Amazigh, Tataouine

The Amazigh of Tataouine are the Berber-speaking people of two old hill villages west of Tataouine town in Tunisia's far south: Chenini (Chninni) and Douiret, and the new villages built below them. About 4,400 live there. They speak Chelha (Shilha), the Berber varieties of Douiret and Chenini, which are closely related to each other and belong with Matmata, Djerba, Sened and Libya's Zuwara to the East Zenati branch of Berber; Joshua Project and IMB code the speech as Nafusi (jbn), the Berber of Libya's Jebel Nafusa. The linguist Zouhir Gabsi has described the Douiret variety in a grammar and found that, despite heavy borrowing from Arabic, it is not beyond saving.

The villages are fortified hilltop granaries (ksour) with houses cut into the rock beneath them. Chenini's oldest structures date to the 12th century; Douiret, founded more than 600 years ago by a holy man said to come from Tafilalet in Morocco, was a caravan stop between Gabes and Ghadames and briefly the French military seat of the south in 1882. In the Middle Ages the hills of Jebel Demmer were an Ibadi refuge, and Maliki Sunni Islam spread there only slowly (Mohamed Hassen, 2012).

After independence the Bourguiba government built New Chenini and New Douiret at the foot of the hills to bring families down, and through the 20th century many left for Tunis, where men of these villages became known as newspaper sellers. Old Douiret is now in ruins with two families left; several hundred people still live in the caves of old Chenini. Field workers who know both describe the Amazigh of Tataouine as a people distinct from the Amazigh of Matmata, about 80 km to the north, in customs and religious identity.

Children learn Chelha at home before Arabic, and villagers speak it among themselves and Arabic with outsiders; it is spoken, not written. Douiret's mothers are remembered for teaching their children Amazigh before school, and women keep the older dress, red haiks with geometric patterns, and the facial tattoos that once marked womanhood, now often removed.

Men and women do not mix socially, a custom field workers liken to Bedouin practice and contrast with the Matmata villages. Marriage to outsiders was taboo until the 1980s; some families still keep daughters from marrying Arab men, calling an outsider 'tabit', for fear of losing the language. Summer weddings bring the whole village together for a week of couscous, lamb, drums and mizwad bagpipe music. Old rites survive: Ommek Tanbou, in which children carry a cross-shaped doll and sing for rain, and a bridal rite in which the bride hides and reveals her face.

Houses in old Chenini are caves dug into the soft rock beneath the ridge, with a whitewashed courtyard front; only two cave-diggers were left in 2022. Families press olive oil in a traditional press turned by a camel. Douiret's people celebrate their heritage in the Ikhtilaf (Difference) festival, with the Douiri jahfa procession, Amazigh crafts and dress.

The Amazigh of Tataouine are Sunni Muslims who follow the Maliki teaching of the governorate. Their villages were once Ibadi, like Djerba and Jebel Nafusa, and field workers still describe them as Ibadi by heritage, but they no longer understand what that means and have been taught by Arab preachers that Ibadis are to be shunned. Each village is crowned by a whitewashed mosque; Chenini's Mosque of the Seven Sleepers is tied to the legend of the sleepers of Ephesus, and tradition says the Berbers built white hilltop mosques so that passing armies would think the villages already converted. Daily practice follows Tunisian Islam: prayer, the Ramadan fast, Islamic weddings and burials. Folk practices with pre-Islamic roots, such as the Ommek Tanbou rain procession and protective tattoos, sit alongside it, though many women now remove tattoos as un-Islamic. The cross motif in carpets, architecture and tattoos is a trace of North Africa's Christian centuries that villagers no longer recognise.

There is no Scripture, audio recording or Jesus Film in the Berber of Douiret or Chenini. Portions exist in Nafusi (jbn), the related Berber of Libya's Jebel Nafusa, and the New Testament and the Jesus Film are available in Tunisian Arabic, which all villagers speak. Global Recordings Network lists 'Duwinna' (Douiret and Chenini) but has no recordings. Pray4Tunisia lists the Amazigh of Tataouine among Tunisia's unengaged, unreached people groups. No believers or fellowship are known.