Boulifa – Wikipedia

Si si Amar uïdougou (Adni, Cabilia, 1861 – Algiers, 8 June 1931) was a linguist, historian and literate Berber with Algerian citizenship.

He was born from a modest family, of marabuttic origins (hence the honorary title “Si” who precedes his name), the Bellqasem Ou Amer at Belqasem (Boulifa is a surname attributed by the French when they created a civil status in Algeria). The father was called Saïd, and his mother Fatima Hadj-Aali. First -born son, he had two sisters and two minor brothers ^[first] .

Orphan at a young age, he was welcomed by a maternal uncle who began to study him in one of the first schools opened by the French in Cabilia, intended for the formation of “Instituteurs” (elementary masters), the highest level to which it was allowed to access indigenous students. After his studies in Tamazirt, Cabilia (in which in 1886 he began to teach as “Monitur Adjoint” ^[first] ), he perfected himself at the Bouzaréah Normal School, becoming “Instituteur Adjoint” in 1896.

In the meantime, but Boulifa took contact with university environments, and began his activity as a reader (“Répétititur”) of Berbero, first at the Normal School (1890) and then to the faculty of letters from Algiers (from 1901). In 1904-5 he participated in the “ségonzac mission” of scientific exploration of Morocco (from which he obtained a remarkable group of Berber texts of Morocco, who published a few years later), on which he wrote a Road diary whose excerpts have been published so far. Even if you do not have documents that try it precisely, at a certain point it must have gone to the rank of professor at the University of Algiers (“Chargé de Cours”) before 1914.

In 1929 he retired, and turned off on June 8, 1931 in Algiers, where he would be buried.

Personality very lively and open to European culture, maintained a strong link with his own language and culture of origin, to which he dedicated the first important works written by an “indigenous”. Secular and nonconformist spirit, he was registered in Freemasonry and challenged the rules of the right -thinking by marrying a French woman.

From a scientific point of view, his works are very important in several aspects.

First of all, the wealth and quality of linguistic materials. The manuals that wrote for the use of Cabilo students often consist of collections of texts transcribed with great accuracy and in a language with a very rich and very appropriate lexicon. In particular the Second year course It is a great and precious anthology of both traditional and ethnographic texts, which for example pass on the descriptions of child games (and of baby talk ) but also author and popular poems.

Furthermore, he was responsible for the first collection of poems by Si Mohand, a poet that Boulifa knew personally and with whom he could control numerous texts of poems collected by oral tradition. His Collection of catile poems It is largely consecrated to this author, and substantially consists in a first part of “authentic” poems and in a second part of poems also attributed largely to Si Mohand, but probably reworked by other authors and therefore “of dubious authenticity”.

Boulifa’s work also turned to epigraphic studies, and the merits of the first scientific description of the rich series of enrollments in Libyan alphabet found in Iphigha (Cabilia), which allowed to greatly expand by the corpus known texts. His historical studies, in which he cannot conceal a certain partisan for the vicissitudes of his people, who leads him to give it a description not always impartial, is more contested by the Academy. Here too, however, it is indisputable that many of the information he gives on the history of Cabilia, especially with regard to the Turkish era, are precious and almost certainly come from first -hand sources now nowhere to be found (probably documents preserved in religious foundations).

Even today in Cabilia his name is well known, and every reprint of his works is quickly exhausted.

The same lingua [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

• A first year of Kabyle language (Zouaoua dialect). Using candidates for the premium and Kabyle patent , Algeri 1897 (2. ed. 1910), 228 pp.
• Kabyle language method (second year course) , Algeria 1913, 544 pp.
• Berber texts in dialects of the Moroccan Atlas , Parigi 1908, 388 pp.

Berbera literature [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

• Collection of Kabyle poems. Zouaoua text translates, annotated and preceded by a study on the Kabyle woman and a notice on the Kabyle song (Music Airs) , Algiers 1904, 555 pp. (2. Algiers-Paris edition 1990)
• Berber manuscripts from Morocco , in Asian newspaper June 10 (1905) ^{[ interrupted connection ]} , pp. 333-362

Archeology [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

History [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

• Djurdjura through history from Antiquity until 1830: organization and independence of Zouaoua (Great Kabylia) , Algeri 1925, 409 pp. Text on the Gallica.bnf.fr website (Rist. Algeri S.D., isbn 978-9961-69-021-5)
• Adni’s Kanoun, text and translation with a historical notice , in Collection of Memoirs and Texts, XIV E International Congress of Orientalists , Algeria 1905, pp. 15-27

• The mbarek and the “un gnrision séinin sergency’s: Emar oulifa””, Distillation 3 (1978), pp. 9-14.
• Salem Chaker, “Documents on precursors. Two Kabyle teachers: A. S. Boulifa and M. S. Lechani”, Revue of the Muslim West and the Mediterranean 44 (1987), pp. 97-115. (online document)
• Tassadit Yacine, “Relire Boulifa”, in Boulifa 1990, p. 9-32.