Assimilation and Nationalism - Dissertation Example

The Berbers have endured many ethnic admixtures since the middle ages from neighboring countries and have been also suppressed by the French strategically against the Arabs so as to discourage united resistances from them in any point of their rule. Ironically this reason has become a dominant issue in making post independent Africa take up the opposite stance of homogenizing the Berbers under official Arab languages and thus exorcise the colonial split created between them. But postcolonial period has its own limitations since the political and entire postcolonial psyche is irrecoverably changed, decolonising is problematic, since it always shall mean the element of a pre-existing colonization.

Thus the stance would be majorly anti-colonial and hence more reactive than generative. These considerations are important because economic and cultural dependency usher in a new age of neo-colonial rule in North Africa, where Berberic consciousness, technology, political needs and socio-cultural practices show a new dependency on neo-imperialism. Thus when Berbers rebel against a homogenizing effect, it is the curse of Enlightenment they are fighting in the form of Arab politicians or intellectuals.

Again their resistance is met with two fronts: one is the Arabisation of their basic identity, which is embedded in, their language and thus their thoughts and again fighting the general forces of globalisation and notions of nationalism that must attempt to establish the modernisation or progress of the country in terms of the Western idea of progress.. Thus when Berbers rebel against a homogenizing effect, it is the curse of Enlightenment they are fighting in the form of Arab politicians or intellectuals.

Again their resistance is met with two fronts: one is the Arabisation of their basic identity, which is embedded in, their language and thus their thoughts and again fighting the general forces of globalisation and notions of nationalism (which is itself an imported ideal) that must attempt to establish the modernisation or progress of the country in terms of the western idea of progress. Hence I will talk about the ills of assimilation under the French rule, which has permeated, into such concepts as Nationalism and hegemony, still controlling the discourse and ideologies of thought against the Berbers.

The Berbers in North Africa has been suffering linguistic imperialism through the systematic control of their language both by the West and by the Arab majority through the process of Arabisation. But what distinguishes imperialism to other kinds of subordination in all forms of the language is that there is a greater attempt to appropriate the psyche and the cultural practices of the colonized. Africa has become a place of rapid colonisation since the 'scramble for Africa' by various imperial countries due to vast economic promises and little resistance from multi-ethnic and linguistic communities.

As the spirit of nationalism was more relaxed, it helped the French to divide and rule or for the British Company at first to indirectly rule the masses through their tribal leaders in most cases. Post independent Africa drew these instances of multi-ethnic separations of the African people that had given rise to