In recent years, a linguistic shift has swept through North African studies: Berber must be replaced with Amazigh. International organizations update their terminology. Academic departments follow suit. Diaspora activists frame it as decolonization, reclaiming indigenous names from colonial imposition.

The reasoning has force. Berber derives from Greek barbaros and arrived through conquest. Why accept a name rooted in ancient dismissiveness, later weaponized by colonial administrators?

But when this cause arrives in Tunisia, something gets lost in translation.

The Amazigh framework carries more than a word. It brings an identity script: the pure Amazigh, sealed in mountains, unmixed, maintaining unbroken continuity with ancient origins. This narrative fits parts of Morocco and maybe also Algeria, where geography and resistance created communities matching this template.

Tunisiaā€™s reality is different. The northern Tell was never isolated. It was agrarian, shaped by Phoenician trade, Roman administration, Byzantine control. Carthage was not a colonial outpost on indigenous land; it was the indigenous development. The coast has always been porous. Contact, not seclusion, defined this place.

Berber was never a unified people here. It was a catchall for ā€œnot yet Arabā€ at the moment of conquest, covering sedentary farmers, town dwellers, merchants, populations already mixed beyond recognition. Compressing this into Amazigh as a single ethnolinguistic identity doesnā€™t clarify our past. It simplifies it.

The real problem isnā€™t Greek roots. Itā€™s what this replacement does. Amazigh comes packaged with assumptions: recoverable purity, identity unpolluted by contact, a straight line from ancient inhabitants to modern claimants. This is the logic that made colonial ethnography dangerous. If we accept a purity template, even calling it decolonization, we still let someone else decide what counts as authentic.

Tunisia is vulnerable because we havenā€™t written our own continuity convincingly. We have Punic fragments, Roman ruins, Vandal wooden cathedrals, Islamic architecture, but nothing that binds them into one inheritable story. When the thread is missing, others supply it. The question becomes: who has authority to name Tunisiaā€™s past?

The path forward is not to police what people call themselves. Tunisians who identify as Amazigh are making a real claim. But we should refuse any label that forces Tunisia into a purity myth, whether Berber or Amazigh. This means building something harder: a historical narrative that treats contact and mixture as the story itself. One that connects the Capsian artist to the Kairouan scholar and sees the mountain and the coast, the village and the city, not as betrayals of origin but as expressions of the same complex continuity.

Until we do that work, we will keep reaching for someone elseā€™s story, whether colonial categories or fashionable replacements. Both flatter us with simplicity. Both let us avoid the harder task: writing a history as tangled and coastal as Tunisia actually is.