consideration of the question was delegated to the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers, which included a French representative; although all council members initially favored some form of trusteeship, no formula could be devised for disposing of Libya. The United States suggested a trusteeship for the whole country under control of the United Nations (UN), whose charter had become effective in October 1945, to prepare it for self-government. The Soviet Union proposed separate provincial trusteeships, claiming Tripolitania for itself and assigning Fezzan to France and Cyrenaica to Britain. France, seeing no end to the discussions, advocated the return of the territory to Italy. To break the impasse, Britain finally recommended immediate independence for Libya.

INDEPENDENT LIBYA

Under the constitution of October 1951, the federal monarchy of Libya was headed by King Idris as chief of state, with succession to his designated heirs.

 

 

 

The Senussi or Sanussi

 

The Senussi/Sanussi refers to a Muslim political-religious Sufi order and tribe in Libya and the Sudan region founded in Mecca in 1837 by the Grand Senussi, Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi. The Senussi claim a direct lineage to the Prophet Muhammed. Senussi was concerned with both the decline of Islamic thought and spirituality and the weakening of Muslim political integrity. From 1902 to 1913 the Senussi fought French expansion in the Sahara, and the Italian colonisation of Libya beginning in 1911. In World War I, the Senussi fought against the British in Egypt and Sudan. During World War II the Senussi tribe provided vital support to the British 8th Army in North Africa against the German and Italian forces. The Grand Senussi's grandson became King Idris of Libya in 1951. An unknown part of the population in Libya continue to be affiliated with the Senussi movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The September 1969 Coup

On September 1, 1969, in a daring coup d'état, a group of about seventy young army officers and enlisted men, mostly assigned to the Signal Corps, and led by then 27-year-old army officer Muammar al-Gaddafiseized control of the government and in a stroke abolished the Libyan monarchy. The coup was launched at Benghazi, and within two hours the takeover was completed. Army units quickly rallied in support of the coup, and within a few days firmly established military control in Tripoli and elsewhere throughout the country. Popular reception of the coup, especially by younger people in the urban areas, was enthusiastic. Fears of resistance in Cyrenaica and Fezzan proved unfounded. No deaths or violent incidents related to the coup were reported. The officers abolished the monarchy, and proclaimed the new Libyan "Arab" Republic, with Gaddafi as it's leader. Muammar al Qadhafi thus became president for life.

 

 

 

 

FRANCE IN ALGERIA - 1830-1962

In the period between Napoleon's downfall in 1815 and the revolution of 1830, the restored French monarchy was in crisis, and the dey was weak politically, economically, and militarily. The French monarch sought to reverse his domestic unpopularity. As a result of what the French considered an insult to the French consul in Algiers by the dey in 1827, France blockaded Algiers for three years. France used the failure of the blockade as a reason for a military expedition against Algiers in 1830.

Using Napoleon's 1808 contingency plan for the invasion of Algeria, 34,000 French soldiers landed twenty-seven kilometers west of Algiers, at Sidi Ferruch, on June 12, 1830. To face the French, the dey sent 7,000 janissaries, 19,000 troops from the beys of Constantine and Oran, and about 17,000 Kabyles. The French established a strong beachhead and pushed toward Algiers, thanks in part to superior artillery and better organization. Algiers was captured after a three-week campaign, and Hussein Dey fled into exile. French troops raped, looted (taking 50 million francs from the treasury in the Casbah), desecrated mosques, and destroyed cemeteries. It was an inauspicious beginning to France's self-described "civilizing mission," whose character on the whole was cynical, arrogant, and cruel. In 1834 France annexed the occupied areas, which had an estimated Muslim population of about 3 million, as a colony.

Even before the decision was made to annex Algeria, major changes had taken place. In a bargain-hunting frenzy to take over or buy at low prices all manner of property: homes, shops, farms and factories: Europeans poured into Algiers after it fell. French authorities took possession of the beylik lands, from which Ottoman officials had derived income. Over time, as pressures increased to obtain more land for settlement by Europeans, the state seized more categories of land, particularly that used by tribes, religious foundations, and villages.

Soon after the conquest of Algiers, the soldier-politician Bertrand Clauzel and others formed a company to acquire agricultural land and, despite official discouragement, to subsidize its settlement by European farmers, triggering a land rush. Clauzel recognized the farming potential of the Mitidja Plain and envisioned the production there of cotton on a large scale. As governor general (1835-36), he used his office to make private investments in land and encouraged army officers and bureaucrats in his administration to do the same. They created large agricultural tracts, built factories and businesses, and exploited cheap local labor.

Called colons (colonists) or, more popularly, pieds noirs (literally, black feet), the European settlers were largely of peasant farmer or working-class origin from the poor southern areas of Italy, Spain, and France. Others were criminal and political deportees from France, transported under sentence in large numbers to Algeria. In the 1840s and 1850s, to encourage settlement in rural areas official policy was to offer grants of land for a fee and a promise that improvements would be made. A distinction soon developed between the grands colons (great colonists) at one end of the scale, often self-made men who had accumulated large estates or built successful businesses, and the petits blancs (little whites), smallholders and workers at the other end, whose lot was often not much better than that of their Muslim counterparts. According to historian John Ruedy, although by 1848 only 15,000 of the 109,000 European settlers were in rural areas, "by systematically expropriating both pastoralists and farmers, rural colonization was the most important single factor in the destructuring of traditional society."

Whatever initial misgivings Louis Philippe's government may have had about occupying Algeria, the geopolitical realities of the situation created by the 1830 intervention argued strongly for reinforcing the French presence there. France had reason for concern that Britain, which was pledged to maintain the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, would move to fill the vacuum left by a French pullout. The French devised elaborate plans for settling the hinterland left by Ottoman provincial authorities in 1830, but their efforts at state building were unsuccessful on account of lengthy armed resistance.

The most successful local opposition immediately after the fall of Algiers was led by Turk Ahmad ibn Muhammad, bey of Constantine. He initiated a radical overhaul of the Ottoman administration in his beylik by replacing Turkish officials with local leaders, making Arabic the official language, and attempting to reform finances according to the precepts of Islam. After the French failed in several attempts to gain some of the bey's territories through negotiation, an illfated invasion force led by Bertrand Clauzel had to retreat from Constantine in 1836 in humiliation and defeat. Nonetheless, the French captured Constantine the following year.

The French faced other opposition as well in the area. The superior of a religious brotherhood, the Turk Muhyi ad Din, who had spent time in Ottoman jails for opposing the dey's rule, launched attacks against the French and their makhzen (a Moroccan term for the governing elite in Morocco) allies at Oran (northwestern coast of Algeria) in 1832. In the same year, tribal elders chose Muhyi ad Din's son, twenty-five-year-old Abd al Qadir, to take his place leading the jihad. Abd al Qadir, who was recognized as amir al muminin (commander of the faithful), quickly gained the support of tribes throughout Algeria. A devout and austere marabout, he was also a cunning political leader and a resourceful warrior. From his capital in Tlemcen, Abd al Qadir set about building a territorial Muslim state based on the communities of the interior but drawing its strength from the tribes and religious brotherhoods. By 1839 he controlled more than two-thirds of Algeria. His government maintained an army and a bureaucracy, collected taxes, supported education, undertook public works, and established agricultural and manufacturing cooperatives to stimulate economic activity.

The French in Algiers viewed with concern the success of a Muslim government and the rapid growth of a viable territorial state that barred the extension of European settlement. Abd al Qadir fought running battles across Algeria with French forces, which included units of the Foreign Legion, organized in 1831 for Algerian service. Although his forces were defeated by the French under General Thomas Bugeaud in 1836, Abd al Qadir negotiated a favorable peace treaty the next year. The treaty gained conditional recognition for Abd al Qadir's regime by defining the territory under its control and salvaged his prestige among the tribes just as the shaykhs (an elder of a tribe, a revered wise man, or an Islamic scholar). were about to desert him. To provoke new hostilities, the French deliberately broke the treaty in 1839 by occupying Constantine. Abd al Qadir took up the holy war again, destroyed the French settlements on the Mitidja Plain, and at one point advanced to the outskirts of Algiers itself. He struck where the French were weakest and retreated when they advanced against him in greater strength. The government moved from camp to camp with the amir and his army. Gradually, however, superior French resources and manpower and the defection of tribal chieftains took their toll. Reinforcements poured into Algeria after 1840 until Bugeaud had at his disposal 108,000 men, one-third of the French army. Bugeaud's strategy was to destroy Abd al Qadir's bases, then to starve the population by destroying its means of subsistence: crops, orchards, and herds. On several occasions, French troops burned or asphyxiated noncombatants hiding from the terror in caves. One by one, the amir's strongholds fell to the French, and many of his ablest commanders were killed or captured so that by 1843 the Muslim state had collapsed. Abd al Qadir took refuge with his ally, the sultan of Morocco, Abd ar Rahman II, and launched raids into Algeria. However, Abd al Qadir was obliged to surrender to the commander of Oran Province, General Louis de Lamoricière, at the end of 1847.

Abd al Qadir was promised safe conduct to Egypt or Palestine if his followers laid down their arms and kept the peace. He accepted these conditions, but the minister of war, who years earlier as general in Algeria had been badly defeated by Abd al Qadir, had him consigned to prison in France. In 1852 Louis Napoleon, the president of the Second Republic who would soon establish the Second Empire as Napoleon III, freed Abd al Qadir and gave him a pension of 150,000 francs. In 1855 Abd al Qadir moved from the Byrsa, the citadel area of Carthage, to Damascus. There in 1860 Abd al Qadir intervened to save the lives of an estimated 12,000 Christians, including the French consul and staff, during a massacre instigated by local Ottoman officials. The French government, in appreciation, conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor, and additional honors followed from a number of other European governments. Declining all invitations to return to public life, he devoted himself to scholarly pursuits and charity until his death in Damascus in 1883.

Abd al Qadir is recognized and venerated as the first hero of Algerian independence. Not without cause, his green and white standard was adopted by the Algerian liberation movement during the War of Independence and became the national flag of independent Algeria. The Algerian government brought his remains back to Algeria to be interred with much ceremony on July 5, 1966, the fourth anniversary of independence and the 136th anniversary of the French conquest. A mosque bearing his name has been constructed as a national shrine in Constantine.

A royal ordinance in 1845 called for three types of administration in Algeria. In areas where Europeans were a substantial part of the population, colons elected mayors and councils for self-governing "full exercise" communes (communes de plein exercice). In the "mixed" communes, where Muslims were a large majority, government was in the hands of appointed and some elected officials, including representatives of the grands chefs (great chieftains) and a French administrator. The indigenous communes (communes indigènes), remote areas not adequately pacified, remained under the régime du sabre.

By 1848 nearly all of northern Algeria was under French control. Important tools of the colonial administration, were the bureaux arabes (Arab offices), staffed by Arabs whose function was to collect information on the indigenous people and to carry out administrative functions, nominally in cooperation with the army. The bureaux arabes on occasion acted with sympathy to the local population and formed a buffer between Muslims and rapacious colons.

Under the régime du sabre, the colons had been permitted limited self-government in areas where European settlement was most intense. The colons charged that the bureaux arabes hindered the progress of colonization. They agitated against military rule, complaining that their legal rights were denied under the arbitrary controls imposed on the colony and insisting on a civil administration for Algeria fully integrated with metropolitan France.

Shortly after Louis Philippe's constitutional monarchy was overthrown in the revolution of 1848, the new government of the Second Republic ended Algeria's status as a colony and declared the occupied lands an integral part of France. European migration, encouraged during the Second Republic, stimulated the civilian administration to open new land for settlement against the advice of the army.

Napoleon III visited Algeria twice in the early 1860s. He was profoundly impressed with the nobility and virtue of the tribal chieftains, who appealed to the emperor's romantic nature, and was shocked by the self-serving attitude of the colon leaders. He determined to halt the expansion of European settlement beyond the coastal zone and to restrict contact between Muslims and the colons, whom he considered to have a corrupting influence on the indigenous population. He envisioned a grand design for preserving most of Algeria for the Muslims by founding a royaume arabe (Arab kingdom) with himself as the roi des Arabes (king of the Arabs). He instituted the so-called politics of the grands chefs to deal with the Muslims directly through their traditional leaders.

To further his plans for the royaume arabe, Napoleon III issued two decrees affecting tribal structure, land tenure, and the legal status of Muslims in French Algeria. The first, promulgated in 1863, was intended to renounce the state's claims to tribal lands and eventually provide private plots to individuals in the tribes, thus dismantling "feudal" structures and protecting the lands from the colons. Tribal areas were to be identified, delimited into douars (administrative units), and given over to councils. Arable land was to be divided among members of the douar over a period of one to three generations, after which it could be bought and sold by the individual owners. Unfortunately for the tribes, however, the plans of Napoleon III quickly unraveled. French officials sympathetic to the colons took much of the tribal land they surveyed into the public domain. In addition, some tribal leaders immediately sold communal lands for quick gains. The process of converting arable land to individual ownership was accelerated to only a few years when laws were enacted in the 1870s stipulating that no sale of land by an individual Muslim could be invalidated by the claim that it was collectively owned. The cudah and other tribal officials, appointed by the French on the basis of their loyalty to France rather than the allegiance owed them by the tribe, lost their credibility as they were drawn into the European orbit, becoming known derisively as beni-oui-ouis (yes-men).

When the Prussians captured Napoleon III at the Battle of Sedan (1870), ending the Second Empire, the colons in Algiers toppled the military government and installed a civilian administration. Meanwhile, in France the government directed one of its ministers, Adolphe Crémieux, "to destroy the military regime . . . [and] to completely assimilate Algeria into France." In October 1870, Crémieux, whose concern with Algerian affairs dated from the time of the Second Republic, issued a series of decrees providing for representation of the Algerian départements in the National Assembly of France and confirming colon control over local administration. A civilian governor general was made responsible to the Ministry of Interior. The Crémieux Decrees also granted blanket French citizenship to Algerian Jews, who then numbered about 40,000. This act set them apart from Muslims, in whose eyes they were identified thereafter with the colons. The measure had to be enforced, however, over the objections of the colons, who made little distinction between Muslims and Jews. (Automatic citizenship was subsequently extended in 1889 to children of non- French Europeans born in Algeria unless they specifically rejected it.)

The loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871 led to pressure on the French government to make new land available in Algeria for about 5,000 Alsatian and Lorrainer refugees who were resettled there. During the 1870s, both the amount of European- owned land and the number of settlers were doubled, and tens of thousands of unskilled Muslims, who had been uprooted from their land, wandered into the cities or to colon farming areas in search of work.

The most serious native insurrection since the time of Abd al Qadir broke out in 1871 in the Kabylie and spread through much of Algeria. The revolt was triggered by Crémieux's extension of civil (that is, colon) authority to previously self-governing tribal reserves and the abrogation of commitments made by the military government, but it clearly had its basis in more long- standing grievances. Since the Crimean War (1854-56), the demand for grain had pushed up the price of Algerian wheat to European levels. Silos were emptied when the world market's impact was felt in Algeria, and Muslim farmers sold their grain reserves-- including seed grain--to speculators. But the community-owned silos were the fundamental adaptation of a subsistence economy to an unpredictable climate, and a good year's surplus was stored away against a bad year's dearth. When serious drought struck Algeria and grain crops failed in 1866 and for several years following, Muslim areas faced starvation, and with famine came pestilence. It was estimated that 20 percent of the Muslim population of Constantine died over a three-year period. In 1871 the civil authorities repudiated guarantees made to tribal chieftains by the previous military government for loans to replenish their seed supply. This act alienated even pro-French Muslim leaders, while it undercut their ability to control their people. It was against this background of misery and hopelessness that the stricken Kabyles rose in revolt.

In the aftermath of the 1871 uprising, French authorities imposed stern measures to punish and control the whole Muslim population. France confiscated more than 500,000 hectares of tribal land and placed the Kabylie under a régime d'exception (extraordinary rule), which denied the due process guaranteed French nationals. A special indigénat (native code) listed as offenses acts such as insolence and unauthorized assembly not punishable by French law, and the normal jurisdiction of the cudah was sharply restricted. The governor general was empowered to jail suspects for up to five years without trial. The argument was made in defense of these exceptional measures that the French penal code as applied to Frenchmen was too permissive to control Muslims.

Hegemony of the Colons

A commission of inquiry set up by the French Senate in 1892 and headed by former Premier Jules Ferry, an advocate of colonial expansion, recommended that the government abandon a policy that assumed French law, without major modifications, could fit the needs of an area inhabited by close to 2 million Europeans and 4 million Muslims. Muslims had no representation in Algeria's National Assembly and were grossly underrepresented on local councils. Because of the many restrictions imposed by the authorities, by 1915 only 50,000 Muslims were eligible to vote in elections in the civil communes. Attempts to implement even the most modest reforms were blocked or delayed by the local administration in Algeria, dominated by colons, and by colon representatives in the National Assembly, to which each of the three départements sent six deputies and three senators.

Once elected to the National Assembly, colons became permanent fixtures. Because of their seniority, they exercised disproportionate influence, and their support was important to any government's survival. The leader of the colon delegation, Auguste Warnier, succeeded during the 1870s and 1880s in modifying or introducing legislation to facilitate the private transfer of land to settlers and continue the Algerian state's appropriation of land from the local population and distribution to settlers. Consistent proponents of reform, like Georges Clemenceau and socialist Jean Jaurès, were rare in the National Assembly.

The bulk of Algeria's wealth in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and trade was controlled by the grands colons. The modern European-owned and -managed sector of the economy centered around small industry and a highly developed export trade, designed to provide food and raw materials to France in return for capital and consumer goods. Europeans held about 30 percent of the total arable land, including the bulk of the most fertile land and most of the areas under irrigation. By 1900 Europeans produced more than two-thirds of the value of output in agriculture and practically all agricultural exports. The modern, or European, sector was run on a commercial basis and meshed with the French market system that it supplied with wine, citrus, olives, and vegetables. Nearly half of the value of European-owned real property was in vineyards by 1914. By contrast, subsistence cereal production--supplemented by olive, fig, and date growing and stock raising--formed the basis of the traditional sector, but the land available for cropping was submarginal even for cereals under prevailing traditional cultivation practices.

The colonial regime imposed more and higher taxes on Muslims than on Europeans. The Muslims, in addition to paying traditional taxes dating from before the French conquest, also paid new taxes, from which the colons were often exempted. In 1909, for instance, Muslims, who made up almost 90 percent of the population but produced 20 percent of Algeria's income, paid 70 percent of direct taxes and 45 percent of the total taxes collected. And colons controlled how these revenues would be spent. As a result, colon towns had handsome municipal buildings, paved streets lined with trees, fountains and statues, while Algerian villages and rural areas benefited little if at all from tax revenues.

The colonial regime proved severely detrimental to overall education for Algerian Muslims, who had previously relied on religious schools to learn reading, writing, and engage in religious studies. Not only did the state appropriate the habus lands (the religious foundations that constituted the main source of income for religious institutions, including schools) in 1843, but colon officials refused to allocate enough money to maintain schools and mosques properly and to provide for an adequate number of teachers and religious leaders for the growing population. In 1892 more than five times as much was spent for the education of Europeans as for Muslims, who had five times as many children of school age. Because few Muslim teachers were trained, Muslim schools were largely staffed by French teachers. Even a state-operated madrasah (school) often had French faculty members. Attempts to institute bilingual, bicultural schools, intended to bring Muslim and European children together in the classroom, were a conspicuous failure, rejected by both communities and phased out after 1870. According to one estimate, fewer than 5 percent of Algerian children attended any kind of school in 1870.

Efforts were begun by 1890 to educate a small number of Muslims along with European students in the French school system as part of France's "civilizing mission" in Algeria. The curriculum was entirely French and allowed no place for Arabic studies, which were deliberately downgraded even in Muslim schools. Within a generation, a class of well-educated, gallicized Muslims--the évolués (literally, the evolved ones)--had been created. Almost all of the handful of Muslims who accepted French citizenship were évolués; more significantly, it was in this privileged group of Muslims, strongly influenced by French culture and political attitudes, that a new Algerian self-consciousness developed.

Reporting to the French Senate in 1894, Governor General Jules Cambon wrote that Algeria had "only a dust of people left her." He referred to the destruction of the traditional ruling class that had left Muslims without leaders and had deprived France of interlocuteurs valables (literally, valid gobetweens ), through whom to reach the masses of the people. He lamented that no genuine communication was possible between the two communities.

The colons who ran Algeria maintained a condescending dialogue only with the beni-oui-ouis. Later they deliberately thwarted contact between the évolués and Muslim traditionalists on the one hand and between évolués and official circles in France on the other. They feared and mistrusted the francophone évolués, who were classified either as assimilationists, insisting on being accepted as Frenchmen but on their own terms, or as integrationists, eager to work as members of a distinct Muslim elite on equal terms with the French.

Algerian Nationalism

One of the earliest movements for political reform was an integrationist group, the Young Algerians (Jeunesse Algérienne). Its members were drawn from the small, liberal elite of well educated , middle-class évolués who demanded an opportunity to prove that they were French as well as Muslim. In 1908 they delivered to France's Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau a petition that expressed opposition under the status quo to a proposed policy to conscript Muslim Algerians into the French army. If, however, the state granted the Muslims full citizenship, the petition went on, opposition to conscription would be dropped. In 1911, in addition to demanding preferential treatment for "the intellectual elements of the country," the group called for an end to unequal taxation, broadening of the franchise, more schools, and protection of indigenous property. The Young Algerians added a significant voice to the reformist movement against French colonial policy that began in 1892 and continued until the outbreak of World War I. In part to reward Muslims who fought and died for France, Clemenceau appointed reform-minded Charles Jonnart as governor general. Reforms promulgated in 1919 and known as the Jonnart Law expanded the number of Muslims permitted to vote to about 425,000. The legislation also removed all voters from the jurisdiction of the humiliating indigénat.

The most popular Muslim leader in Algeria after the war was Khalid ibn Hashim, grandson of Abd al Qadir and a member of the Young Algerians, although he differed with some members of the group over acceptance of the Jonnart Law. Some Young Algerians were willing to work within the framework set out by the reforms, but Emir Khalid, as he was known, continued to press for the complete Young Algerian program. He was able to win electoral victories in Algiers and to enliven political discourse with his calls for reform and full assimilation, but by 1923 he tired of the struggle and left Algeria, eventually retiring to Damascus.

Some of the Young Algerians in 1926 formed the Federation of Elected Natives (Fédération des Elus Indigènes--FEI), as many of the former group's members had joined the circle of Muslims eligible to hold public office. The federation's objectives were the assimilation of the évolués into the French community, with full citizenship but without surrendering their personal status as Muslims, and the eventual integration of Algeria as a full province of France. Other objectives included equal pay for equal work for government employees, abolition of travel restrictions to and from France, abolition of the indigénat (which had been reinstituted earlier), and electoral reform.

The first group to call for Algerian independence was the Star of North Africa (Étoile Nord-Africain, known as Star). The group was originally a solidarity group formed in 1926 in Paris to coordinate political activity among North African workers in France and to defend "the material, moral, and social interests of North African Muslims." The leaders included members of the French Communist Party and its labor confederation, and in the early years of the struggle for independence the party provided material and moral support. Ahmed Messali Hadj, the Star's secretary general, enunciated the groups demands in 1927. In addition to independence from France, the Star called for freedom of press and association, a parliament chosen through universal suffrage, confiscation of large estates, and the institution of Arabic schools.

The Star was banned in 1929 and operated underground until 1934, when its newspaper reached a circulation of 43,500. Influenced by the Arab nationalist ideas of Lebanese Druze Shakib Arslan, Messali Hadj turned away from communist ideology to a more nationalist outlook, for which the French Communist Party attacked the Star. He returned to Algeria to organize urban workers and peasant farmers and in 1937 founded the Party of the Algerian People (Parti du Peuple Algérien--PPA) to mobilize the Algerian working class at home and in France to improve its situation through political action. For Messali Hadj, who ruled the PPA with an iron hand, these aims were inseparable from the struggle for an independent Algeria in which socialist and Islamic values would be fused.

Algerian Muslims rallied to the French side at the start of World War II as they had done in World War I. Nazi Germany's quick defeat of France, however, and the establishment of the collaborationist Vichy regime, to which the colons were generally sympathetic, not only increased the difficulties of the Muslims but also posed an ominous threat to the Jews in Algeria. The Algerian administration vigorously enforced the anti-Semitic laws imposed by Vichy, which stripped Algerian Jews of their French citizenship. Potential opposition leaders in both the European and the Muslim communities were arrested.

After the fall of the Vichy regime in Algeria, General Henri Giraud, Free French commander in chief in North Africa, slowly rescinded repressive Vichy laws despite opposition by colon extremists. He also called on the Muslim population to supply troops for the Allied war effort. Ferhat Abbas (from a family of provincial administrators and landowners) and twenty-four other Muslim leaders replied that Algerians were ready to fight with the Allies in freeing their homeland but demanded the right to call a conference of Muslim representatives to develop political, economic, and social institutions for the indigenous population "within an essentially French framework." Giraud, who succeeded in raising an army of 250,000 men to fight in the Italian campaign, refused to consider this proposal, explaining that "politics" must wait until the end of the war.

In March 1943, Abbas, who had abandoned assimilation as a viable alternative to self-determination, presented the French administration with the Manifesto of the Algerian People, signed by fifty-six Algerian nationalist and international leaders. Outlining the past evils of colonial rule and denouncing continued suppression, the manifesto demanded specifically an Algerian constitution that would guarantee immediate and effective political participation and legal equality for Muslims. It called for agrarian reform, recognition of Arabic as an official language on equal terms with French, recognition of a full range of civil liberties, and the liberation of political prisoners of all parties.

Instead, the French administration in 1944 instituted a reform package, based on the 1936 Viollette Plan, that granted full French citizenship to certain categories of "meritorious" Algerian Muslims--military officers and decorated veterans, university graduates, government officials, and members of the Legion of Honor--who numbered about 60,000.

Abbas called for a free, secular, and republican Algeria loosely federated with France. Upon his release from five-year house arrest, Messali Hadj returned to Algeria and formed the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques--MTLD), which quickly drew supporters from a broad cross-section of society. Committed to unequivocal independence, the MTLD firmly opposed Abbas's proposal for federation. The PPA continued to operate, but clandestinely, always striving for an independent, Arab, and Islamic Algeria. The clandestine Special Organization (Organisation Spéciale--OS) was created within the MTLD by Hocine Ait Ahmed in 1947 to conduct terrorist operations when political protest through legal channels was suppressed by authorities. Ait Ahmed was later succeeded as chief of the OS by former french soldier Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the early Algerian nationalist leaders.

Ben Bella created a new underground action committee to replace the OS, which had been broken up by the French police in 1950. The new group, the Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action (Comité Révolutionnaire d'Unité et d'Action--CRUA), was based in Cairo, where Ben Bella had fled in 1952. Known as the chefs historiques (historical chiefs), the group's nine original leaders--Ait Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf, Belkacem Krim, Rabah Bitat, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, Mourad Didouch, Moustafa Ben Boulaid, Mohamed Khider, and Ben Bella--were considered the leaders of the Algerian War of Independence.

 

 

Between March and October 1954, the CRUA organized a military network in Algeria comprising six military regions (referred to at the time as wilayat; sing., wilaya). The leaders of these regions and their followers became known as the "internals." Ben Bella, Khider, and Ait Ahmed formed the External Delegation in Cairo. Encouraged by Egypt's President Gamal Abdul Nasser (r. 1954-71), their role was to gain foreign support for the rebellion and to acquire arms, supplies, and funds for the wilaya commanders. In October the CRUA renamed itself the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale--FLN), which assumed responsibility for the political direction of the revolution. The National Liberation Army (Armée de Libération Nationale--ALN), the FLN's military arm, was to conduct the War of Independence within Algeria.

 

 

War of Independence

In the early morning hours of All Saints' Day, November 1, 1954, (Front de Libération Nationale--FLN), maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks in various parts of Algeria against military installations, police posts, warehouses, communications facilities, and public utilities. From Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Muslims in Algeria to join in a national struggle for the "restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam." The French minister of interior, socialist François Mitterrand, responded sharply that "the only possible negotiation is war." It was the reaction of Premier Pierre Mendès-France, who only a few months before had completed the liquidation of France's empire in Indochina, that set the tone of French policy for the next five years. On November 12, he declared in the National Assembly: "One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French . . . . Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession."

 

 

After a long and costly War:

The creation of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria was formally proclaimed at the opening session of the National Assembly on September 25, 1962. Abbas, a moderate unconnected with the Political Bureau, was elected president of the assembly by the delegates. On the following day, after being named premier, Ben Bella formed a cabinet that was representative of the Political Bureau but that also included Boumediene as defense minister as well as other members of the so-called Oujda Group, who had served under him with the external forces in Morocco. Ben Bella, Boumediene, and Khider initially formed a triumvirate linking the leadership of the three power bases--the army, the party, and the government, respectively. However, Ben Bella's ambitions and authoritarian tendencies were to lead the triumvirate to unravel and provoke increasing discontent among Algerians.

 

 

 

Why France has become a prime target for terrorists

Business Insider
Pamela Engel - Mar 19th 2016

Tensions surrounding France's Muslim community have long been simmering, as George Packer, a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker who covered the Iraq war, chronicled in an August article. The article, titled "The Other France," wondered whether Paris suburbs are an "incubator for terrorism." "France has all kinds of suburbs, but the word for them, banlieues, has become pejorative, meaning slums dominated by immigrants," Packer wrote.

"Inside the banlieues are the cités: colossal concrete housing projects built during the postwar decades, in the Brutalist style of Le Corbusier. Conceived as utopias for workers, they have become concentrations of poverty and social isolation. The cités and their occupants are the subject of anxious and angry discussion in France.

After the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo earlier last year, which was carried out by Al-Qaeda operatives, local activists in a Paris banlieue worried that it would divide France even more. "I fear for the Muslims of France," one woman wrote on an activist's Facebook page, according to Packer. "The narrow-minded or frightened are going to dig in their heels and make an amalgame" to conflate terrorists with all Muslims, the woman said.

Packer explained the context of the tensions between some French people and families who came over from Algeria:

When Algeria was settled by Europeans, in the early nineteenth century, it became part of greater France, and remained so until 1962, when independence was achieved, after an eight-year war in which seven hundred thousand people died. It's hard to overstate how heavily this intimate, sad history has been repressed. "The Battle of Algiers," the filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo's neo-realist masterpiece about insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism, and torture in Algiers, was banned in France for five years after its release, in 1966, and it remains taboo there. On October 17, 1961, during demonstrations by pro-independence Algerians in Paris and its suburbs, the French police killed some two hundred people, throwing many bodies off bridges into the Seine. It took forty years for France to acknowledge that this massacre had occurred, and the incident remains barely mentioned in schools. Young people in the banlieues told me that colonial history is cursorily taught, and literature from former colonies hardly read.

Andrew Hussey, a British scholar at the University of London School of Advanced Study in Paris, told Packer: "The kids in the banlieues live in this perpetual present of weed, girls, gangsters, Islam. They have no sense of history, no sense of where they come from in North Africa, other than localized bits of Arabic that they don't understand, bits of Islam that don't really make sense." This can be isolating for Muslims in Paris's suburbs.

Packer explained that citizens of immigrant descent "often identify whites with the term Français de souche — 'French from the roots.' The implication is that people with darker skin are not fully French."

 

Interesting - the different activities by Race.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1900, the estimated population of Tunisia was 1,960,000. Today the French, Italian, and other European immigrants have swelled that number to 10,000,000.

 

The current leaders

Mr. Bouteflika claims Berber heritage
Mr. Ben Ali claims Arab heritage

 

 

MAURITANIA

The contemporary social structure of Mauritania can be dated from 1674. The warrior groups or Arabs dominated the Berber groups, who turned to clericalism to regain a degree of ascendancy. At the bottom of the social structure were the slaves, subservient to both warriors and Islamic holy men. All of these groups, whose language was Hassaniya Arabic, became known as Maures. The bitter rivalries and resentments characteristic of their social structure were later fully exploited by the French.

Despite the Almoravid domination of Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there seems to be little evidence of contact during that time between Mauritania and Europe. The inhospitable coastline of Mauritania continued to deter voyagers until the Portuguese began their African explorations in the fifteenth century. Lured by legends of vast wealth in interior kingdoms, the Portuguese established a trading fort at Arguin, southeast of Cap Blanc (present-day Ras Nouadhibou), in 1455. The king of Portugal also maintained a commercial agent at Ouadane in the Adrar in an attempt to divert gold traveling north by caravan. Having only slight success in their quest for gold, the Portuguese quickly adapted to dealing in slaves. In the midfifteenth century, as many as 1,000 slaves per year were exported from Arguin to Europe and to the Portuguese sugar plantations on the island of Sao Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea.

With the merger of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in 1580, the Spaniards became the dominant influence along the coast. In 1638, however, they were replaced by the Dutch, who were the first to begin exploiting the gum arabic trade. Produced by the acacia trees of Trarza and Brakna and used in textile pattern printing, this gum arabic was considered superior to that previously obtained in Arabia. By 1678 the French had driven out the Dutch and established a permanent settlement at Saint Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, where the French Company of the Senegal River (Compagnie Française du Sénégal) had been trading for more than fifty years.

The Maures, with whom the Europeans were trading, considered the constant rivalries between European powers a sign of weakness, and they quickly learned the benefits of playing one power against the other. For example, they agreed simultaneously to give monopolies to the French and the Dutch. The Maures also took advantage of the Europeans whenever possible, so that when the French negotiated with the amir of Trarza to secure a monopoly on the gum Arabic trade, the amir in exchange demanded a considerable number of gifts. Thus began the coutume, an annual payment expected by the Maures for doing business with a government or a company. By 1763 the British had expelled France from the West African coast, and France recovered control only when the Congress of Vienna in 1815 recognized French sovereignty over the coast of West Africa from Cap Blanc south to Senegal.

 

 

 

 

 

MOROCCO

The Alaouite Dynasty is the name of the current Moroccan royal family. The name Alaouite comes from its founder Moulay Ali Cherif who became Sultan of Tafilalt in 1631. His son Mulay r-Rshid (1664–1672) was able to unite and pacify the country. The Alaouite family claim descent from Muhammad through the line of Fātimah az-Zahrah, Muhammad's daughter, and her husband, the Fourth Caliph ‘Alī ibn Abī ālib. According to some legends the Alaouites entered Morocco at the end of the 13th century when Al Hassan Addakhil, who lived then in the town of Yanbu in the Hejaz, was brought to Morocco by the inhabitants of Tafilalet to be their imām. They were hoping that, as he was a descendant of Muhammad, his presence would help to improve their date palm crops.

 

 

In 1659, the last Saadī sultan was overthrown in the conquest of Marrakech by Mulay r-Rshid (1664–1672). After the victory over the zāwiya (Sanhadja Berbers) of Dila (middle Atlas), who controlled northern Morocco, he was able to unite and pacify the country. The organization of the kingdom developed under Ismail Ibn Sharif (1672–1727), who, against the opposition of local tribes began to create a unified state. Because the Alaouites, in contrast to previous dynasties, did not have the support of a single Berber or Bedouin tribe, Isma'īl controlled Morocco through an army from sub-Saharan Africa. With these soldiers he drove the English from Tangiers (1684) and the Spanish from Larache (1689.) However, the unity of Morocco did not survive his death — in the ensuing power struggles the tribes became a political and military force once again. Only with Muhammad III (1757–1790) could the kingdom be pacified again and the administration reorganized. A renewed attempt at centralization was abandoned and the tribes allowed to preserve their autonomy.

 

 

Albinos view history as merely an opportunity to propagandize themselves as important, involved participants, and shapers of history. Thus they made themselves ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Hebrews, American Indians, and now they are Arabs. And in situations were they cannot FAKE participation, they will cavalierly make stuff up - including images. These images are found in European museums and books.

 

 

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Note this menagerie of fancifully drawn images of Moroccan rulers. Note that a common background and clothing is used throughout. Clearly there is no attempt to accurately depict anyone, caricature is used:

except when they decide to introduce an Albino to the mix!

 

 

The Alaouite sultan is said to be the father of over a thousand children, a total 867 children including 525 sons and 342 daughters was noted by 1703 and gained a 700th son in 1721. Meknes, the capital city he built, is sometimes called the "Versailles of Morocco", because of its extravagance. Some of the stones were plundered from the ancient Roman ruins at Volubilis. He has also been given the epithet "The bloodthirsty" for his legendary cruelty. In order to intimidate rivals, Ismail ordered that his city walls be adorned with 10,000 heads of slain enemies. Legends of the ease in which Ismail could behead or torture laborers or servants he thought to be lazy are numerous. Within the 20 years of Ismail's rule, it is estimated 30,000 people died.

During Moulay Ismaïl's reign, Morocco's capital city was moved from Fez to Meknes. Like his contemporary King Louis XIV of France, Moulay Ismail began construction of an elaborate imperial palace and other monuments. In 1682 he sent Mohammed Tenim as an ambassador to Louis XIV, and he even made an offer of marriage to Louis XIV's beautiful legitimised daughter Marie Anne de Bourbon. Marie Anne refused.

Moulay Ismaïl is noted as one of the greatest figures in Moroccan history. He fought the Ottoman Turks in 1679, 1682 and 1695/96. After these battles the Moroccan independence was respected. Another problem was the European occupation of several seaports: in 1681 he retook al-Mamurah (La Mamora) from the Spanish, in 1684 Tangier from the English, and in 1689 Larache also from the Spanish. Moulay Ismaïl had excellent relations with Louis XIV of France, the enemy of Spain, to whom he sent ambassador Mohammad Temim in 1682. There was cooperation in several fields. French officers trained the Moroccan army and advised the Moroccans in the building of public works.

Moulay Ismaïl is also known as a fearsome ruler and used at least 25,000 slaves for the construction of his capital. His Christian slaves were often used as bargaining counters with the European powers, selling them back their captured subjects for inflated sums or for rich gifts. Most of his slaves were obtained by Barbary pirates in raids on Western Europe. Over 150,000 men from sub-Saharan Africa served in his elite Black Guard. By the time of Ismail's death, the guard had grown tenfold, the largest in Moroccan history.


Quote: Over 150,000 men from sub-Saharan Africa served in his elite Black Guard. By the time of Ismail's death, the guard had grown tenfold (1.5 million), the largest in Moroccan history.

We have no idea why Albino compilers of Moroccan history have decided to inject such a stupid lie! As we have seen over and over again, Albinos often use the telling of history as a way to inject a particular racist lie to promote their presence or participation. In this case, (crazy as it sounds) they may be using this ridiculous scenario, and its numbers, to suggest that this is the source of Morocco’s Black population. Remembering that in the delusional Albino and Mulatto mind, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that they are "Native" to North Africa - note the following:

Mediterranean race
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mediterranean race (also Mediterranid race) is one of the sub-races into which the Caucasian race was categorized by most anthropologists in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. According to various definitions, it was said to be prevalent in Southern Europe and Southeast Europe, in Western Asia, Central Asia, certain parts of South Asia, in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, and in certain parts of the British Isles and Germany. It is characterized by medium to tall stature, long (dolichocephalic) or moderate (mesocephalic) skull, a narrow and often slightly aquiline nose, prevalence of dark hair and eyes, and pink to reddish to light or dark brown skin tone; olive complexion being especially common.

 

This is what a Mediterranean race man is supposed to look like - Surprise, Surprise, he looks just like a regular European - Silly delusional people. This is of course the whole point of pages like this North African History: to refute Albino nonsense history by explaining where the Albinos came from, and when.

To put the stupidity of the lie in context, consider this: The estimated population of Morocco in the 17th. 18th. centuries would have been 4-5 million at most. Making the so-called Black guard about 1/3 - (33%) of the Moroccan population. No mention is made of the REGULAR Moroccan army, so we can only guess at its size. No nation was EVER been rich enough to afford such an army, as a percentage of its population - EVER. The reason is simple - the ruler would have to allow a total destruct of his own people, so as to allow his mercenaries to take all of their land and property as pay. Not to mention that such an army would simply overthrow the ruler, and take the country.

Providing context:

By share of population, the largest empire was the Achaemenid Empire, better known as the Persian Empire, which accounted for approximately 49.4 million of the world's 112.4 million people in around 480 BC – an astonishing 44%.
In spite of Herodotus's wild claims, most experts place the size of the Persian army at under a million men - including perhaps 10% or less in mercenaries. Today - the largest Army in the world is the Chinese army = 2,333,000 men. China's Population = 1.5 BILLION
Like we say: What an absolutely STUPID lie to tell!

 

After Moulay Ismaïl's death at the age of eighty (or around ninety by the 1634 birthdate) in 1727, there was another succession battle between his surviving sons. His successors continued with his building program, but in 1755 the huge palace compound at Meknes was severely damaged by an earthquake. By 1757 his grandson, Mohammad III moved the capital to Marrakech.

Successful Portuguese efforts to invade and control the Atlantic coast in the 15th century did not profoundly affect the Mediterranean heart of Morocco. After the Napoleonic Wars, Egypt and the North African maghreb became increasingly ungovernable from Istanbul, the resort of pirates under local beys, and as Europe industrialized, an increasingly prized potential for colonization. The Maghreb had far greater proven wealth than the unknown rest of Africa and a location of strategic importance affecting the exit from the Mediterranean. For the first time, Morocco became a state of some interest in itself to the European Powers. France showed a strong interest in Morocco as early as 1830.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Hisham was born in 1778. Following the death of his uncle Suleiman of Morocco, Abd al-Rahman was proclaimed sultan of Morocco in Fez on 30 November 1822. His reign began during a tumultuous time, when many noble families and rural tribal confederations in Morocco were trying to extract greater power away from the center, and spent much of the early part of his reign crushing revolts.

The most serious foreign threat to Morocco, however, was France, which had launched its invasion of neighboring Algeria in 1830. Abd al-Rahman rushed Moroccan troops up to defend Tlemcen, but they were thrown back and Tlemcen was captured by the French in 1832. Abd al-Rahman supported the continued guerilla resistance in Algeria led by Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri, albeit only tentatively, not wishing to incur French retaliation. But the border tribes of Morocco continued supporting Abd al-Qadir more actively, prompting the French launch their own strikes over the border and establishing forward outposts in Moroccan territory, which only inflamed the reaction in Morocco and increased the irregular border war.

The French demanded that Morocco cease its support of Abd al-Qadir and cede its eastern frontierlands to French control and in 1844, launched the Franco-Moroccan War. The war did not go well for the sultan. The French navy bombarded Mogador (Essaouira) and Tangier, while the Moroccan army, under Abd al-Rahman's son Moulay Muhammad, was decisively defeated by the French at the Battle of Isly in August 1844. Abd al-Rahman was forced to consent to the humiliating Treaty of Tangier in October 1844, withdrawing support for al-Qadir, reducing the frontier garrisons, and submitting the Moroccan/Algerian border to modification. The Treaty of Lalla Maghnia was signed in March 1845, whereby the Moroccan border was demarcated further west, closer to the Moulouya River.

 

 

 

 

Hassan I of Morocco (1836 - 1894) was Sultan of Morocco from 1873 to 1894. He was a member of the Alaouite dynasty. Mulay Hassan was among the most successful sultans. He increased the power of the makhzen in Morocco and at a time when so much of the rest of Africa was falling under foreign control, he brought in military and administrative reforms to strengthen the regime within its own territory, and he carried out an active military and diplomatic program on the periphery.

 

 

 

Morocco - late 1800s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moulay Hassan I of Morocco in Meknes in 1887

 

 

INTERESTING HOW WHITE MEDIA "TURNED" HIM WHITE WHEN HE DIED!

 

 

The Raisuli

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni (known as Raisuli to most English speakers, also Raissoulli, Rais Uli and Raysuni) (1871-April 1925) was the Sharif (descendant of Mohammed) of the Jebala tribe in Morocco at the turn of the 20th Century, and considered by many to be the rightful heir to the throne of Morocco. While regarded by foreigners and the Moroccan government as a brigand, some Moroccans considered him a heroic figure, fighting a repressive, corrupt government, while others considered him a thief. Historian David S. Woolman referred to Raisuni as "a combination Robin Hood, feudal baron and tyrannical bandit." He was considered by many as "The last of the Barbary Pirates".

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni was born in the village of Zinat sometime in 1871. Due to his place of origin and his reportedly handsome visage, one of his other nicknames was "the Eagle of Zinat." He was the son of a prominent Caid, and began following in his father's footsteps.

By most accounts, the formative event in Raisuni's life was his arrest and imprisonment by Abd-el-Rahman Abd el-Saduk, the Pasha of Tangier, who was Raisuli's cousin and foster brother. The Pasha had invited Raisuni to dinner in his home in Tangier, only for his men to capture and brutalize Raisuni when he arrived. He was sent to the dungeon of Mogador and chained to a wall for four years; fortunately, his friends were allowed to bring him food, and he managed to survive. Raisuni was released from prison as part of a general clemency early in the reign of Sultan Abdelaziz - ironically, soon to become Raisuni's greatest enemy.

 

Abdelaziz of Morocco (1878–1943; also known as Mulai Abd al-Aziz IV, served as the Sultan of Morocco from 1894 at the age of sixteen until he was deposed in 1908. He succeeded his father Hassan I of Morocco. He was a member of the Alaouite dynasty.


Rule

Urged by his Circassian mother, the sultan sought advice and counsel from Europe and endeavored to act on it, but advice not motivated by a conflict of interest was difficult to obtain, and in spite of the unquestionable desire of the young ruler to do the best for the country, wild extravagance both in action and expenditure resulted, leaving the sultan with depleted exchequer and the confidence of his people impaired. His intimacy with foreigners and his imitation of their ways were sufficient to rouse fanaticism and create dissatisfaction. In 1908 Abdelaziz was defeated in battle.

 

 

 

 

Abdelhafid of Morocco (or Mulai Abd al-Hafiz) served as the Sultan of Morocco from 1908 to 1912, as a member of the Alaouite Dynasty. His younger brother, Abdelaziz of Morocco, preceded him. Abdelaziz was considered by many in Morocco as a puppet of the French. He was backed by Madani al-Glaoui, older brother of T'hami one of the so called Lords of the Atlas. He was assisted in the training of his troops by Andrew Belton (Kaid), a British officer and veteran of the Second Boer War. For a brief period Abdelaziz reigned from Rabat while Abdelhafid reigned in Marrakech and Fez was disputed.

 

El Haj T'hami el Mezouari el Glaoui (1879 - 1956), better known in English-speaking countries as T'hami El Glaoui or Lord of the Atlas, was a Berber Pasha of Marrakech from 1912 to 1956. His family name was El Mezouari, from a title given an ancestor by Sultan Moulay Ismail in 1700, while El Glaoui refers to his chieftainship of the Glaoua (Arabic) or Aglawou (Chleuh) tribe of Southern Morocco, based at the Kasbah of Telouet in the High Atlas and at Marrakech. He became head of the Glaoua upon the death of his elder Brother Si el Madani, and as an ally of the French in Morocco conspired with them in the overthrow of the king, Sultan Mohammed V.

 

 

As we can clearly see from the picture above: Thami El Glaoui was superior in rank to the Sultan of Morocco. Throughout modern history, there seems to have been several Albino Moroccan Sultans. These may have been of Turkic, Portuguese, Spanish, or French extraction - all of whom ruled Morocco to one extant or the other over that period. But as we can see from the picture, the Black Berber Chief was still supreme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continuing: Abdelhafid's reign was unfortunate, to say the least.

His only success would be the fact that he was able to arrest the Berber insurgent Bou Hmara in 1909.

 

 

 

 

 

Abdelhafid abdicated in favor of his brother Yusef after signing the Treaty of Fez on March 30, 1912, which made Morocco a French protectorate. He signed his abdication only when on the quay in Rabat, with the ship that would bring him to France already waiting. After an extended visit to France, where he received a great deal of attention from the press, he returned to Morocco and was exiled to the Dar el Makzhen (Sultanate Palace) in Tangier.

 

 

Sultan Yusef ben Hassan (1882–November 17, 1927) ruled the French Protectorate of Morocco from 1912 until his death in 1927. Born in the city of Meknes to Sultan Hassan I, he inherited the throne from his brother, Sultan Abdelhafid, who abdicated after the Treaty of Fez (1912), which made Morocco a French protectorate. He was a member of the Alaouite Dynasty. His mother was Lalla Ruqiya, fifth wife of his father - (a Turkish lady from Constantinople). Yusef's reign was turbulent and marked with frequent uprisings against Spain and France. The most serious of these was a Berber uprising in the Rif Mountains.

 

 

 

Recognition by the United Kingdom in 1904 of France's sphere of influence in Morocco provoked a reaction from the German Empire; the crisis of June 1905 was resolved at the Algeciras Conference, Spain in 1906, which formalized France's "special position" and entrusted policing of Morocco jointly to France and Spain. A second Moroccan crisis provoked by Berlin, increased tensions between European powers. The Treaty of Fez (signed on March 30, 1912) made Morocco a protectorate of France. By the same treaty, Spain assumed the role of protecting power over the northern and southern Saharan zones on November 27 that year.

Under the French protectorate, Moroccan natives were denied their basic human rights such as freedom of speech, the right of gathering and travel in their own country. French settlers built for themselves modern European-like cities called " Village or ville" next to poor old Arab cities called "Medinas". The French apartheid system forbade native Moroccans from living, working, and traveling into the French quarters. The French education system was teaching the few favored noble native Moroccan families about solely French history, art and culture. There was complete disregard for the natives own language and culture. Colonial authorities exerted tighter control on religious schools and universities namely "madrassas" and quaraouaine university. The rise of a young Moroccan intellectual class gave birth to nationalist movements whose main goals were to restore the governance of the country to its own people. Nationalist political parties, which subsequently arose under the French protectorate, based their arguments for Moroccan independence on such World War II declarations as the Atlantic Charter (a joint U.S.-British statement that set forth, among other things, the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they live). A manifesto of the Istiqlal Party (Independence party in English) in 1944 was one of the earliest public demands for independence. That party subsequently provided most of the leadership for the nationalist movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though this originally began in the Spanish-controlled area in the north of the country, it reached to the French-controlled area until a coalition of France and Spain finally defeated the rebels in 1925. To ensure his own safety, Yusef moved the court from Fez to Rabat, which has served as the capital of the country ever since. Yusef's reign came to an abrupt end when he died suddenly of uremia in 1927. He was succeeded by his son Muhammad.

 

 

Mohammed V (10 August 1909 – 26 February 1961) was Sultan of Morocco from 1927–53. On 20 August 1953, the French who were occupying Morocco at the time forced Mohammed V and his family into exile on Corsica. A relative of his, Mohammed Ben Aarafa, was placed on the throne. Mohammed V and his family were then transferred to Madagascar in January 1954.

France's exile of Sultan Mohammed V in 1953 to Madagascar and his replacement by the unpopular Mohammed Ben Aarafa, whose reign was perceived as illegitimate, sparked active opposition to the French and Spanish protectorates. The most notable violence occurred in Oujda where Moroccans attacked French and other European residents in the streets. Operations by the newly created "Jaish al-tahrir" (Liberation Army), were launched on October 1, 1955. Jaish al-tahrir was created by "Comité de Libération du Maghreb Arabe" (Arab Maghreb Liberation Committee) in Cairo, Egypt to constitute a resistance movement against occupation. Its goal was the return of King Mohammed V and the liberation of Algeria and Tunisia as well. France allowed Mohammed V to return in 1955, and the negotiations that led to Moroccan independence began the following year. In February 1956 he successfully negotiated with France for the independence of Morocco, and in 1957 took the title of King.

 

 

King Hassan II ( July 9, 1929 – July 23, 1999) was King of Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999. He was the second eldest son of Mohammed V. Hassan's rule, one characterized by a poor human rights record, strengthened the Alaouite dynasty. In Morocco's first constitution of 1963, Hassan II reaffirmed Morocco's choice of a multi-party political system, the only one in the Maghreb. The constitution gave the King large powers he eventually used to strengthen his rule, which provoked strong political protest from the UNFP and the Istiqlal parties that formed the backbone of the opposition. In 1965, Hassan dissolved Parliament and ruled directly, although he did not abolish the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy. When elections were eventually held, they were mostly rigged in favor of loyal parties. This caused severe discontent among the opposition, and protest demonstrations and riots challenged the King's rule. He survived two assassination attempts.

These assassination attempts perhaps prompted his marriage to his second wife, Lalla Latifa - a supposed Berber or Arab. Hassan died of natural causes in his birth town at the age of 70 on 23 July 1999.

 

 

 

Mohammed VI, is the present King of Morocco and self-appointed Amir al-Mu'minin (commander of the faithful). He ascended to the throne on 23 July 1999 upon the death of his father King Hassan II. He married Princess Lalla Salma of Morocco née Salma Bennani; born 10 May 1978). She is the first wife of a Moroccan ruler to have been publicly acknowledged and given a royal title.

 

 

Current Moroccan King and family

 

 

 

 

Moroccan Population

1631 - 3,800,000

1957 - 10,688,000

2010 - 35,948,000

The surge in population from 1957 to 2010, was due to a huge influx of migrant whites from Europe, America, and the Middle East.

They however, seem to entertain no great fondness for the Monarchy.

 

RABAT, July 3, 2011 (AFP) - Faced with protests like those that ousted the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and have shaken much of the Arab world, Morocco's King Mohammed VI made an unusual offer: concessions. And now that voters have massively backed a new constitution curbing his near absolute powers, analysts say the king will need to follow through on promises of democracy to his increasingly demanding people.

 

 

 

“The constitutional reform is an opening granted by the monarchy, a measured and controlled opening,” said Khadija Mohsen-Finan, a regional expert at the University of Paris.
“It may seem enviable in comparison with the rest of the unmoving Arab world, but it is well below the demands of the streets,” she said. Mohammed VI, who in 1999 took over the Arab world's longest-serving dynasty, has faced demonstrations since February after the pro-democracy movement sweeping the region reached his country, the westernmost in north Africa.

Using websites such as Facebook and YouTube, the youth-based February 20 Movement has organised weeks of demonstrations that brought thousands to the streets calling for greater democracy, better economic prospects and an end to corruption. But from the beginning, analysts said, Morocco's Arab Spring uprising was different. “Some reforms were already underway in Morocco and there was a much bigger openness (to dissent) than in other countries,” said Mohamed Tozy, a political science professor at Casablanca's Hassan II University, noting that protests were largely allowed to go ahead without interference. “And of course the (protest) movement never questioned the legitimacy of the regime” by calling for the overthrow of the monarchy, he said.

Instead, protesters demanded a constitutional monarchy akin to those in Britain or Spain, with the king becoming the figurehead of a democratically elected government. As the protests grew, the king announced a new constitution under which he would remain head of state, the military, and the Islamic faith in Morocco, but the prime minister, chosen from the largest party elected to parliament, would take over as the head of government. Other changes would grant more power to parliament, introduce an independent judiciary and provide new guarantees of civil liberties. After a referendum campaign fiercely backed by authorities and in the media, more than 98 percent of voters approved the new constitution on Friday. The February 20 Movement, which had urged a boycott of the vote, immediately denounced the result as a fraud.

 

 

Anti-government protesters in Morocco have taken to the streets two days after the country voted to in a referendum to limit the almost absolute power of King Mohammed VI. Pro-democracy campaigners say the thousands of people who took to the streets are proof that the constitutional changes were nothing more than political window-dressing.

 

 

 

 

 

Why are the same people Everywhere?

 

 

 

THE TURKS

 

 

The University of Calgary: Applied History Research Group - The End of Europe's Middle Ages

Origins of the Ottoman Empire

Pressured out of their homes in the Asian steppes by the Mongols, the Turkish tribes converted to Islam during the eighth and ninth centuries. By the tenth century, one of the Turkish tribes, the seljuk , had become a significant power in the Islamic world and had adopted a settled life that included Islamic orthodoxy, a central administration, and taxation. However, many other Turkish groups remained nomadic and, pursuing the gazi tradition, sought to conquer land for Islam and to acquire war booty for themselves. This led them into conflict with the Seljuk Turks, and to pacify the nomadic tribes, the Seljuks directed them to the eastern domain of the Byzantine Empire, Anatolia. The tribe known as the Ottomans arose from one of the smaller emirates established in northwestern Anatolia after 1071. The dynasty was named for Osman (1259-1326), who began to expand his kingdom into the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, moving his capital to Bursa in 1326.

Click here for the history of the Turkish usurpation of Islam, and the deposing of the Arabs. Click >>>

 

Note; the University of Calgary (Canada), has disabled all links from Realhistoryww. Clearly they don’t like how we use their information. Which is good, because it destroys the myth of nonracist Canadians. All Albinos (Everywhere) of any wealth and/or Power, or aspires to any wealth and power, have a vested interest in maintaining the fantasy history of Albinos (which says they were everyone, everywhere – Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, etc.). And the social structure that says Albinos are supposed to be on top. All this because Albinos ganged together, gathered up all the best weapons in the world, and proceeded to topple Black Empires just 400 years ago. (The Thirty Years War on the Continent, and the British Civil Wars). And now when we point out that Hebrews couldn’t be White, they say Jesus couldn’t be Black – he was “Mediterranean”. You know they always want to talk about the “Olive” complexioned “Mediterranean’s”. Note this exchange:


 

Rarely do we have an opportunity to praise young Black men, but this one does not seem to have had his mind turned into mush by rap culture, ala Kanye, Nick, and millions more. It seems that he sincerely wants to know and understand more.

 

Back to point: No surprise, when you knock down one Albino lie, they raise another. Actually those “Olive” complexioned people they speak of, are the Mulattoes of Albinos of the Vandal and Alan subtribes of the Visigoths (western Goths) of the Germanic super tribe of Central Asian Albinos who invaded North Africa in 429 A.D. The other Mulattos are those of Turks who the Black Arabs foolishly used as Slave Soldiers, and who overthrew them, and took over their religion in 1055 A.D. The others are Mulattoes from the French invasion and colonization in 1830, and the Italian invasion and colonization of 1911. Take away those Albinos and their Mulattoes and it’s all Black, we call them as a group - Berbers.

To get to the Calgary University information:

Google “The End of Europe's Middle Ages, Calgary”
Click the following Search Results
www.faculty.umb.edu › Courses › Philosophers › End
End of Europe's Middle Ages - Home Page
Click “Begin the Tutorial”
Click “Ottoman Turks” then Click “Origins of the Ottoman Empire”.

 

 

 

THE TURKISH OTTOMAN EMPIRE

 

 

 

Turk Mulattoes and Quadroons

 

 

 

 

 

 

The people of North Africa, Turkey, the Middle-East, and Arabia, are in the middle of this process:

How will it end?

 

 

Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. (born March 1, 1927) is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. Born Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr. at Lying-in Hospital in Harlem, New York: Belafonte was the son of Melvine (née Love) – a housekeeper of Jamaican descent – and Harold George Bellanfanti, Sr., a Martiniquan.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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