Amazigh, Ghadames

The Ghadamsis are the Berber people of Ghadames, an oasis town in the far west of Libya where the borders of Libya, Algeria and Tunisia meet, 460 km south-west of Tripoli. They speak Ghadamsi (Ghadames), an Eastern Berber language of its own, close to the speech of Awjila and Sokna and kept with remarkably few Arabic loans; it has two dialects, those of the Ayt Waziten and the Ayt Ulid, the two halves into which the town's seven clans were divided. Ethnologue rates the language as threatened.

Ghadames was the Roman fort of Cydamus, garrisoned from 19 BC, and for two thousand years a gateway of the trans-Saharan caravan trade: Ghadamsi merchants kept agents in Tripoli, Tunis, Timbuktu and the Hausa cities, trading cloth and goods south and gold, ivory, skins and slaves north. The town was organised in quarters by clan, each with its own mosque and square, and in a hierarchy of noble families, free clients, freedmen and slaves of African origin. The trade declined in the late 19th century, the old town was emptied in the 1980s when the state built a new town beside it, and the walled old town, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986, is now visited for festivals and summer coolness. Ghadamsis are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school. Arab families (the Awlad Bellil) and Tuareg have long lived beside them; the Ghadamsis keep a clear identity of their own.

The old town is one building: houses of mud brick, lime and palm wood stand wall to wall over covered lanes that stay cool in the heat, each house rising through a storeroom, a family floor with a high living room lit from above, and a roof terrace. The roofs were the women's town, linked from house to house so that women could visit one another without going down to the men's lanes. Interiors are painted in red patterns of triangles, diamonds, suns, palms and hands, and mirrors and copper pots hang on whitewashed walls; this women's art, zanjafor painting, is being revived. Water from the Ain al-Faras spring was shared through channels by a precise measure of time. Weddings were long cycles of songs in Ghadamsi, studied in a 1982 thesis by a Ghadamsi scholar. Each autumn the Ghadames festival brings families back to their old-town houses, with date markets, horse and camel shows and Tuareg music, and in 2023 a crafts festival drew thousands of visitors.

Ghadamsis are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, with a mosque and Qur'an school in each quarter of the old town. Older beliefs survive beside mosque practice: respect for holy lineages and marabouts whose tombs are visited for blessing (baraka), fear of the evil eye and jinn, and an ancient custom, noted by classical writers for the Libyans of the region, of seeking guidance through ancestors and dreams at tombs. Ghadames had Ibadi ties in the early Islamic centuries, as the Nafusa and Djerba did, but its people follow the Maliki school today.

Ghadamsi has no Scripture, no Jesus Film and no audio recordings; translation is needed. Ghadamsis are fluent in Libyan Arabic, in which Scripture portions and the Jesus Film exist. No church or known believer among the Ghadamsis is reported. IMB marks the group as engaged.