The Berbers of Morocco

A History of Resistance

Michael Peyron

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838603755
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Middle Eastern History

From the Rif War to the rebellion of 1958, the Berbers (Imazighen) have played a central role in the history of Moroccan resistance to colonialism in the twentieth century. This book provides an in-depth overview of Berber resistance to the French campaigns of 'Pacification', and the subsequent struggle over Berber identity in the independence era. Deeply steeped in Berber history and culture, the author traces the major and minor engagements between French forces and the Berbers in revealing detail, using previously unavailable sources. Relying on a wealth of oral sources and extensive field work, it provides the most complete history to date of one of the most important Berber communities in North Africa.

1

Berber Origins

Morocco has retained in the Atlas Mountains the largest reservoir of what one British writer called “the last barbarians of the white race left on the face of the earth.”¹ More prosaically, in Morocco one finds the highest percentage of Tamazight speakers divided into several racial types, speaking different, though closely-related dialects—a fact which has been emphasized only in recent decades. Then why, the reader may be tempted to ask, is the term Berber generally associated with a given ethnic group?

The problem stated

The Romans labeled uncivilized nations “from beyond the Pale” as barbarians, hence barbarii in Latin, from which the name “Berber” was ultimately derived, although they were variously referred to as Libyans, Garamantes, or Numidians. Another explanation is put forward by leading medieval scholar Ibn Khaldoun, according to whom the locals were called Berbers by their Arab conquerors because of their loquacity.² Thus was the term “Berber,” little used until the mid-eighteenth century, considered as representative of aboriginal North Africans. Berbers tend to reject this casually inflicted label, preferring the term Imazighen.³

Regarding Berbers it must be emphasized that the different racial characteristics among them point to varied origins.⁴ Generally, the shluh of the Sous and Anti-Atlas are short, round-headed, their white skins sometimes tanned a healthy-looking brown, while the tamazight- or tarifit-speakers are usually fairer-skinned, tall, and spare, with long faces and straggly beards. Brown eyes are common to both groups, though blue eyes and/or fair hair are met with at times. Some early twentieth-century French visitors to Morocco imagined they had discovered descendants of “nos ancêtres les Gaulois,” while to quote one British traveler, the Vandals had apparently left “traces of their blond hair and blue eyes in dim recesses of the Atlas.”⁵ However, both the tashelhit and tamazight linguistic areas feature a strong sprinkling of dark-skinned elements, thus complicating the issue. These are to be found in greater numbers among the pre-Saharan oases, where they rub shoulders with their lighter-skinned cousins, especially in the Dra’a Valley, though colored people do not necessarily present Negroid characteristics. They are thought to be survivors of the original inhabitants of the Sahara, and have been tentatively identified as descendants of the Garamantes, or some early Ethiopians who moved northwest as the desert gradually became drier during the second millenium BC, which would appear to fit in with recent research.⁶

Myth and legend

Amateur speculation has led to various origins, some of them fanciful, being attributed to Berbers:⁷ the Amerindians, the Basques, the Carthaginians, the Arabs, the Sumerians, the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.⁸ Throughout the Middle Ages, theories on this much-vexed topic were aired, chiefly by Ibn Khaldoun, famous for his distinctions between first-race and second-race Berbers of so-called Himyarite stock who formed a proto-Arab race that mingled with African aborigines, thus becoming “Berberized.”⁹ This attempt to ascribe a Yemeni origin to the Berbers remained a favorite ploy well into the Middle Ages, especially with the Almoravids, probably due to the fact that quite a few Yemenis actually did come to Morocco at the time of the Arab conquest. Too numerous to be described in detail, different theories were expounded by Maghribian genealogists throughout North Africa and Andalucia.¹⁰ Ibn Khaldoun claimed a Canaanite origin for the Berbers, described as descendants of Mazigh, while their leaders answered to the title of jalut (Goliath).¹¹ This was largely dictated by prestige-building and dynastic considerations, a fabricated oriental ancestry, especially with origins skillfully and convincingly traced back to the Koraïshi family and the Prophet, notably enhancing the pedigree of any local Berber kinglet.

Much of it, however, was incoherent propaganda, tending to depict Berbers in an unfavorable light, either as eternally disreputable underdogs, or as exiles forced to flee from Canaan, or even Arabia. In the latter case they could be demonstrated as having no specificity at all, having originally been Arabs who emigrated towards the Maghrib at an early period. This apparently convincing interpretation was the one that featured for long in official Moroccan history textbooks.¹² Thus were they conveniently stripped of their identity, as in the following gem:

The Berbers are a nation of the offspring of Abraham. It is also said that they were descended from Japhet and from Gog and Magog who were shut up by dhu l-qarnayn (Alexander). A party of them came forth to wreck havoc and destruction on others. They remained and intermarried with the Turks and Tartars.¹³ It is also said that they are from the land of jinn (al-jayn). A party went to Jerusalem and spent the night in a valley. In the morning they found that their womenfolk had been made pregnant by the men of that spot. They gave birth to them. They are a people who are by nature blood-thirsty, who loot and pillage goods and possessions and wage war.¹⁴

This is typical of the many falsehoods circulated for the sole purpose of belittling the Berbers. As will be immediately perceptible to the discerning reader, material of this kind alternates between twaddle and half-truth, would-be Arab affiliations being unashamedly politico-racist in motivation, though the supposed Sumerian connection is less foolish than it sounds. Indeed, Berber has distinct morpho-syntactical similarities with ancient Akkadian, both belonging to the Chamito-Semitic family of languages.¹⁵

Archaeological and historical theories

Among specialists and non-specialists alike, however, the main body of Berbers is held to have come from slightly further afield, either from the Nile Valley, or some notional circum-Mediterranean sub-stratum,¹⁶ though differences in appearance and speech argue against their having shared a common homeland at any one time. The fact, however, that the tashelhit and tamazight dialects have a fair number of words in common does appear to suggest that the westward movement was a prolonged process lasting several decades, even centuries, during which the language would have gradually evolved through contact with the different linguistic areas of pre-historic, Libyco-Berber North Africa.

Archaeology gives credence to the above theory by tentatively suggesting that present-day Berbers may trace their origins back to snail-eating Capsian man (from Gafsa in Tunisia, where the first skeleton was found), whose ancestors earlier emigrated from the Black Sea region, or Nile Valley, some 10,000 years ago.¹⁷ From the eastern Maghrib they subsequently moved westward in successive waves till checked by the unavoidable breakwater of the Atlas ranges.¹⁸ That the whole of North Africa once shared what was basically a common culture and language there is little doubt.

Archaeological research on rock-drawing sites on the Yagour plateau and elsewhere in Morocco has opened windows on a fascinating past. The drawings tally with the style used by most Saharan rock-artists, depicting the usual gamut of animals, figures, and symbols, arguably belonging to the close of the “Cattle Herder” period, c. 2000 BC.¹⁹ These include chariots, elephants and cattle, lions, snakes, and solar wheels. According to one researcher,²⁰ mountain-top worship fanned out from the eastern Mediterranean in the Neolithic Age and was linked in North Africa with the “Cattle Herder” migration away from the Sahara and into the Atlas as the former continued to dry up, around 2500–1200 BC.

Hence, it can be reasonably surmised that these “Cattle Herders” were the ancestors of most of today’s sedentary Berber-speaking tribes in the Morocco. Others no doubt joined them from Iberia via the sunken land-bridge of the “Pillars of Hercules,” if one is to lend any credence to a theory pointing to early links between Proto-Berbers and Iberians.²¹

These so-called Proto-Berbers appear to have developed an early civilization of sedentary small-scale stock-breeding peasant farmers living in dry-stone houses. Today, we may observe their descendants in the Western High Atlas, though, as one survey has shown,²² this way of life was formerly prevalent throughout the more accessible mountain areas along the northern fringe of the Sahara as far as Ifriqiya (Tunisia), until the Beni Hilal nomads broke up their communities in the eleventh century. It remains unclear, however, whether these Proto-Berbers, who originally moved in from the east, were fair-skinned like most Atlas Berbers, or ark-colored like the present-day inhabitants of the Dra‘a Valley. The likeliest theory is that the fair-skinned newcomers absorbed the dark-skinned elements, more or less holding them in thrall, a state of affairs that prevailed among pre-Saharan oases until the early twentieth century. At least one expert, summarizing the various theories expounded above, sounds quite categorical as to Berber origins:

The Berbers [are] a population of Caucasian origin which had migrated through Arabia before crossing over to Africa in the 2nd millennium BC onwar...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Berber Origins
• 2 From Carthage to Islam
• 3 Dynasts versus Heretics
• 4 Triumph of the Atlas Berbers
• 5 Makers of Mayhem: Beni Hilal and Ma’qil
• 6 Atlas Saints and Mountain Kings
• 7 Senhaja Revival
• 8 Scourge of the Berbers
• 9 Transition and Recovery
• 10 Berber Backlash
• 11 Dawn of the Great Qayd Era
• 12 The Foreign Threat
• 13 The Start of Morocco’s “Thirty Years’ War”
• 14 The Defense of Jbel Fazaz
• 15 Stemming the Tide in Southeast Morocco
• 16 Great Qayd versus Marabout
• 17 Between Oum Rbia’ and Moulouya: Failure of the Marabouts
• 18 Bitter Battles Around Jbel Tishshoukt
• 19 The Rif War (1921–7)
• 20 Phoney War on the Atlas Front (1926–9)
• 21 Reckless Raiders Rule the Roost (1927–34)
• 22 The Opening Rounds of the Atlas Endgame: Ayt Ya’qoub to Tazizaout (1929–32)
• 23 Heroic Defense of Tazizaout
• 24 Atlas Endgame: The Closing Stages (1933–4)
• 25 Pacification Aftermath
• 26 Transition to Modernity: Protectorate and Independence
• 27 From Oblivion to Recognition
• 28 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Place and People’s Names
• Copyright