A Saharan archive and its afterlives

An archive in Mbembe’s (in: Hamilton C et al. (eds) Refiguring the archive. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 19–26, 2002) interrogation of the institution is necessarily defined by two elements: “the building itself and the documents stored there” (2002:19). In this paper I argue that Tifinagh writing in the form or rock inscriptions in the Algerian Sahara constitutes a materially different kind of desert archive that nonetheless fulfils the role of “instituting imaginary” that Mbembe attributes to the archive. Tifinagh is a relative of the ancient Libyco-Berber script, and is used by Kel Ahaggar Tuareg, an Amazigh (Berber) people, as a yet unbroken writing practice that has existed for centuries. Consulted by French colonial actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Tifinagh archive contributed to the European invention of its Tuareg authors as “close others” whom they placed on a racial hierarchy above Arabs. In the post-independence era of Arab nation building in North Africa, governments attempted to suppressed expressions of Amazigh culture and identity, and relegated Tifinagh to the domain of folklore. In the popular revindication of Amazigh identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries activists such as those of the Agraw Imazighen or the Berber Academy consulted the Tifinagh archive to resuscitate an alphabet that had disappeared from use in North Africa in late antiquity. Ultimately, although this desert archive presents a materiality that is at odds with Mbembe’s notion of the archive, it nonetheless accomplishes many of the functions he attributes to the archive.