The doe-eyed, soft-spoken performer looks nothing like a covert revolutionary or rebellious youth, but appearances in Qaddafi's Libya were often deceiving. Abu Sagar and a few of his friends decided to teach themselves the script, letter-by-letter and word-by-word. It was political dissent by alphabet. They swore one other to secrecy, fearing arrest. They began to hop from one internet café to the next, changing locations every hour and never signing in with their real names. "We were very scared," Abu Sagar remembered, "people were watching everywhere."

Abu Sagar said it took him two years to master the language. Eight years after that, he would hold clandestine classes for other Amazigh who wanted to learn it. For one month last summer, 25 students convened nightly in a cave in the Nafusa Mountains, a scraggly range west of Tripoli near the Tunisian border where many of Libya's Amazigh communities still reside. Abu Sagar taught his students what he knew and he shared the Amazigh poetry he'd composed. Like many before him, his goal was to keep the language alive, despite the risks.

From Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Vandal, Arab-Muslim, and European conquerors to the policies of modern-day North African leaders, the Amazigh have been oppressed throughout their millennia-long history. This year's Arab Spring unleashed a lesser-known social movement: unprecedented Berber activism and an Amazigh cultural revival. Nowhere in the region has this new movement been more unique than in Libya, where after playing a vital role in the fight against Qaddafi, the Amazigh want their contribution to Libya's revolution acknowledged and their identity accepted. But despite the relative openness of post-Qaddafi Libya, the Amazigh face a difficult road ahead and their fate will become one of the true tests of Free Libya's freedom and its future.

Centuries of assimilation and decades of outright oppression have left the minority, which Berber scholar Bruce Maddy-Weitzman estimates today make up about 9 percent of Libya's 5.7 million people, marginalized. The Arab conquests in the seventh century promoted Arabic as the language of God and created a stigma against using Tamazight. Amazigh identity took an even harder hit from populist Arab-national sentiments promoted by the region's leaders against European colonialism, often denying Berber identity altogether. Past Amazigh cultural revivals in the region have ended with brutal repression. In a country whose future looks more and more tumultuous each day, some worry that history may repeat itself, especially if Libya's new government is hyper-nationalist.

"In the end, they kept their heads down during all the Qaddafi time. I just hope that having stuck them over the barricades they don't have them chopped off," says archaeologist and academic Elizabeth Fentress, who studies Amazigh communities and co-authored of one of the definitive books on the group's history, The Berbers. "There's a tremendous tendency in these countries for the Arab groups to say, 'Thank you very much for your help now would you shut up and start speaking Arabic again.' They [Arabs] really don't trust them or like them or want to know them."