In her lecture, which was sponsored by Tulane African Student Association (TASA) and Amazigh Cultural Association in America (ACAA), Professor Yacine addressed historical, ethnic, cultural and political issues of Algeria and North Africa, and presented a coherent and clear profile of the Amazigh people and their relentless struggle for the recognition of the Amazigh dimension in North Africa.

A disciple of the late Mouloud Mammeri and the author of several anthropological and sociological books on the Amazigh population of Algeria, Professor Yacine recounted the struggle of the local population against a succession of conquerors, be they Roman, French, or Arab. She stressed the Amazigh people's unending opposition to conquerors and their resolve to keep and preserve their identity by asserting their cultural and ethnic heritage as the original inhabitants of North Africa.

After a brief geographical and historical introduction, Professor Yacine presented and described about 30 slides which clearly depicted the cultural and ethnic identity of the Amazigh people. These showed scenic regions where Amazigh people still live today, including Kabylia (about 80 miles east of Algiers), Mzab (with the main town of Ghardaia about 300 miles south of Algiers) and the Aures Region (200 miles southeast of Algiers).

The pictures depicted the beauty of the land as well as its harshness and bareness, and also demonstrated the contrasts among the areas. Kabylia, which is composed of hills with olive orchards surrounding the Djurdjura Mountains, is green in the spring and takes on a white cap in the winter, whereas the Mzab and the Aures regions are inhospitable and remote areas where survival is hard. One can wonder why an indigenous people would settle in the mountainous or desert region. Many Amazigh groups fled the plains and fertile lands because those were of interest and value to the conquerors. Professor Yacine indicated that because the Amazigh people continued to live in remote areas that had no agricultural value, the Amazigh way of life, customs, and identity were preserved and foreign influence was avoided. "Being so remote, they did not have to obey the occupier nor behave like him in order to survive," she noted.

To illustrate a case of the urban and the rural worlds living apart, she told of a villager who once went to a market in a city where he saw a "Roumi" (Imazighen refer to the French as "Iroumian," a word derived from Roman and which draws on the fact that both the French and Romans, the ancient conquerors, came from Europe). When he returned, the villagers inquired about the new "Iroumian."

- "Well," he said," from the waist up they look like us, but from the waist down, they are cut in half."

The villager was referring to the two-leggedpants Frenchmen wore, in contrast to the traditional pants of an Amazigh man, with its spacious middle area extending down to the calves.

Midway through the two-hour lecture Professor Yacine read two excerpts to demonstrate the similarity between the motivation and reasoning of conquerors. She first cited Emile Masqueray, the most humanist of the French, who wrote, "Our teachers are grabbing now the souls of the Berbers They will draw wide lanes on which, just like in their fields, the modern world will roll." It was neither the first nor the last time that invaders and colonizers used this argument to defend their occupation of foreign lands. Drawing a striking similarity, Professor Yacine then cited Sheik Bachir El-Ibrahimi, the Head of the Ulemas (the Muslim religious clerics in Algeria), who, in the 1948 issue of the newsletter El-Bassair, wrote, "It is through the Arabic language that Berbers learned what they did not know ... Ahead of the Berber language, it transformed democratically and without any duress the Berber soul into an Arab soul ... It is also the justice of Islam which made the Berbers submit to the Arabs - a brotherly submission and not that of a submission under duress. ... Thanks to the Islamic spiritual contribution and to the beauty of the Arabic language, Islam has definitely become the characteristic of this land and the Arabic language its language above all else, allowing no other competition."

Professor Yacine noted the common agreement among conquerors as demonstrated in the excerpts: that of subduing the local population, civilizing it, and transforming their souls.

Turning to the era before and after independence, Professor Yacine spoke of the 1949 crisis of the independence movement when the Amazigh question was put off to the side and most of its proponents either eliminated or forced to accept the Arabo-Islamic ideology. She noted that, despite the 1949 crisis, Imazighen remained at the forefront of the struggle for an independent Algeria, hoping that their rights would not be denied when the French occupier would be thrown out. When independence was confiscated by the "border army" stationed on the Tunisian border, the outcome and the consequences were a blow to the Amazigh culture and identity. Fresh and ready, the "border army" found no resistance and met no challenge from the Algerian combatants inside Algeria. The new leaders allowed no opposition and began to diffuse the "Arab-Islamic" identity onto the Algerian population as a means to control. The Front de Liberation National (FLN) leadership started an irrational program of arabization that suppressed both the popular Arabic language and the Amazigh language.

Then, in March 1980, the Algerian government prevented Mouloud Mammeri, the modern father of the Amazigh culture, from giving a lecture on ancient Amazigh poetry to the students at the University of Tizi-Ouzou. The cancellation of the lecture sparked a popular uprising in the entire Amazigh region that touched other neighboring cities as well as Algiers, and the events came to be known as the Amazigh Spring. Professor Yacine noted that the government exhibited a great lack of imagination in cancelling the lecture. When the government resorted to violence and ordered its forces to storm the university and the local hospital on April 20, people responded with strikes and street demonstrations. A milestone in the Amazigh struggle, the events galvanized the Amazigh population's claim of their rights to their culture and language and gave birth to the Movement for the Amazigh Culture, a movement that has been dominating the social as well as the popular scene ever since.

Professor Yacine ended her lecture with a poem by Ait-Menguellat, the famous Amazigh singer, from her book (1):

Tell me, Fog, Fog driven by the wind
Tell me, Fog, Fog driven by the wind
It is from the oak tree that I take root
And not from the reed
Since my eyes have known the exile
They have not run out of tears
They await the messenger
To at least question him
It is not you that sadden me
But the Earth from which we come from

Ansi d tekkid' ay agu
Ay agu d-yebbwi wad'u
Si tassaft i d-ggigh asghar
Matci d dderga ughanim
Seg wasmi ba Ur ctaqent imett'i
Negh ur'djant wa a d-ir'uh'en
Xer's'um a t-id-nesteqsi
Matci d ketc i yi d ighad'en
D akal i seg d-nefruri