Mémoire gentilice et histoire nationale : figures et enjeux du récit d'une insurrection bédouine anticoloniale

G. Albergoni — The People's Memory and National History : Images and Issues in Accounts of a Bedouin Anticolonial Uprising. Several accounts of the 1915 anticolonial uprising among the Bedouin tribes of far southern Tunisia have been collected during an ethnohistoric survey of the area. By comparing them with colonial military archives and the officiai version of the Tunisian movement for independence, significant, often unexpected, points of divergence and convergence crop up. Since local accounts draw their style from Bedouin cultural traditions and enhance its hero figures, the latter appear as a metonym for a group, and each group having its own account of events, Bedouin memory is pluralisme. It is segmented like the tribal society that has wrought it. Participation in the uprising, its leaders, the persons and events worthy of being remembered, ail these points are symbolic issues and historical arguments brandished in debates about legitimacy. Since the memory of this uprising is closely linked to a more distant past, this local memory, which is aristocratie, has remained indifferent to nationalistic themes and rhetoric. It celebrates a whole past rather than the founding event of a nation.Albergoni Gianni. Mémoire gentilice et histoire nationale : figures et enjeux du récit d'une insurrection bédouine anticoloniale. In: Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 30, n°119, 1990. Maghreb : récits, traces, oublis. pp. 299-328