In Morocco, the Arab and Arabized groups tended to be associated with the lowlands, and the speakers of the Berber dialects originally with the mountains. The Berbers had no written culture; urban Arabs regarded them as uncouth and bloody-minded highlanders, and as indifferent observers of the faith. While they were, of course, Muslims, pre-Islamic beliefs were discernible in local practice, and the diligence of their daily observances varied widely. Among Berber tribes, sharia law had always coexisted with customary law, the latter sometimes taking precedence, and some sultans attempted to subdue outbreaks of dissidence in a spirit of jihad (in the early nineteenth century one of these, the zealot Moulay Sulayman, had raged at the Berbers as irreligious barbarian ‘monkeys’).
THE CENTRAL FACT OF TRIBAL HISTORY since the seventeenth century had been the pressure of Berber movements in search of land, broadly from the south-east to the north, north-west and west. Crudely, this was a process of competitive tribal migration by highland Berbers seeking to dispossess or dominate lowland Arabs. For example, the belligerent Ait Atta people of the south exploded from the Djebel Sahro in all directions; when they were checked in the mountains to their north they turned west, south and east, to dominate the cultivators of the grain- and date-growing oases of the Rteb plain north of the Tafilalt and the Dades valley to its west, and to compete for control of the caravan routes. Further north, in the early nineteenth century there was a great Berber revolt in the Middle Atlas; at the battle of Landa in 1818 one of Sultan Moulay Sulayman’s sons was killed by the Berber ‘monkeys’, and the sovereign himself did not long survive the resulting crisis. To the east, French southwards expansion from the Algerian Tell to the edge of the Sahara in the 1840s to 1860s presented further dilemmas to the sultans of Morocco. Before then, at least the Maghzan had been the only major power with which the tribes could deal; now there was a second pole of influence, on the other side of ill-defined borders on the most inaccessible flank of the bled es siba.
After the death of Moulay Sulayman in 1822, the practical boundaries of the bled el maghzan had become more or less stable. Roughly, they enclosed the Atlantic coast, the plains surrounding Fes, Meknes and Marrakesh, and the strategic corridor running from Fes eastwards to Taza and Oujda, carrying ‘the Sultan’s Road’ to the Moulouya river valley and the Algerian border. Any relative stability was due not so much to Maghzan coercion as to the success of highland tribes newly arrived on the plains in fighting off those who sought to follow them down, and the balance of tribal power at the time of French contact was still fluid. The Maghzan was obliged to grant recognition to various tribal leaders, but how heavily or lightly their reciprocal obligation weighed on these caids depended, as always, on the strength, resolve and guile of the current sultan, and an inevitable consequence was that regional power accreted around individual tribal strongmen. At the turn of the century these included figures who would become central to the concerns of the Europeans – the incorrigible Raisuli in the Djibala, the brothers Glaoua in the High Atlas, and (though more briefly) the trickster El Rogi in the hills around Taza.12 However, the early confrontations with French troops took place far from these power bases, in the southern borderlands between Morocco and Algeria’s Oran province.
TO CONSIDER THESE BORDER MARCHES from north to south: the 90-odd miles of formally delineated frontier between western Algeria and eastern Morocco, below the Mediterranean coast, cut across the slant of forested mountains that made up the far north-eastern end of the Middle Atlas (see Map 11). The Moroccan town of Oujda lay just west of the line, but many Frenchmen always believed that the natural border should be the Moulouya river about 50 miles further west.
South of these coastal mountains lay a wedge of the high plains, about 80 miles deep and called, collectively, the Dahra. Below this, the next stripe of mountains pushing up from the south-west was the dry, naked tip of the High Atlas (called the Saharan Atlas, or Mountains of the Ksour), some 100 miles deep from north to south. Between two fingers of the Algerian end of this range lay the small town of Ain Sefra, the base for French military activity in the Sud-Oranais. Some 70 miles south-west of this, on the southern edge of the slanting mountain wall, was the great Moroccan oasis of Figuig, an important hub in the traditional trans-Saharan caravan routes. South of Figuig there was only stone-desert, and after about 60 miles the gravel gave way to the first wandering dunes of the ghostly Grand Erg Occidental – the Great Western Sand-Sea.
To the semi-nomadic tribes, the notional frontier between southern Morocco and Algeria existed only as a vague idea. They did not use maps, nor see the world as divided by straight lines, but thought in terms of the ranges of particular peoples. Some communities traditionally acknowledged the religious authority of the sultans of Morocco; others did not, and intertribal relationships and physical movements flowed back and forth across a fluid margin whose exact edges had no meaning. The only thing that did have meaning in this desolate country was water; life was organized along and between a strictly limited number of oueds – watercourses, flowing as rivers in the north and in times of seasonal flood, but mostly below ground in the south, though feeding along their whole length broken chains of fertile oases. Although the tribes moved their beasts around the plains between them in a seasonal rhythm, for most practical human purposes the narrow green ribbons of these valleys and their dotted oases were the habitable peninsulas and islands in a virtually lifeless yellow-grey ocean, and the landmarks of the French penetration of south-east Morocco would all be found along three main systems.
THE EASTERNMOST, in the debatable lands between Algeria and Morocco, was the Oued Zousfana, which normally flowed on the surface as far south as Figuig (see Map 11). It then continued underground, emerging briefly at Taghit in a group of oases known as the Beni Goumi, before sinking out of sight again. Its course continued below the sands to Igli, where it joined that of the Oued Guir; from there the underground flow made its secret way south-east as the Oued Saoura, feeding oases such as Beni Abbès, until it reached those of the scattered complex called the Touat in the edge of the true Sahara (see Map 3).
About 150 miles west of Figuig, on the far side of an expanse of plateaux and hills, the Oued Guir flowed as far south as Boudenib, but for most of the year it then disappeared beneath its bed somewhere to the east. However, when it reached Abadla it frayed out into many narrow beds to create an alluvial plain covering about 15,000 acres. The water flowed on the surface here for between two and three months in winter, irrigating the tribes’ main source of wheat and barley. Below the Abadla flood plain the Guir passed underground once more, to unite with the course of the Zousfana at Igli.
West of the Oued Guir, cliffs rose to the most hostile environment in the whole south-east: the Hammada of the Guir, a stark and waterless stone plateau up to 100 miles across, shaped like a north-pointing flat-iron broadening southwards towards the Sahara. In high summer it was utterly dead, but knowledgeable herdsmen could drive their beasts across it in spring and autumn. The Hammada was a rampart between the two eastern valley systems and the westernmost, richest and most politically important.
The Oued Ziz snaked south through High Atlas gorges to emerge into the desert close to Ksar es Souk (modern Er Rachidia). From there southwards it had carved a slot in the earth hundreds of feet below the lifeless expanse of stone-desert; the red canyon walls enclosed a ribbon of lush greenery, with villages every few miles along this sharply defined corridor of life. Emerging from the canyon, the Ziz crossed the Rteb plain to the great date-basket of the Tafilalt. The river usually flowed above ground here even in summer, and in spring the snow-melt from the Atlas sometimes kept it on the surface even further south. With the lesser Oued Rheris that flowed into the Tafilalt from the west, the Ziz watered an area about 13 miles long by 9 miles wide. Here, up to 120,000 residents of and tribal visitors to seven separate groups of castle-like walled villages (ksars), with four subsidiary oases to the north, tended the many hundreds of thousands of date-palms that formed t
he basis of the trans-Atlas trade.13
The Tafilalt was a mostly Arab island set in a Berber sea, and it was where sultans kept their mistrusted relatives in privileged but quarrelsome exile. It was historically the main way-station for the trans-Saharan caravans; by the nineteenth century its ancient city of Sijilmasa, once the northern terminus of the trade in gold and slaves from Timbuktu, had crumbled into ruins, but the Tafilalt was still the most important religious, commercial and political centre south of the Atlas. The Maghzan khalifa lived in the Rissani district, though with only 50 to 100 soldiers. (More an envoy and administrator than a governor, he was largely powerless, and could not impose royal authority on any group unless he could persuade another group to support him; tribal warriors often profited by taking sides in feuds between villages, and thus came to dominate them. During a particularly devastating tribal war in 1896 – 1900, a Maghzan expedition led by Madani el Glaoui managed to restore order briefly, but skirmishing resumed as soon as he marched north again.)
The greater Tafilalt area supported perhaps 40 per cent of the total population of south-eastern Morocco. The whole region between the Saharan Atlas in the east and the Ziz valley in the west, the High Atlas in the north and the Saharan dunes in the south, was home to between 200,000 and 250,000 people. These communities were both Arabic- and Berber-speaking: Arabs mainly on the high plains and along the lower Zousfana, Guir and Ziz, Berbers mainly in the eastern edge of the High Atlas, on the upper Guir and upper Ziz. The great majority of them lived by cultivating dates, vegetables, grain and fodder in the oases, and the rest by grazing sheep, goats and camels on the esparto grass and artemisia of the steppes. Between the two ways of life there was a symbiotic relationship: the semi-nomads needed access to the crops, markets, manufactured goods, scribes, holy men and news that they could find only in the oases, and often acquired date-groves there themselves. The villagers of the oases needed the meat, milk and hides of the herdsmen, sometimes their external protection, and always the lines of communication that the tribes controlled. While mutually necessary, however, these relationships were seldom peaceful for long.14
THE ARAB TRIBES FIRST ENCOUNTERED by the French during their infiltration from east to west were the Amur and other small groups in the Saharan Atlas north of Figuig, but these were hardly significant. The main proprietors of the Zousfana and Guir country were – from north to south – the Beni Gil, the Ouled Jarir and the Dawi Mani.
The tent-dwelling Beni Gil (the victors at Chott Tigri in 1882) were 15,000 – 20,000 strong, and followed their flocks across the whole width of the steppes between the High Atlas and the Zousfana and on into Algeria, some clans also owning date-groves in Figuig. South of them, astride the middle Zousfana, were the Ouled Jarir camel-herders. Though numbering only about 5,000 they were renowned raiders, and they also owned date-groves at Béchar and grainfields in the Zousfana oases. The Ouled Jarir were long-time allies of the third and most significant group, whose lands lay to the south of them.
The Dawi Mani Arabs numbered about 15,000 tent-dwellers, who insured themselves against the ever-present threats of drought, flash floods, locusts, disease and war by practising a diverse economy.15 The centre of their range was the lower Oued Guir, where they were the biggest growers of grain around Abadla. Various segments of the tribe owned groves and fields, worked for them by sharecroppers, in the oases of both the Tafilalt in the west and the Beni Goumi area of the lower Zousfana in the east, and they migrated between these with their camels, sheep and goats in an annual cycle shaped roughly in a horizontal figure-of-eight. They assembled around Abadla in November – December to plant grain; when the spring grass appeared they dispersed both west across the Hammada towards the Tafilalt and east to the Zousfana. In May – June they converged on Abadla again for the grain-harvest, and in August they dispersed west and east once again, for the autumn date-harvests in the Tafilalt and on the Zousfana. These patterns would play an important part in the Dawi Mani responses to French pressure in the first years of the twentieth century. The Dawi Mani had a sophisticated internal structure, the khams khmas or ‘five fifths’, and despite their wide dispersal, the councils of two or more of these self-governing constituent segments might occasionally agree to take the field in joint campaigns under a temporary elected war-chief. Since they had much to protect, by the end of the nineteenth century the Dawi Mani were basically defensive, but that was always a strictly relative term, and they frequently made raids on other tribes. Their domination of oasis villages as far apart as the Tafilalt and the Touat also brought them into local conflict with the Ait Khabbash Berbers.16
In the first years of the new century the French would also clash with the Ait Khabbash, the outriders of the formidable Ait Atta nation, whose heartland lay far to the west of the Algero-Moroccan border but whose aggressive expansion had carried their name ever further east. From the Djebel Sahro massif, about 100 miles west of the Ziz valley (see Map 23), the constituent tribes and clans of the Ait Atta – totalling perhaps 50,000 people – had spread out in all directions since the seventeenth century, and in southern Morocco their range now extended from the Oued Draa in the west to the Touat in the east, and from Boudenib and the slopes of the High Atlas in the north down to the Saharan fringe. They were basically sheep- and goat-herders, with some camel-breeding; but at heart they were conquerors, contemptuous of sedentary Arabs and ruthless in first looting, then taking control of any oasis villages that they could. They had long ruled most of the plains north of the Tafilalt, and had extended their fingers into parts of that great honey-pot. They might capture a ksar by simple assault or more gradually; their protection rackets controlled much of the caravan trade as far east as the Touat, which allowed them to take over oases by a process of strangulation, extortion, and finally outright domination.
The Ait Atta could sometimes briefly assemble armies of several thousand, but usually operated in smaller numbers. They too had a ‘five-fifths’ structure, but even looser than that of the Dawi Mani; the ‘fifth’ that was active in the south-east comprised two tribes, the Ait Khabbash and the Ait Umnasf, each up to 4,000 strong.17 Despite their rivalry for dominance of oases in both the Tafilalt and the Touat, the great expanses of grazing land on the plains allowed a degree of coexistence between Ait Atta Berbers and Dawi Mani Arabs. Sometimes Ait Khabbash and Dawi Mani tribesmen even mounted joint raids, especially southwards to steal camels from the nomadic Shaamba bedouin in the true Sahara; it was generally noted that Moroccan raiding parties might include groups of men from a number of different clans or even tribes, brought together through personal relationships. (Clans of the Ait Atta – like those of all other peoples – often fought each other, but their ancestral enemies were the Ait Yafalman, a Berber confederation in the High Atlas north of their Djebel Sahro homeland.)18
The central weakness of Moroccan resistance to French pressure would always be the inability to create any sort of unified, coordinated movement even at a regional level. The peoples of the south-east might appear to us as addicted to a life of gang warfare that was fatally shortsighted in the shadow of a far greater threat to them all, but that is a superficial judgement. The genuine interests of the tribes and the oasis villagers often conflicted, as did those of different elements within single tribes. The great fact of life was the desert: in this marginal environment the ‘economic’ arguments for or against resistance or collaboration always finally outweighed the ‘political’, although the two naturally overlapped. In the desert the only ‘economy’ depended upon retaining access to the strictly limited sources of water, food, and thus life itself. Everything came down to stark choices about group survival, choices that had always demanded flexibility.19
THE OASES THAT WERE THE FOCUS of both tribal and French attention enclosed the great majority of the total population, packed densely into the productive islands that were the only sources of grown food. Their economic importance was not reflected in armed strength, since most of the inhabitants were co
mmitted to intense cultivation – of date-palms, of the vegetables and animal feed grown in irrigated gardens occupying every square yard between them, and sometimes of grain in fields around the periphery. Large oases had several distinct ksar village communities, each inhabiting a walled warren of interconnecting two- and three-storey mud brick houses. The ‘political’ life of an oasis usually centred on water rights, and disputes over the opening and closing of sluices might cause vitriolic feuds.
The majority of villagers were independent Arab or Berber farmers; these boasted of being ‘whiter’ than the haratin who worked as mere sharecroppers, but in fact both classes often had much African blood. This was a relic both of previous waves of conquest from the south, and of more than a thousand years of slave traffic. There were still some slaves in the ksars, but not many by 1900; east and south of Morocco the French had made considerable progress in stamping out that terrible commerce. When a pastoral tribe like the Ait Khabbash or Dawi Mani moved in to take over a ksar they seldom killed more than its active resisters, since its value lay in its continued productive activity.20 The oases were essential to the pastoral tribes, and not just as sources of grown food and manufactured goods: here they traded the produce of their flocks and date-groves, managed their sharecroppers, met their relatives and allies, arranged marriages, submitted disputes to judges, sold their loot from raids, and planned new ones. Central to these plans was, of course, the acquisition of guns and ammunition.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 39