The Amazigh (Berber) are the indigenous people of North Africa. Their presence on the continent predates Arab migration by thousands of years. In Libya, Amazigh identity was systematically suppressed under Gaddafi and remains contested. Tewa Barnosa (EP 20) articulated the issue with unusual clarity.
Under the Gaddafi regime (1969-2011), Libya was defined as an Arab state. Amazigh language, Tamazight, could not be taught in schools. Amazigh names were discouraged or banned. Cultural expressions — music, festivals, dress — were marginalised. The state promoted a singular Arab identity that required the erasure of Libya's pre-Arab heritage.
Tewa framed this as more than cultural policy. She described it as attempted civilizational erasure. Tamazight is not merely a communication tool — it is, in her words, an operating system. A language encodes a way of seeing, thinking, and organising the world. Eliminating the language meant eliminating the worldview it carried.
After 2011, Amazigh communities asserted their identity publicly. In Zuara, a predominantly Amazigh coastal city, trilingual street signs appeared — Arabic, Tamazight, and English. Amazigh flags flew openly. Cultural festivals were held. The Amazigh Supreme Council was established to represent community interests in Libya's political transition.
The gains were real but fragile. Tewa described backlash from people who had never visited Zuara, never learned Tamazight, and had no connection to Amazigh culture — but who objected to its visibility on principle. The resistance came from Arab nationalist reflexes embedded over decades of state propaganda.
Tewa's central argument was that Libya is not merely a modern nation-state — it is an ancient civilisation. The Acacus Mountains in southwestern Libya contain cave paintings dating back 12,000 years — among the oldest art on earth. The territory was home to Amazigh, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman civilisations before the Arab conquests of the 7th century.
This history is not obscure. It is physically present — in ruins, in art, in language. But it was politically inconvenient for the Arab nationalist project, and so it was minimised.
Tewa described language not as a tool but as an operating system — a structure that shapes thought before thought becomes conscious. Tamazight and Arabic do not merely use different words for the same concepts. They organise experience differently. Losing Tamazight, therefore, was not losing vocabulary. It was losing a cognitive architecture.
This framing connects to broader linguistic anthropology, but Tewa did not present it academically. She presented it personally: her language was nearly taken from her, and what would have been lost was not words but a way of being.
Amazigh identity in the diaspora carries a double displacement. Tewa, based in Berlin, was not only a Libyan abroad — she was an Amazigh Libyan abroad, carrying an identity that was marginalised both in her home country and invisible in her host country. Her name, "Tewa," means "bridge" in Tamazight — a word she carried as mission statement.
Her work with Waraq Art Foundation centred Libyan and North African art outside institutional gatekeeping, creating space for expression that neither the Libyan state nor the European art market had provided.