Claiming their right to possess: the Guich Oudaya tribe’s resistance to land grabbing

ABSTRACT

In February 2014, at the heart of an upscale neighborhood in Rabat, police forces forcefully destroyed the homes of Douar Ouled Dlim’s inhabitants – descendants of the Guich Oudaya tribe. Refusing to leave their land, the inhabitants have since continued to live in makeshift camps made of plastic tarp, protesting their dispossession. Ultimately, they all wonder ‘wach hna maghrba – are we still Moroccan citizens?’ The Guich lands, which have been relinquished at nominal prices to private developers linked to the ruling elite, have been used since the 1980s to extend the city of Rabat and, particularly, to erect one of its most exclusive neighborhoods, Hay Ryad. Despite the various struggles that shaped the resistance led by the Guich Oudaya tribe, today their lands have been consumed by concrete, erasing any trace of the existence of this peri-urban agricultural community. By analysing the mechanisms of dispossession put in place by the State, this paper seeks to show how the colonial logic – reconfigured through the discourse of modernity – has implemented a dichotomy between ‘progress’ and ‘nature’. Finally, the paper argues that this dichotomy continues to contribute to and legitimise the destruction of communal agricultural spaces and the consolidation of urban inequality in contemporary Morocco.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective lands
• Morocco
• Guich Oudaya
• urbanisation
• dispossessions
• resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My research consisted in collecting a series of legal documents from the inhabitants of Douar Ouled Dlim such as: the collective land deed, the various State requisitions, the agreement signed by the SAR and the CDG, court judgments, etc.

2 A dahir is a royal decree.

3 Article 7 of the Convention on the implementation of the Guich Oudaya program in Rabat and Temara regarding the commitments of the Ministry of the Interior stipulates that the Ministry of the Interior undertakes to ‘give up the land of about 96 hectares, at a Dirham symbolic, for the benefit of the client via the CDG’.

4 Here is the annual report of the Court of Auditors of 2024: http://www.courdescomptes.ma/fr/Page-27/publications/rapport-annuel/rapport-annuel-de-la-cour-des-comptes-2014--volume-i-livre-i/1-133/.

5 For more information about this topic, read the PhD thesis of Essahel H. (2011), Policies for the rehabilitation of non-regulated neighbourhoods in Morocco and mobilization of inhabitants. Case studies in the Rabat conurbation, François Rabelais University, Tours, UMR 6173, CITERES (EMAM).

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out with the support of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences – ‘Environmentalism, Impoverishment and Social Justice Movements: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ Third Cycle (2019-2020) and funded by The Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA).