Pop Goes Libya

Zuwarah, Libya

Khaled el Naggiar

This is my city and I came back again

I found myself where I was born.

The jam session was stirring, though it took place in the proper bourgeois living room of Khaled el Naggiar, a 55-year-old cultural activist here. Two or three young men played acoustic guitar while one kept beat on the bundeer, a thin drum resembling a tambourine. One, sometimes two, sang—always in the Tamazight language, sometimes originals, sometimes covers such as “My City” (1975) by Zuwarah’s Ismail Jafaz, sometimes favorites from the well-known Algerian Amazigh group Idir (“horizon”), and sometimes musical settings of the poems of the late Libyan Amazigh poet Said Sifaw al Mahrouq (1946-1994), a local cultural icon.

The sound was both familiar—Amazigh music uses half tones, like European classical music, rather than Arab music’s quarter tones—and hard to pin down. There are suggestions of Spanish and Cuban music, which makes sense given Libya’s proximity to the former Muslim kingdoms of Al Andalus and to Niger, Mali, Sudan, and other points of origin for Afro-American music. The bundeer, of course, is African.

And while this music sounds as though it were the fruit of a long tradition, it is not. The guitar arrived in Zuwarah only in the 1970s, as part of a North African Amazigh cultural awakening—“Berber” is the term outsiders use—and all of Zuwarah’s young players are self-taught. While Amazigh have always sung at weddings, the first modern song written in the Tamazight language dates only to 1975, when “My City” was sung. When he heard “My City,” the poet Mahrouq wrote “Amousnaw” and gave it to his disciple Naggiar to sing. Neither song was recorded at the time.

“If I had recorded it, I would have been in jail,” Naggiar tells me.