Minorities and the State in Africa By Michael U. Mbanaso and Chi ...

to this evolving ethno-political dynamic, where the latter has pursued a more antagonistic strategy and the former has opted for a more careful approach. Key to this upsurge is the Berber language itself, Tamazight, as both a strategy and objective of resistance. From the cultural field to the political arena, from quotidian gestures to grand social vision, the goals of the “Amazigh Cultural Movement” are as varied, overlapping, cleaved, and sutured together as the shifting terrains of struggle upon which the multitude of actors and organizations maneuver. This emerging identity politics in North Africa is most visible in the two countries with the largest Tamazight-speaking populations, Morocco and Algeria. Mundy locates the Amazigh movements within the broader problematic of state-society relations and authoritarian governments in postcolonial Morocco and Algeria as well as the liberalization and democratization process of the Algerian and Moroccan regimes. The two preceding papers examine different socio-cultural and political contexts: they certainly portray the complexity of minority questions in Africa and a continued desire to maintain cultural identity amid integrationist policies.

The question of ethnic and minority identity has confronted most human societies, especially from the nineteenth century onward. In Africa, the process of state creation and expansion of existing empires meant that many pre-colonial African societies were multiethnic even if the issue of ethnic identity was fluid. Yet notions of difference had always existed between those in majority and those perceived as minority. Such differences often extended to formulation of certain perceptions of the “Other” that become lodged in the collective memory of each group. In “A Tale of Two Minorities: The State of the Gaboye and Bantu Communities of Somalia,” Mohamed A. Eno and Omar A. Eno explore the experiences of two non-nomadic and distinctive communities in Somalia and the variety of suppression, degradation, and marginalization. They argue that the perceived inferiority status and the separate statuses accorded to different groups of minorities situate them in distinct social categories in respect to ethnic background and access to resources within the Somali state. The domination of the Somali Bantu and Madhiban communities by the majority and their experiences as a people oppressed socially and