KABYLIE AND THE KABYLES
Kabylie is a wild, strange land known to few and peopled by many, though
indeed the population is mostly native. Colonization has not made great
inroads into the mountains of Grande and Petite Kabylie. And though the
tract is contiguous to Algiers itself, few stranger tourists know it as
anything more than a name. Still less do they know its savage and
undeveloped beauties.
The Algerian government has pushed a great "Route Nationale" through the
heart of the mountains, and Tizi-Ouzou and Fort National have grown up
into more or less important centres of European civilization; but in the
main the aspect is as much Kabyle to-day as it was when this pure Berber
race--the purest left in North Africa--first began to make its influence
felt among the many tribes of the Mediterranean coast and the Sahara.
The mountain villages of Kabylie are not mere nests of huddled shacks,
nor groups of tents, nor "lean-tos," nor mud huts. They are of
well-built houses, with sloping or flat stone roofs, and look like the
little hamlets of the Pyrenees or the Cevennes in France, where the rude
winters have taught men to build after a certain fashion in order to
live comfortably. The Kabyles early learned the same way of doing
things; for, in spite of the fact that the brilliant African sun
sometimes burns, even in midwinter, with a fervour unknown elsewhere,
the mountain-tops are snow-covered for three or four months of the year;
and the roads over which the daily antediluvian mail-coach and diligence
pass--with occasionally an intrepid automobilist--are often impassable
for a week.
The railway does not penetrate this mountain fastness beyond Tizi-Ouzou,
and though it skirts the sunny southern side of the woods, the snows of
winter blocked it last year for forty-eight hours. And this in Africa!
If the exterior of the Kabyle mountain villages do resemble those of
other lands, their interiors have a style of furnishing and decoration
all their own. Purely Kabyle, it is wonderfully decorative, simple, and
effective. It is the artist's ideal interior, as the illustration
herewith shows. The decorative scheme is its all in all. There is
little furniture, almost no _bibelots_, if one omits goat-skin rugs,
blankets, and the homely pottery and copper domestic utensils.
From Fort National the route leads down to meet the trunk line at
Beni-Mançour, and _en route_ takes on even a wilder aspect than that by
which one ascended from the seaboard plain around Algiers. The journey
can be made readily in a day by hired carriage, or, better yet, in a few
hours by automobile.
From either side extend mountain valleys and ravines, each of them
giving place to a road of sorts, practicable to the mountain mule, but
to nothing else, save a human being on foot. If one would do some real
exploring, let him spend ten days in Kabylie. He will think he is in the
"Forbidden Land" of Tibet so far as intercourse with the outside world
is concerned.
Footprints of the naked feet of men and women, and of the cloven hoofs
of animals, will be the only signs of life visible for hours at a time.
Yet in spite of the fact that the land is so wild and dreary, it is the
most thickly populated region of Northern Africa. The braying of
donkeys, the voices of women, the cries of children, and the gutturals
of the men give, if not a melody, at least a quaint and charming sound
as one draws up on some hilltop Kabyle village. A flock of sheep bars
the way, but an old woman with a stick pounds them hither and thither
with head-cracking blows, and at last you arrive before the open door of
a native café and bargain with a soft-faced brown Kabyle youth for a
_bourriquet_ to take you twenty kilometres farther on, where you may
find a lodging for the night.
You must bargain, wherever you are, and for whatever you want, in
Africa; even with the Kabyle. Once your bargain made,--three francs for
a little donkey for a day, or five, including his owner for a
guide,--you need have no fear. The Kabyle will hold to it like grim
death. The Kabyle is a savage if you like, but his virtues are many.
The Kabyle villages abound in dogs. They may not be vicious dogs, but
you don't know whether they are or not, and accordingly are wary. The
Kabyle dogs have all shades of pitch and gamut in their voices. There
are tenors, baritones, and even sopranos, and an occasional bass. If a
solitary example is met with on a by-road he is readily made to retreat
with a shower of stones; but as he is liable to catch up with you later,
accompanied by reinforcements, as you draw up on the village, you must
ever be on the _qui vive_. No one ever heard of anybody but a
sheep-stealer having been bitten by a Kabyle dog (which, by the way,
looks like any other mongrel cur): but discretion here, as in many other
tight corners, is the chief part of valour. "_De l'audace, encore de
l'audace et toujours de l'audace!_" is a stimulating French slogan, but
one is in doubt about putting it into practice with a grinning,
long-fanged mongrel before him on a lone mountain road.
The Kabyles are one division of that great race of Berbers, the most
ancient dwellers on African soil. They have kept the type comparatively
pure by inhabiting this restricted area closely bordering upon the Atlas
Mountains a dozen or twenty leagues from the sea. "They are," says M.
Jules Duval, "the principal types of the Berber race, and those who have
best conserved their ancestral characteristics, and are perhaps the
Numidians of old." That is a pedigree worth owning up to. Brave and
industrious, the Kabyles can fight as well as bargain, and they value
patriotism and ancestral tradition above everything else.
Of all the Mussulman races, the Kabyles treat their women with the
greatest deference, and even allow them to frequent public fêtes, faces
uncovered, and to dance with the men, _yatagan_ or gun in hand.
The Kabyle is successful in whatever occupation he follows, more so than
any of his Mussulman brothers. As herders, farmers, armourers,
blacksmiths, and masons,--at everything in fact that requires an
aptitude and deftness of hand,--they excel.
When in straits the Kabyle will sell all his worldly goods, save his
gun, without the slightest trace of emotion. Perhaps this is because his
gun is the only thing on which he pays taxes and accordingly he knows
its value.
It is said of the Kabyles that they eat their daughters. "_Le père mange
sa fille._" This comes from the custom which some of the Kabyle tribes
have of bartering off the hand of their daughter to the most willing
suitor at a price ranging from two hundred to a thousand francs. There's
nothing very wrong about this, seemingly, not according to African
standards.
The Kabyle and his relatives in their little square house live the life
of a truly happy family. He and his relatives and his live stock--except
his camels, the odour from which is a little too strong for even Kabyle
nostrils--all living together under the same roof. There is no more
squalor about it, however, than one may see in the human and
pig-inhabited huts of Connemara.
The Kabyle comes of a comparatively wealthy class, but his house
furnishings are very meagre. Besides the animals before mentioned, he
possesses only his _batterie de cuisine_, some great oil jars and
earthenware pots for the storing away of olives, butter and honey. He
also has a storehouse for grain, where he keeps his wheat or maize
flour, which he or the members of his family have themselves ground
between the traditional upper and nether millstones, which in this case
are portable ones.
Such is a brief inventory of the dwellings and the round of life of the
Kabyles of the mountain villages, founded by their ancestors hundreds
and perhaps thousands of years ago. Some of their race have got the
wandering foot, and live in the pastoral black and brown striped tent
like the real nomads; but these are comparatively few in number. The
real, Simon-pure Kabyle is a house-dweller.
The Kabyle mountain settlements are often mere hamlets called _dehera_,
and in these the village schoolmaster, besides having his own duties,
also performs the functions of priest of the temple. He is literally the
_imam_ of the mosque, and carries out according to his faith the
monotonous repetition of the words of the Koran when not otherwise
engaged. Every Kabyle village has its temples of knowledge and of
religion, just as sure as it has a headsman or Sheik. The mosque is
naturally the most notable edifice of the settlement; but is seldom
splendid or pretentious, and often it serves as a hostelry as well as a
place of worship. But only for the faithful--not for dogs of infidels.
Though the Kabyles in general are not tent-dwellers, but live in houses
of stone or brick construction, these edifices exhibit no particular
architectural characteristics; but are as much like the dwellings of the
Pueblos as they are like those of the Thibetans. To all intents and
purposes the towns and settlements and, in a measure, all Kabyle houses,
are fortresses. This is an effect which is heightened by the almost
universal employment of substitutes for the crenelated battlement and
_meurtrières_ or loopholes, cut in the walls in place of windows, so
distinctive of European feudal architecture.
Just by way of contrast to the virtues of the Kabyles, it is bound to be
recorded that they are the dirtiest lot that one finds in Africa; and
inasmuch as this is contrary to the tenets of the Mussulman religion it
is the more to be remarked. Up to within a few years, according to the
head of a French mission which surveyed the Kabyle country, there was
but one public bath establishment to be found in all their native towns
and villages. The result is that hereditary affections are transmitted
from generation to generation, and were it not for the efficacy of the
open-air cure the Kabyles would be a considerably less long-lived race
than they are.
The Kabyles live well at all events, and their couscous is renowned
throughout all Algeria. Their preserved figs and ripe and unripe olives
are of the first quality and bring the highest prices in the markets of
Algiers, Bougie or Beni-Mançour. The Kabyle is no longer a savage,
though he does stick closely to many traditions, and eats his couscous
out of a great dish of beechwood fashioned by hand from a cross-section
cut from a tree-trunk. The mere fact that he eats it from a plate at
all, instead of from a pot, indicates, however, an approaching degree of
civilization.
The Kabyle is primarily a tiller of the soil and a herder of goats and
sheep. And when education was thrust upon him, or rather upon his
children, by a progressive French government, he resented it. He had
cut out an illiterate career for his progeny; he didn't care if they
weren't educated, nor did they.
He explained it all to the writer in a Moorish café one afternoon, in a
_patois_ something like the following,--it's a queer thing, Arab-French,
but it's as good as that of most foreigners nevertheless.
"_Si li Beylick fasir, fic toutes lis enfants dis mitres d'icole,
qu'ist-ce qui travaljar la tirre ... qu'ist-ce qui gardi lis chèvres,
lis motons, lis vaches?_" Who indeed will guard his goats and sheep if
the children all go to school! The old man probably will have to work
himself.
The new generation is changing, but the old-school Kabyle is as
conservative as a "down-east farmer," a "Yorkshireman," or a "_bon
Provençeau_."
The Kabyles are the Piedmontese or Auvergnats of Algeria. An indigenous
race which has resisted better than any other the march of progress.
They have, too, certain other foreign characteristics. One wonders how
they got them. They practise the vendetta, like the Corsican; they have
the _landesgemeinde_, as in certain of the Swiss cantons; and they have
cock-fights like the Spaniards. They are a very curious race of people,
but they are becoming enlightened, and rank among the most loyal
towards the new French government of all the tribes of Algeria.
The Kabyle has fought for France, and fought well. The first zouaves
were Kabyles,--the name comes from Zouaoua, a Kabyle tribe. General
Clauzel enrolled a company of them in 1831, and taught them what, he was
pleased at the time to think, was civilized warfare. Doubtless it was,
as civilized as any warfare, which is not saying much for it. This new
type of soldier, the zouave, has endured to this day in France and
elsewhere, and a very practical, businesslike soldier he has proved.
The Kabyle women jingle with bijoux and scintillate with yards of
ribbons and flying draperies, and a strong scented perfume emanates from
them with an odour of sanctity, almost, so strange and exotic is it.
They know the difficult art of elegance--these mountain women of
Kabylie--better than their more fashionable sisters. Not all the science
of the _couturière_ or the _modiste_ can give a tithe of the grace borne
naturally by these half-savage Kabyle beauties. The Jewesses of Algiers
and Tunis have a certain, if crude, voluptuous elegance, which is an
adulteration of civilization and savagery; but the Kabyle woman,
beneath her draperies and her bijoux, expresses something quite
different. Cleopatra might well have been one of them. Their natural
graces and their bijoux are the details which set off their charms so
splendidly. The cross-breeding of the Berber with the Arab has no doubt
debased the race somewhat. This is mostly among the men and the women
who dwell in the towns.
Apparently these Kabyle women are not coquettes, though they smile,
always, with their pearly teeth, rouge-red lips, and flashing eyes,
bespeaking the sensuality of a land and its customs entirely foreign to
European civilization. Of beauty they have little according to other
standards, although their features are not crude or unlovely. Rather is
theirs the beauty of a high-bred animal, or the sculptured bronze ideal
replica of a race. They are types of a species and are delightful to
look upon, alike in face and figure.
The Kabyle jewelry is something to be coveted by every woman. It can be
bought--even in the bazaars and _souks_ of Algiers and Tunis--at its
weight for old silver. But the buying of it is an art, and one must
beware of not getting dross or something made in Birmingham or Solingen.
The genuine old stone or
[Illustration: _Things Seen in Kabylie_]
coral-set enamelled Kabyle bracelets and necklaces are becoming rarer,
and the imitation ones more and more common. Still, in any aspect, the
designs are beautiful, and far and away ahead of the aberrations of mind
which produce the _art-nouveau_ jewelery of Bond Street or of the Rue
de la Paix. Sometimes instead of silver a substitute of dull,
unburnished white metal,--pewter most probably,--is used in the settings
of these bizarre ornaments, and even then the effect is charming.
The Kabyles have ever been fond of coral, which, from the earliest
times, they gathered from the sea, cutting and polishing the fragments
as if they were precious stones. Coral is fast disappearing from the
African coast, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, wherever the Italians
have exploited the commerce, and the rosy, translucent branches of old
are now more often replaced with the inferior dead coral of a yellowish
white or even reddish brown colour. Unless indeed celluloid imitations
are not used instead.
Sea shells, too, enter into the make-up of the adornments of the Kabyle
woman.
The metal work, be it gold, silver, or pewter and antimony, is
invariably hand-forged, with the loving marks of the hammer still
visible. This rough crudity is its charm, for the intrinsic value as a
rule is not great. It looks high at fifty francs (a collaret of three or
four bands strung together on a silver wire, with a clasp the size of a
half-dollar), but when, by the classic process of Arab or Berber
bargaining, you get the same thing for ten francs, it is really _très
bon marché_.
Grande and Petite Kabylie, the Kabylie du Djurjura and the Kabylie des
Babors, is not thickly strewn with Frenchified towns and cities. On the
coast there are Dellys, an incipient seaport. Bougie, the ancient
Saldae, where a colony of veterans was established by the great
Augustus, but now a growing seaport with half of its fifteen thousand
population French. Djidjelli, a hundred kilometres east of Bougie by a
wonderful coast road, was the ancient colony of Igilgili of Augustus.
Collo is an Italianized fishing village; Beni-Mançour, a flourishing
small town to-day, but formerly a simple _bordj_ or halting-place on the
main caravan route from east to west; and Setif, the _chef lieu_,
contains a mixed population of 15,000, of which a quarter part are
Europeans and 1,600 Jews.
These commercial centres, and a half a dozen smaller places, are the
only points where the traveller by road or rail will find any approach
to European comforts in all Kabylie, excepting at Tizi-Ouzou and Fort
National on the branch road from Beni-Mançour to Bougie.
Tizi-Ouzou is the centre of a Kabyle population which figures out a
hundred and ten souls to the square kilometre. Its name signifies "Col
des Genets," and it occupies the site of an old _bordj_ or rest-house of
former days.
Four hours of diligence--which costs four francs--carries one from
Tizi-Ouzou to Fort National, at any time of the year between April and
December; at other times the pass of Tirourda may be snow-covered, and
you may become stalled for hours or even days. Fort National, in the
heart of Grande Kabylie, is a grim, modern fortress, perched on the
highest peak of the Algerian mountain range paralleling the coast. It is
only interesting from a grim picturesque point of view. The citadel
crowns a height a thousand metres above sea-level, and from its terrace
unfolds a remarkable panorama of mountain-tops and valleys: "Incipient
mountain chains stretching out in all directions like the arms of an
octopus," a Frenchman described these topographical features, and if you
know what an octopus looks like you will be struck by the simile. Fort
National is the best centre from which to make excursions into Kabylie,
but you must come here in the spring or autumn for the purpose, not in
winter or summer.
Bougie is off the beaten track. To get there one must break his journey
going from Algiers to Biskra, Constantine or Tunis at Beni-Mançour.
Bougie is a coast town, and one of the terminals of the steamship lines
from Marseilles. Because tourists go and come via Algiers, or via
Algiers and Tunis or vice versa, Bougie is not known of all travellers
in North Africa. This is where they make a mistake. Bougie is the most
splendidly situated of all the African Mediterranean ports. Its points
of view and panoramas are ready-made for the artists to jot them down in
crude paint on dull canvas--if they can. The most one can do is to try.
And Bougie, its glistening white-walled houses, its shore-line, its
sky-line, and its background of cliff are motifs which will fascinate
all who view it, whether for the first or last time.
All the same Bougie has little enough of interest for the conventional
tourist. The native quarter is not remarkable, the mosque is a modern
affair, though on good old lines, and the native market, if curious,
does not equal those of Blida, Boufarik, or Constantine.
It is the site of Bougie, and its environs, that make its charms. If its
hotels were not poor patterns of those of the pompous prefectures in
France it would really be a delightful seaside resort.
There are some Roman ruins of the days of Augustus still remaining, some
fragmentary fortifications, and some great cistern vaults. Bougie's past
was historic, for it was one day the capital of an independent state.
The Spaniards came and destroyed its independence through the wiles of
Pedro Navarro, who built Algiers' Peñon. Charles V sojourned here for a
time, basking under African skies, in 1541. That is all of Bougie's
romance.