The Tunisian Berbers of this group closely resemble the natives of the Pyrenees and of Languedoc, and of the great islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Their chief characteristic is a tendency toward murder, feud, and fray.
In the three “arrondissements” of Ain Drahm (in the Khrumir mountains), Bizerta and Kef, all in north-west Tunisia, where this type prevails, no less than forty-one murders and assaults were committed last year alone, whereas in the whole of the rest of Tunisia there were only twenty-nine. This computation includes only the crimes committed by natives. This propensity to shed blood exists also amongst the kindred race north of the Mediterranean.
It is startling to observe that this temperament prevails wherever the brown dolichocephalous peoples are found.
Other characteristics which they have in common are their warlike disposition, their devotion to agriculture, and their pronounced clannishness.
For example, when the French came to Tunisia, the Khrumirs, the most typical of the tribes belonging to this group, were formed into three leagues, composed of fifteen tribes, which were again subdivided into forty-three divisions, although the whole population numbered only five thousand and seventy-one persons, of whom only one thousand four hundred and seventy were men capable of bearing arms. In other words, there were only forty-three armed men in each division.
The tribe Nefza in the same province had innumerable chiefs of clans.
A peculiarity of the people on either coast of the Mediterranean is their strong inclination to fetichism, whatever may be the form of their religion.
The Khrumirs are Mussulmans only in name. Their religion is confined to observing the fast (Ramadan), and to a holy horror of all unbelievers. They never pray, and are unacquainted with any ritual. They own some Marabout tombs, enshrining saints to whom peculiar influence is attributed, and who are worshipped like positive idols.
One of these is adored because he takes care that parents who ill-treat their children shall be punished through his intervention.
Some punish perjurers.