Romanizing the Berbers*

Abstract

In the long and at times very tiresome debate on Romanization during the last quarter-century North Africa occupies a particular place. Nowhere has the equation of Rome with modern imperialism been more obviously applied, both by the colonial powers and by the colonized. The post-colonial perspective turned the earlier, benign view on its head, as the violence of the Algerian war placed the occupiers in stark contrast to the colonized, and what elements of acculturation could be found in the Algeria of the 1960s could be read as deliberate choices on the part of the Algerians, rather than the blessings of an enlightened imperialism.1 The debate on the nature of Romanization could with some justice be said to have begun with a memorable exchange between the late Yvon Thébert and Marcel Bénabou and Philippe Leveau.2 The subject was Bénabou’s ground-breaking work La Résistance africaine à la romanisation,3 which provided a reading of resistance to acculturation by Rome from the point of view of the indigenous North Africans. Thébert, in rebuttal, argued that rather than looking to ethnic groups or geography as essential determinants of the division between Roman and non-Roman we should examine the social formation of North Africa in the Roman period. The class structure would give a better basis for predicting the results of Romanization than any supposed division between mountain and plain. Romanization was for Thébert a matter of choice, seized on by the elites and ignored, at least initially, by the peasants. Bénabou replied with some justice that such an equation leaves the Romans out of the picture, that they did after all conquer North Africa, centuriate it and set up an administration. Further, the strictly Marxist approach left culture out of the picture, thereby oversimplifying it.

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