The Timbuktu School for Nomads
Page 9
We sat back, glancing at a football match on the overhead television, and I asked a few simple questions: how life had changed in the mountains over the decades, and whether there were laws against stripping the wood for firewood (there were – pastureland is still technically common, depending on intertribal agreements over grazing ranges, but the forests belong to the state). I struggled to make headway with my halting Arabic, but the others were keen to talk and advise me on my route over the next few days, and Jagha edged his chair closer to explain what they were saying.
‘My friend Bushtu wants you to know that life is very hard if you are Amazigh.’
Drawing on a cigarette, Bushtu talked fast, his words and the smoke fusing with Jagha’s translation.
‘In the time of King Hassan,’ he explained, ‘it was really difficult. There was a big policy of Arabisation. It’s because of the French. They used a policy of divide and rule to keep us apart from the Arabs. And they were very angry with us, because it was always the Amazighen who fought against them.’
Bushtu and his thick-browed friend, Jamal, both leaned forward. They weren’t keen on Jagha monopolising the conversation, just because he happened to speak the tongue of the colons. Jamal probed the air with his bony middle finger, drawing the five-point star that is the symbol of the Moroccan monarchy. Then he snapped his fist and rubbed his fingers, crumbling the invisible image to dust.
‘He wants to tell you something,’ Jagha explained. ‘When the French came to Morocco, it was the king who invited them. He betrayed the Moroccan people, because he was scared the Amazighen would seize the power. Because of this, there have been many tensions between us. We don’t like to trust Arabs. They made a lot of promises but they never kept them. You know what we say? We say if you see an Arab, you always find a snake.’
‘But now the king’s married to an Amazigh,’ I said. ‘Haven’t there been improvements?’
‘Of course. In my father’s time, you never even heard Tamazight on the radio and there were no newspapers in our language. King Hassan set up the Institute for Arabisation. They wanted to make sure we lost our identity. If people wanted to register their children they couldn’t use Amazigh names. Now, there have been some concessions, but it isn’t enough. Many people from the villages, they went to Fez or Meknès or Casablanca to find work, but the Arabs won’t give them any work because they say we don’t speak good Arabic. Our country has a lot of economic problems, and it is the Amazighen who suffer the most.’
‘The past resembles the future more than one drop of water another,’ declared Ibn Khaldun. Reading around the cycle of invasion and oppression endured by the Berbers, you get his point. ‘After the preaching of Islam,’ he relates, ‘the Arab armies penetrated into the Maghrib and captured all the cities of the country; but they did not establish themselves there as tent-dwellers or as nomads, since their need to make sure of their dominion in the Maghrib compelled them to keep to the towns.’ For a while, the going was good. But as the Middle Ages stumbled towards the modern era, the Berbers were driven higher into the mountains, and deeper into the Maghrib’s least accessible corners. By the time the French started casting their net in North Africa, the nomads were shut away in their mountainholds, as isolated as desert monks – which made them perfect fodder for the colonialists.
Roaming the Atlas hills in the nineteenth century, map-carrying ethnologues engineered a revival of Berber self-awareness, translating poems and key texts like Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which Leo Africanus had introduced to the West. Sometimes, this was spurred by genuine scholarly curiosity. More often, monocled colonels were behind the work of the academics, keen to establish what the French sociologist Jacques Berque described as ‘a Berber reserve, a sort of national park which was to be sheltered from the ideologies of the plain’. Political institutions emphasised the division: the urban population was administered by shariah (Islamic law), but the tribal izref code was maintained in the mountains.
A neat divide and rule was the plan, but the policy ricocheted against the colons. Pan-Islamic preachers accused them of evangelising. Protests were organised and prayers given for ‘our Berber brothers’ in the mosques; polemics were published in the nationalist press and included in a ‘Plan de Reforme’ submitted to the colonialists in 1934.
Meanwhile, the Berbers were rising – showing those faint-hearted town dwellers what insurrection is all about. And, had this still been the eighth century, they might have succeeded. But they were fighting a modern European army: chutzpah and solidarity were no match for state-of-the-art military equipment and heaps of cash. Whether buying off the Sultan’s caids (local chiefs) in the High Atlas or strafing the Rif with aeroplane bombs, the French army did a textbook job. Even more disastrous, if less dramatic, were the restrictions on movement, which forced nomadic Berbers to spend all year in summer or winter pastures. ‘The result’, writes anthropologist John Shoup, ‘was financial ruin as their livestock starved and died from the lack of grazing, forcing the tribes to submit to French control.’
Now triumphant, the protectorate followed the model of previous North African invaders. Berbers were conscripted into the Armée d’Afrique, as goumiers or native soldiers (they excelled at Monte Cassino but also committed mass rapes of thousands of Italian women). While this worked to the French advantage in the short term, it also increased contact between Berber and Arab. ‘Berber-speaking areas … became more and more integrated,’ writes the historian Jonathan Wyrtzen, ‘… due to the increased ease of travel, the enlistment or conscription of much of the male population into the colonial army, and economic upheaval that encouraged, or forced, much of this population to migrate to the cities.’ Like Apuleius’s hero in The Golden Ass, the French had cast the wrong spell. Fusion instead of division was their legacy, doing more to spread orthodox Islam in the mountains than anyone else in the last millennium, inspiring alliances that would bounce them back across the Mediterranean.
The fire that burned out French rule in North Africa was lit by the assassination of a trade unionist in Tunisia (the same country in which the Arab Spring would spark, six decades later: another of Ibn Khaldun’s timeless drops of water). Like those recent conflagrations, the 1950s revolts identified themselves as pan-Arabist – despite the heavy Berber involvement. This left the Berbers in an uncomfortable position when independence finally came. Fenced outside the triumphant national identity, they were vulnerable to accusations of anti-patriotism. Their language and culture were oppressed and the very act of listening to Tamazight radio was imprisonable until the 1990s.
In the later years of King Hassan’s reign, and particularly during the era of Mohammed VI, there had been developments. These included the establishment of a Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture in 2001 (although critics accused it of ‘folklorising’ Berber culture and co-opting Amazigh activist groups). Yet it was the Arab Spring that did more than anything to thaw the glacier around Amazigh self-expression. King Mohammed had no wish to join the growing roster of fallen North African rulers, so he reached out to the people who represented around 40 per cent of his subjects. Since my first visit a couple of years before, there had been noticeable change: improvements in cultural rights, signs in the Tifinagh script appearing above schools and on buses, Tamazight accepted as an official language in the new constitution. Nevertheless, there were prevailing economic issues, as Jagha suggested, that would be harder to resolve.
8
Market Forces
EVERY TUESDAY, AZROU HOSTS A MARKET. ONE OF THE BIGGEST IN THE region, it draws farmers and herdsmen from all over the Atlas. It takes place on the outskirts of town: a patchwork camp pitched behind an arched gateway. Ripped-open rice sacks, canopies and parasols jostle together, shielding the stalls from the sun. A water carrier in a red leather hat chimes a bell, filling tin cups from a goatskin slung over his shoulder. Popcorn rattles out of a gas-powered bucket. A garlic seller balances a set of weighing scales on the handles of his trolley cart.
Lowing, bleating and howling, livestock strafe the air with laryngeal whines, semibreves of panic, deep basso moans. I tried to count how many there were, but gave up and asked one of the regulars – he estimated the day’s intake at 4000 animals. Glossy, lanolin-smelling curls glistened on the backs of brown-faced Timahdite sheep. Fluked tails tapered behind polled ewes, while dandyish rams eyed them up, locks tendrilling and horns spiralling magnificently. There were whitefaces, blackfaces, pied panda-faces. There were black-haired goats, appreciated for their resistance to cold, with horns like spires of barley sugar; and a dozen breeds of cattle, including local tan and chestnut breeds and map-backed Holstein-Friesians, which fetched the best prices for their high dairy production (around 10,000 dirhams per head, equivalent to £7000); and there were calves with cut-off bottle ends strapped over their muzzles to stop them drinking their mothers’ milk.
The owners stood beside the clustered herds, while potential customers came over to haggle, tweaking the cows’ udders, pinching ears and tails, cupping the billy goats’ balls and pressing down on the rumps of the ewes.
‘This is the ancient method,’ one customer told me. ‘Anybody who wants to sell his animals can bring them here. There is no inspector to pay, but you have to make a contract saying the price and that it is in good health and hasn’t been stolen.’
Most of the animals were marked in some way. Clipped tags poked out of cattle ears, coloured numbers streaked the backs of sheep. By the middle of the day, when hundreds of sales had been made, there was a mass confusion of colour. Newly assembled flocks sported three or four different shades of paint, while contented-looking owners cradled the strays in their arms, legs strung together to stop them returning to their old herds.
Axle deep in the muddy hill above the market were trucks to take the stock back to the mountains. Hands of Fatima hung from the windscreens of Hiluxes and Mitsubishis, between pictures of the king and tasselled verses from the Quran. By noon, they were packed. Animals squeezed together like rows of babouches in a leather store, the luckier ones plugging their mouths to the openings, sucking in diesel instead of the stench of shit inside. The rattling of engines and lock-bars were the only sounds that matched the sheep: a reminder that humans were in control, however much the animals might protest.
Like the sellers I had met in the skin market near Fez, they all spoke dialects of Tamazight. Some of them were farmers who cultivated fields, but many were nomads who lived in the mountains, grazing their animals on the available pasture. I told them my plans – heading up mountain towards the village of Ain Leuh – and they tipped their heads in approval. ‘There is good grazing in that area,’ one of them said. I wondered how they had brought their animals to the market. Presumably they didn’t have cars?
‘We come with the farmers from the village,’ explained an elderly bedawi in a woollen burnous. ‘There are three of us in one truck and at the end of the day we take back the animals we haven’t sold. We paint different colours on their backs, so we can’t mistake them.’
‘Besides,’ said his friend, ‘they are ours. We don’t need paint to recognise them.’
I thought of Lamina and other nomads I had met, their animals so bound up in their lives they were as familiar as household pets.
So many herders were milling about, surrounded by so much livestock, embroiled in such a roaring trade, it seemed the country was in rude health. But strolling back into town, I met a kilim seller who told a different story. Ahmed Zahid was in a good position to know – he ran the Bazaar Salama, one of Azrou’s top carpet emporia, stocked with loom-woven textiles from nomad camps all over the region, which he personally visited to seek out their products.
‘Look at all the houses they’re building in town,’ he said. ‘There’s so much pressure on nomads to bring their children to school – and then how do they continue their life? So they take work in a café, or selling mobile phone credit, or helping to build all the houses. Being a nomad has never been harder, because now so much land is privately owned. The government has arrangements with most of the tribes, but the land for grazing is much less than it used to be, so even if they are living in the mountains, people can’t move around as much.’
I saw what Ahmed was talking about when I strolled out of Azrou the next morning. Unpainted breezeblock pronged the sky with rebars. Mounds of cement lolled beside stacks of pipes and a brick hod that was acting as a lookout post for ravens. The red bottlecap of Coca-Cola flashed on the wall of a distribution centre, making the tufted grass look pale and anaemic. A shepherd was leading his flock nearby. I waved to him, and he seemed to stop and look at me; until I realised he was looking at the billboard behind me. It was advertising a new five-storey condominium and the logo read: ‘For a comfortable and happy life’. I wondered how long he would hold out.
At last I was in the countryside: a taste of sweet, cool air, laced with animal sulphides. Yet I was still far from nomad terrain. Compartmentalisation was everywhere: chickenwire and picket fences, drystone walls and barriers made from rows of Barbary figs, guarded by green cladode pads bristling with barbs. The freedom of the open country was nowhere to be seen. You couldn’t even stray off the roadside without being heckled by dogs. Apoplectic barks flailed my ears, dishing out canine threats that didn’t take much imagination to translate: ‘You son of a whore, get away from my master’s cherry orchard or I’ll spray the road with your ankleblood!’ ‘One more step towards this fig grove and the next time you see your toes they’ll be coming out of my arse!’
The humans were more welcoming. A farmer in an olive grove showed me a spring. The water drummed in my bottle and stung my palate with freshness. A teenager on a tractor threw a hearty wave from his cab. And when I sat on the wall of a sheepfold to eat my lunch, a couple of children beckoned me inside their limestone cottage, where their mother chatted away, telling of her visit to Fez nine years previously, while unbuttoning her shift to feed her newest (and eleventh) baby. Without ever losing the thread of the conversation, she massaged and kneaded her breast to make her milk more accessible. All this time she kept her headscarf on, and carefully put it back in place when it was in danger of slipping. Sitting beside this garrulous lady, tucking into my goat’s-cheese sandwich while her lactating nipple quivered in the corner of my eye, I had already learned more (about how maternal needs override the modesty prescribed in Islam – or, to put it another way, how nature trumps religion when you are living so close to it) than hours on the urban passegiata could teach me.
The land was growing rougher. Knobs and tendons burst through the sillion, shedding fences like King Kong snapping his chains. Mantled with cypresses, blue juniper and giant cedars a hundred feet high, the hills tilted ever steeper. Behind oleander shrubs and picnic rugs of poppies, sheep tumbled down the slope like scree. The metamorphosis was exciting, but the gradient was exhausting. My thighs were stiffening, my heart beating to the altitude. A shared taxi squiggled up the road from Azrou and I stuck out my thumb, pinching back the shame. Save your feet for tomorrow.
Ain Leuh was a pretty village of winding alleys and limestone guest-houses, tucked beneath a pinnacle of cedars that looked like a CGI backdrop projected from the Alps. I took a bed above a tea-house for just under £2. There were cigarette butts floating in the communal basin and the mattress felt like it had been chipped out of a nearby tor. All in all, I would say the price was spot on.
In the evening, men in hooded gowns filled the piazza like attendees at a Star Wars convention, ringed in spinning circuits of teenage roller-bladers. A stre
et-corner rotisserie dished up spicy ‘Berber omelettes’. I ended up sharing one with a jittery keef addict who displayed the scars he had earned from fighting for scraps with the local cats. If I wasn’t on a mission, who knows what friendship might have emerged? But he summed up Ain Leuh’s atmosphere for me: a paradise lost. Villages were too much like towns; I needed a clean break. Tomorrow night, I promised myself, would be spent in the hills.
9
The Hunt for Aziza’s Lost Cattle
THE NEXT MORNING, I COULD HEAR THE PLAINTIVE HOO-HOO-HOO OF WOOD pigeons. There was an azure rustle in the trees, but the African blue tits were acting coy. Hopefully, the nomads would prove less elusive.
Switchback roads cleaved the forests of the Aguelmouss massif. The hills tilted sharply, as if they were trying to push me back to the village. I had set out with firm intentions straight after breakfast. But it wasn’t until an hour’s strolling in the cool shade of the cedars that I was struck by one of those Homer Simpson ‘doh!’ moments: I had managed to evacuate town with only a small bottle of water and not a crumb of food. Hmmmm …. After congratulating myself on my immaculate preparations, I decided to cross my fingers for rural hospitality. Going backwards always feels wrong. And, like the ping of good chance in a fairytale, the path offered encouragement. Sliding downslope to pick a handful of cherries, I piled them into my backpack pocket, in case they were the landscape’s only freebie.
The road was as smooth as a bowling alley, and the air hurled by the trucks nearly skittled me. In the interests of avoiding my impending fate as roadkill, I clambered up a knoll. Scree threaded the grass-coated hills like gingerbread crumbs laid down by giants. I picked my way carefully, wary of tearing my boots. This was a land that ran by its own rules, and I had yet to learn what they were.
Across a valley, there was a fluctuation of light, a warping in the texture of the hills. Igneous rock burst through the greenery in tough, serrated shoulders. It took a few more steps to interpret the warping – man-made material, grafted to the native skin of the rock. Slowly, more material accumulated: a palisade of thorns, ribbed plastic sheeting held down with stones, cotton gowns hung to dry from strings lashed to wooden poles. I stepped closer, pausing to flick through the Tamazight phrases I had scribbled in my notebook. They were already forming on my lips when my presence was registered by the household guard.