Wednesday, 5 February 2014

Word of the ?Week: Kabyle

In "The Escape" by Joseph Kessel (in the French Stories book), his protagonist notes the types of people who are incarcerated along with him at a detention camp in France during World War II. There's room for everyone:

"Room for foreigners. For traffikers. For Freemasons. For Kabyles. For those who were opposed to the Legion. For Jews. For refractory peasants. For vagrants. For former convicts. For political suspects. For those whose intents were suspect...." The list goes on. But I had never heard of Kabyles, and so I paused.

They are a Berber-speaking ethnic group from Algeria. Wiki tells me that for "historical and economic reasons", a lot of Kabyle folks moved to France, and it sounds like, according to Kessel, they were persecuted along with so many other groups in the 30s and 40s. After several Google searches I can't find more information about the Kabyle movement to France. Very curious!

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