A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  Guy suspects that this book of Dumas’ may have been behind his ancestors’ decision to up sticks and start their new life in North Africa. Although, sad to say, no myth or legend has survived in Guy’s family to explain their departure from France, his parents and grandparents all agree that the book, an original edition, had stood for long generations on the bookshelf of their Algiers home – though nobody had ever been known to take it down and read it. Guy pulled it from a dusty box in the attic of his Paris home, where it had languished ever since the 1960s when his family joined the panic-stricken French exodus from Algeria – and found it in mint condition. He must, he thinks, have been the first member of the family to open its pages for over a hundred years. And a very disturbing read it was, too!

  Dumas’ trip here was paid for by the French government, in the hope that a book by such a popular author might conjure up willing volunteers for settlement in the newly conquered North African colonies. At the time, the desperate poor of the French countryside were flooding into the already-overcrowded cities, seeking non-existent work, and causing no end of trouble. The plan was to entice this hungry and disorderly peasantry across the Mediterranean, where they would not only be out of the way, but could usefully be set up to farm the good fertile land sequestered from the vanquished North Africans, and contribute, in return, to supplying the hard-pressed Motherland with grape and grain.

  Like Guy, I found it hard to imagine that Dumas’ book had attracted anyone at all to this part of the world. Dumas is fascinated, true, but constantly torn between anger and terror, as he tries and fails to control the various bunches of rebellious Maghrebis allocated to him as servants. They will use his horses for unauthorized races, wearing them out behind his back, or refuse to touch the wild boar he’s bagged while out hunting – an unclean pig-type animal – so that Dumas and his European companions are forced to lose face and carry it home themselves. Dumas describes in horrified detail the savagery of the bastinado, the usual punishment for such insubordinate behaviour – a severe beating to the soles of the culprit’s feet. But he sits by while it is carried out on his behalf, regardless. His fear of losing the upper hand when outnumbered by natives – which, this being their country, he usually is – naturally outweighs his Christian compunction. Could anyone possibly have seen this book as a reassuring advertisement for a prosperous new life abroad? It certainly wouldn’t have attracted me. But then, who knows how adventurous Guy’s forebears may have been? Or, indeed, how hungry and disorderly?

  Among the olives now are cork oak plantations. You can see the great three-foot scars on the sides of their trunks where slabs of bark, destined one day to seal the necks of the wine-bottles of Europe, have been carefully removed. Piles of them lie by the side of the road, waiting to be collected. Must be a strange job, if you’re a practising Muslim, to make your livelihood from something so utterly useless in your own culture. Unless perhaps Moroccans are partial to a nice bit of cork tiling? Yazid looks at me as if I’m mad. He’s never heard of such a thing.

  All this, the olives and the cork too, is certainly organized, commercial production. No sign of the small-time peasant farming I was expecting to see, from all we’ve heard about the Rif.

  Not till after Chefchaouen, says Tobias. We’re still in the land of the Arabic-speakers here. Prosperous parts. Another hour or so before we’re in the Rif proper and among the Berbers.

  We’re passing through a small town now, a strange mixture of shacks and isolated houses, with the occasional modern villa standing incongruous among them.

  Migrant money, says Yazid, craning round to check the details – comparing and contrasting, I expect, with his own efforts in this sphere. Suddenly, he starts his wheezing chuckle again and, grabbing Tobias’ arm, draws his attention to the roofs of the next two villas, just down below the road. They are both – speaking of incongruity – sporting large, shiny colanders, hanging like absurd hats over the TV aerials on their roofs.

  Tobias slows down to get a better look. Brave people, he says.

  We wait with bated breath to hear what can possibly be brave about hanging a colander from your TV aerial.

  The items in question, Yazid explains to us foreigners, are not colanders at all, but couscoussiers – steamers for the family couscous. Not long since, the whole of his town was festooned with them, hanging from almost every aerial, until the king got annoyed and decreed that they all had to be taken down. Maybe nobody cares, here in the middle of nowhere? But back home, anyone who still had a couscoussier on their roof would be getting a very unfriendly visit from the police. Surreal, yes, but not as inexplicable as it appears at first sight. A while ago, we learn, a rumour went round all the north of Morocco that, if you added a couscoussier to your aerial, you would be able to receive the European TV stations that the king, in his wisdom, had banned from the country. It was just an urban myth, but it spread like wildfire.

  Tobias laughs: he remembers the day he found himself driving through the inexplicable forests of cookery equipment that had suddenly sprouted from every roof over the border. And of course, says Yazid, once you’ve bothered to go up on your roof to hang your couscoussier on the aerial, you aren’t in any hurry to get back up there and take it down, are you, even when it turns out to do nothing at all for your reception? People saw them on one another’s roofs and believed the story all the more. By the time everyone had realized they didn’t work, the whole skyline was adorned with couscoussiers. And though they might not get you any foreign TV stations, they certainly made a fine – and highly visible – sign of his citizens’ discontent with their king and his censorship! And nobody could say you were doing anything illegal, either. Here in Morocco, it is forbidden to criticize the king. But how could a couscoussier be a criticism? What sortof crimeishangingasaucepanfromyourroof?Sopeoplewent on putting them up, even once they knew perfectly well they did nothing at all! Ah, great times! says Yazid. The police came round browbeating people into taking them down, one by one . . . But the point was made. How can the king say he wants to build a modern, educated nation, and then refuse to let people know what’s going on in the world? Or, indeed, to let them watch the juicy American soap operas being beamed out of Italy?

  As predicted, within the hour we are making our way along ever more steep and winding roads, climbing slowly but surely, the dry, sun-baked earth of the lower hills giving way to green. Rivulets trickle down craggy rock faces, the courses of their streams marked, way below, by lines of wild reeds and oleanders. We’re into real hill-country now: hamlets of half a dozen squat, whitewashed houses nestling in protective coppices of fir. We pass a man ploughing a patch of stony, ochre earth with a pair of oxen. Ahead of us, a flock of goats wanders, blocking the road, the usual child with a stick bringing up the rear. We slow down to a crawl to squeeze through, and find, leading the flock, the first women we have seen in all this time.

  Berbers, says Tobias. You don’t get Arab women out and about like that.

  This information hardly seems to cover the questions that spring to mind at the sight of this pair of shepherdesses. Even more striking than the fact that they’re female is the fact that they appear to be in fancy dress. Or in the wrong country. They are wearing an outfit that would not look out of place on a Peruvian indio: wide-brimmed straw sombreros decorated with bright red pom-poms and trails of multicoloured ribbons, over green-and-white shawl-like headscarves pinned under their chins. They have lengths of bright red fabric knotted round their waists, broad white pin-stripes woven into it, and loose pale leggings below. Grass-green and canary-yellow socks, respectively, complete the picture.

  Rif Mountain Berbers, says Yazid. The colours of the stripes in the fabric show which clan they belong to. He thinks these are Ait Ouriagar. Unless they’re Ait something-else. These days, only country people who still stick to the old hill-farming lifestyle wear the traditional outfits, though most of Morocco’s inhabitants are really of Berber blood. The rest have moved into the towns over the
centuries, ended up speaking the Arabic language, as you do in the cities, and dressing in ordinary jellabas: hardly think of themselves as Berbers any more.

  And is Yazid one of them?

  Half and half, he says, with a grin.

  We pull in to allow the goats and their owners to perform a complex sharp-left-turn manoeuvre, which involves a lot of stick-waving, shouting, and chasing of strong-willed escapees. While we wait for this caprine drama to resolve itself, Gérard reveals that he has been looking forward immensely to seeing the Rif. He is, he tells Yazid, a big fan of Abd el-Krim. I am confused. Abdelkrim? As far as I am aware, Abdelkrim is the name of a young protégé of Moustafa’s, an occasional False Guide to the city of Tetuan . . .

  But of course, interrupts Yazid. Many people are named after Abd el-Krim, who was a very great man indeed, a Berber hero! Abd el-Krim and his Rif shepherd fighters kept the Spanish at bay – if Tobias will excuse his putting it like that! – for a good two decades, when Spain was trying, in the first half of the twentieth century, to occupy the whole Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Thanks to Abd el-Krim, the Rif, and Yazid’s own town, only suffered thirty years of colonization and humiliation, unlike the rest of his country – and, indeed, his continent.

  Gérard joins in with gusto. Abd el-Krim was a brilliant guerrilla strategist, he says, and a man who had many admirers outside Morocco as well as within. Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong – everyone who was anyone claimed Abd el-Krim as an inspiration in their own fights against colonialism.

  Abd el-Krim and his supporters, Yazid says, were fighting for self-rule: they had set up their own Berber Republic of the Rif, wanting no truck with either Moroccan Arabic Royalty or other people’s Empires – something that today’s Rif Berbers have still not changed their minds about! They even managed, at one point, with guerrilla forces of a mere 3,000, to defeat a Spanish army of 13,000! Later, in his shame at this dishonourable trouncing, the Spanish general in charge of the invading forces committed suicide. His death, as chance would have it, cleared the path for a newcomer with a great future, now promoted to anti-Berber operations: a certain General Francisco Franco.

  But the final downfall of the Rif Republic, Gérard tells us, was only brought about by his and Guy’s own country stepping in to lend a hand. France had decided it had to crush this rebellion, even if it meant helping the Spanish competition. The flame of Abd el-Krim’s successes was spreading fast among France’s own colonized peoples – not just to the French sectors of Morocco, but to next-door Algeria, as well, and even to Indochina, where the Vietnamese were starting to rebel. And so a saturation army of a quarter of a million soldiers descended on the towns and villages of the Rif – a massive swamping manoeuvre.

  And the mustard gas! Don’t forget the poison, says Yazid. Fired into our homes, against our aged parents, our women and children! Nobody could stand up to such an onslaught, not even Abd el-Krim, who was captured now and exiled far from his homeland, to be kept prisoner, incommunicado, on some distant island in the Indian Ocean.

  Gérard doesn’t know if it was Franco who came up with the idea of testing out chemical weapons on the Berber hill villages, or his French allies. Still, the victory didn’t last long, did it? Even the Roman Empire, Gérard tells us, never did manage to subdue the Berbers of the Rif. For centuries now, their homeland has been nicknamed the Bled es-Siba by the rest of Morocco: the Land of Dissidence.

  Though you could also translate it ‘Land of the Argumentative’, says Yazid.

  And all that, Gérard adds, will be why the Rif Berbers get left alone to grow cannabis if they want to. The Imperial Powers demonstrated only too clearly, long ago, that it takes a quarter of a million armed men to bend a few thousand Berbers to your will!

  Yazid says there’s more to it than that. He doesn’t believe his government really wants to stop the cannabis farming. There is no other crop the Berber farmers could grow on their tiny plots of stony land anyway – nothing that would earn enough, these days, to support them and their families. They would have no choice but to abandon the land altogether and head down from the hills, flooding into the already-overcrowded cities seeking non-existent work and causing no end of trouble . . .

  The women have finally got their goats across the road and down a track leading to a small collection of cube-shaped buildings a short way below us, on the side of the valley. You can see chickens scratching about in the yard down there. They wave their thanks, shouting a greeting. I like the look of these Berbers a lot. Very reminiscent of another group of people of whom I am most fond: the pugnacious inhabitants of the Ligurian hills, back in Italy. The Ligurians, too, are known for their dissident traditions, and for their successful resistance, from their mountain fastnesses, both to the home-grown Italian and the invading German Fascists. Also some centuries earlier, to the Romans, whom they allowed to waste much time building a road to Gaul through their tribal lands, only to make passage along it so perilous that the Romans gave up and went by sea instead. Can it be the recalcitrant landscape from which both these hardy peoples make their livelihood that produces the spirit of resistance?

  Compared to the tight-headscarf-and-jellaba women in Tetuan, these Berber women also seem very free-and-easy – out and about with the flocks, waving and smiling to people they don’t know. And though they are wearing head-coverings aplenty, nobody could call them modest and unostentatious, not with all those colours and bobbles and ribbons – no question but they’re aiming at pleasing the eye, rather than at pious modesty.

  Tobias says that Europeans like me always misunderstand the situation. Berber countrywomen may look more free to Western eyes, – but to other Moroccans, they just look more poor and less valued and respected by their families. We needn’t imagine that other women round here will be looking on enviously at Berber ‘freedom’. Just the opposite. The way they see it, Berber women are forced to work – and to show themselves in public while they do it – because their husbands can’t afford to keep them decently at home. Or are too shameless to care. Or both.

  We pass an orchard of fruit trees now – apricots, by the look of it – where a group of these shameless and argumentative people, sickles in hand, are clearing the ground of spring weeds and grass, men and women working together. The Berbers themselves, it seems, don’t give a fig for their compatriots’ disapproval. Not a few of them appear to be singing.

  5

  The countryside is getting more and more spectacular. Down in the valleys are deep green pastures and swathes of arable land, fertile slashes cut through the parched hillsides high above. Ahead of us, forested hills interlock above green river-plains and the occasional mirror-blue lake gleams down in the intricate valleys; great limestone crags loom above us. Rounding a bend we glimpse a hill-town up ahead, a pile of roofs clustered together in the misty distance. Way down below us, on a grassy bank, a tiny group of scattered golden-brown tents is pitched near a meandering river. Nomad Berbers, says Tobias. Or semi-nomads, rather. Their clans wander with their flocks all summer, in search of pasture, and go back to their villages for the winter.

  Here we overtake a young boy riding a donkey laden with what look like jerrycans of petrol. At first sight, a bit of a contradiction in terms, but what do we know? Maybe his other beast of burden is a Porsche. Or, indeed, a Mercedes. His mixed bag of animals is straying out across the road: a cow and half a dozen sheep, two lambs prancing around them. He’s using the long hood of his jellaba as an improvised shopping-bag. There’s a big round loaf peeping out of the top of it, and what looks like a lettuce.

  That’s how Yazid grew up, he says. The donkey for transport, the cow for milk, the sheep for meat and wool, the lambs for cash in hand. Taking the family fortunes out for a wander to fill their bellies, just like that boy there! And now look – not a single one of his own children would survive a week in the countryside. Everything’s changed. Against all the odds, two of his sons are at university. An unexpected spin-off from emigration. The least
educated are becoming the most educated, he says. And meanwhile, a poor ignorant man like himself has to go on working an extra decade to pay for it all! Thirty years ago, back in his village, you expected your children to be grown and working by the time they were thirteen or fourteen. If things had stayed the same, Yazid would have been back home and comfortably retired years ago, grandchildren already playing around his knee. Some hope!

  The story goes like this. Yazid, like the other migrants of his town, has always made sure his children never lacked for money. Spoilt them, maybe, he confesses. Their father might be a mere unskilled countryman, but that made it all the more important that they should be able to hold their heads high in the town. In his absence, his children grew up on the migrant money he was sending home – and in comfortably off middle-class style. Except that, unlike the parents of their middle-class friends, a migrant father has no family business to set them up in when they leave school. And no connections in the town to help them find a job, either, after a lifetime spent away. What can he do to make it up to them but carry on working – and support them through university so they will, eventually, get a job that will keep them in the style to which they’re accustomed?

  And keep out of their way when he’s home, too, Yazid adds, after a pause for thought. So as not to embarrass them with his uncouth peasant ways! Not one of them could so much as draw a bucket of water from a well, never mind care for a flock of sheep. Or, in his daughter’s case, spin the wool for her man’s jellaba. And now she wants to join her brothers at college, too. She has applied to a Spanish university to study medicine! When will he ever be able to retire? His parents would turn in their graves!

  In a clearing on the tree-lined bend up ahead, a small whitewashed dome appears. A mini mosque?