Tiwiza: The Berber-inspired Rock Band Mixing Desert Blues and Chaabi Music

It’s a band from Toulouse that mixes rock, chaabi music and desert blues. Tiwiza publishes after ten years of existence, Amenzu, a first record that evokes the struggle of the Berbers in North Africa. Explanations with his Kabyle singer, Sofiane Aït Belaïd, and discovery.

In the Berber language, the word “tiwiza” designates a mutual aid system, a voluntary work done to help someone. This word, which exists throughout North Africa, takes different forms depending on the region and can quite simply mean solidarity. In Kabylie, the region of origin of Sofiane Aït Belaïd, this term becomes “tiwizi”, but the singer has chosen to call his group Tiwiza, as if to recall his interest in the global history of the Berbers.

After leaving his country in the last years of the “dark decade” during which Algeria faced Islamist terrorism, the teenager was very marked by the assassination of Matoub Lounès on June 25, 1998. He was fifteen years old, just arrived in Toulouse with his family, and the murder of the rebel singer is the beginning of a return to the roots for Sofiane. “It’s the summer of 1998, the summer of the football World Cup. Matoub Lounès disappears, and at the same time, Zidane appears. Even if they are not the same areas, I said to myself: ‘There must be a continuity somewhere’“, rembobine-t-il.

The influence of soul, more than rock’n’roll

From then on, the young man will take an interest in Algerian music, its culture, and seek to disseminate it at all costs. He studies biochemistry in science faculty, misses the first two years, begins a series of food jobs while music imposes itself on him. In 2013, he formed a Kabyle song group and Tiwiza. At the beginning, the formation counts a keyboard, a transverse flute, and it tightens around four members.

Guitar, bass, drums, a singer playing the mandola and the guembri… The group mixes rock, Algerian chaabi music and desert blues. He is inspired much more by the Orchester National de Barbès (ONB), by Gnawa Diffusion than by the big Toulouse brothers of Zebda. But like the latter, Tiwiza mixes identities that have been forged on both sides of the Mediterranean, from Algeria to the Occitan region, from the Toulouse region to a great interbreeding.

“It’s the rock spirit more than this music that speaks to me. I can very well take inspiration from the punk of the Clash and Matoub Lounès. They are very different, but what emerges and what they claim is rock’n’roll“, says Sofiane Aït Belaïd. If it is better to listen loudly to Tiwiza’s first album, Amenzu, its singer is above all passionate about Motown and soul. Very young, he also spent sleepless nights listening to Michael Jackson and considers Stevie Wonder as his “God”.

Berber culture at the heart of things

Sofiane Aït Belaïd wants to reconcile the musicality of Afro-American music with the depth of Berber song and poetry. Full of groove, his songs are written in Kabyle. They deal with the future of this people (Leqbayel), their mountains (Ay Adrar Inu) and more broadly of the struggle of the Berbers. This “millennial” people who are now spread over nine countries in North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco, and which include the Kabyles as well as the Tuaregs living in the desert, on the borders of Algeria.

But on this first disc, the singer came out of his “comfort zone“, writing on the condition of women (Taste it) or recounting the lament of this man who fell madly in love with a girl who ignores him (Ayen Aaka A Zzman). Takerfa is a letter to Africa, as much as a call for the unity of a continent and an observation on its migrations. “I speak to Africa by personifying it. I find her depressed because her children are leaving, risking their lives, and being swallowed up by the Mediterranean. I tell him to have hope. And I also talk about racism between North Africans and black Africans. I tell him: ‘Don’t worry, one day, these people will recognize themselves as one and indivisible’“, he describes.

For Sofiane Aït Belaïd, music serves precisely “to bring people together“. “At the beginning, we see each other from afar. We say to ourselves: ‘Hey, we’re different!’ But as soon as you put musicians with instruments in their hands, there are no more borders“, he assures.

Tell us, Amenzu (Ma Case Prod & Collek Tifin’Art) 2023

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