Fanon emphasizes the importance of the establishment of a national identity that ignores aspects such as race, ethnicity, religion, and other things that may separate people into groups. He believes that creating a national identity could help free people from colonialism, as it unites the people of the land against the colonizers, which I believe to be true to some extent however, does that also work against settler colonialists?
Settler colonialism in North Africa is overlooked and often ignored when discussing colonialism; I assume this is because it happened so long ago that now the settlers have assimilated into the region and claim to be in some way just as native as the Amazigh. In some North African countries such as Morocco and Algeria, the native people are the Amazigh, but after the Arabs colonized them, many Arabs settled in their land and changed the way their culture and society works.
Creating a national identity can strengthen the colonized nation against the colonialists by uniting people who feel like they belong to the nation. In the case of North Africa, specifically Algeria, many different ethnic and religious groups united against the French, under one Algerian identity. Despite some ethnic groups, such as the Arab Algerians, historically being a form of settler colonialist, they had been on the land for centuries and had mixed in with the native Amazigh in several aspects. The Arabs in North Africa were influenced by the Amazigh culturally, linguistically, and numerous other features because of the amount of time they have been there and because of intermarriages between the two communities, this could be applied to the rest of North Africa as well. During the Algerian revolution, the Algerians used many tools like, for example, the radio, to call for all Algerians to join and work together against the French, who were purposefully trying to divide the two groups and pit them against each other. This was successful against the French, and now all Algerians live in their own independent nation, but are they treated equally? Was the establishment of national identity a way of getting rid of the French, or did it also purposefully and simultaneously erase other ethnic and religious identities that exist in Algeria?
In Morocco, the Moroccan government has constantly tried to push forward an Arab identity, even when the majority of the people living there have rejected this and are advocates for the creation of an Arab-Amazigh national identity. The Arab-Amazigh national identity would merge between both the Amazighs and the Arabs living there, as well as the large percentage of people who are a mix of both as a result of intermarriages between the two groups. This new national identity would also recognize the most common language spoken in the land: Arabic. It also includes the native language that has slowly been erased as the Arabic language became the dominant one, and then, later on, French colonialism brought on the french language which battled both the Arabic and Amazigh languages. The Arab-Amazigh national identity also recognizes the effects that Arab colonialism had on Moroccan culture, as it now has been transformed into a mix of the two cultures.
So since many people either accepted the idea of a national identity that merges both cultures or are actually a part of both cultures and so they find that this national identity represents them accurately, does this mean that we should forget that the Arabs were once colonizers of the land? It seems that this is what many are hoping would happen – especially the Moroccan government who has constantly tried to erase the identity of the Amazigh, and in the rare moments that they are represented, their culture and identity are folklorised and commodified as an attraction to tourists.