Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.We drove out of Algiers early on a warm, late October morning. The traces of Al Djazaïr, as it was known for centuries, and of Alger la Blanche, as the enthralled French described its houses and buildings cascading down to the sea, seemed now buried under a vast sea of concrete. Our destination was the Kabylia mountains less than 100 kilometres due east, and in particular Tizi Hibel, a village perched high up in Grande Kabylie which I had last visited 25 years ago. Past the region's capital Tizi Ouzou, an equally ugly concrete jumble, the road began to rise.
Quite by luck, it was the feast of Ashura, the tenth day of the first month of 1437 in the Muslim calendar, marked by Shi’a and Sunni Muslims alike. In Kabylia, where the influence of the (Shi'a) Fatimid dynasty, which ruled north-east Africa from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, is still felt, it is a celebration of particular importance. No male farmer would till the land on that day, no farmer's wife would sow. The mountain roads, with villages every few miles, were filled with joyous family groups out to visit their relatives. The younger women were dressed in brightly striped, yellow-and-orange skirts, blouses and traditional caftans, while young men wore western-style clothes, version algérienne There was not a veiled woman in sight.
Traffic was chaotic but good natured in every village high street, where the usual assortment of half-finished buildings, some rising four or five stories above the street, testified to the disappearance of the low-lying tile-covered houses that were once common. Towards the magnificent Djurdjura range, the hilltops look quite surrealistic, as if chunks of Manhattan had been parachuted onto Kabylia's summits. In Beni Douala, the last small town before Tizi Hibel, the road sign had the Arabic word "Beni"clearly crossed out and replaced by "Aït", the Berber equivalent, meaning “son of.” Walls were inscribed by militant Kabyle slogans. In this part of Algeria, the very word "Arab" is deemed by some to be an insult. People are proud of their Berber ancestors who predated the Arab invaders of the seventh century by two millennia or more.
