The diaspora and the cemetery: emigration and social transformation in a Moroccan oasis community

Abstract

This essay explores the history and social consequences of emigration from the southeastern oases of Morocco, which since the 1940s have functioned as a veritable demographic pump, sending streams of labour migrants to northern cities and across the Mediterranean. It examines the close symbolic and material relations between physical and social mobility, as migrant remittances transform embedded hierarchies based on property ownership, irrigation rights, and economic independence. The essay situates these micro-level dynamics in the larger political tensions around ‘harrag’ (overseas undocumented migration), Berber (Amazigh) ethnic activism, tribal land rights, and racialised violence that have recently struck rural Morocco – tensions that have made Amazigh militants, often based in the diaspora, particularly concerned about the cultural fate of their homeland oases communities. In underlining these political frictions and ambivalences, the essay critically intervenes in a larger literature that has too often, and without qualification, characterised emigration as cultural uprooting and an inevitable harbinger of social death.

Keywords:

• migration
• diaspora
• social mobility
• Amazigh movement
• Morocco

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at research workshops at the University of Florida and the University of Minnesota. The author wishes to particularly thank Hakim Abderrezak, Aomar Boum, Greg Feldman, Patricia Lorcin, Laurie McIntosh, Ayse Parla, Esther Romeyn, Daniel Schroeter, and Maria Stoilkova for their generous welcome, engagement, and comments.

Funding

This work was supported by research grants from the United States Institute of Peace, the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Notes

1. For an ethnographically nuanced discussion of the gendered construction of the tamazirt in the Moroccan Anti-Atlas through men's migration and nostalgia, and women's dwelling and hard labour, see Hoffman (2002). In this essay, I complement her important work by exploring how the dialectical production of homeland and diaspora as interdependently moral places operates in and through ethnic stratification and conflict.

2. In High Atlas villages from which young women are regularly sent to Marrakech or Agadir to work as domestic servants (petites bonnes) for bourgeois families, the city is popularly referenced as a ‘cemetery’ (lmedint) (Crawford 2008, 174).

3. The Moroccan and Spanish media regularly report on migrant bodies that wash up on the beaches.

4. For ethnographic discussions of harrag, see Fernandez (1999) and Pandolfo (2007).

5. The intimate relationship between travel, religious education, and sainthood in North Africa has been much studied. See Clancy-Smith (1990), Evans-Pritchard (1949), and Gellner (1969) for the history of development of several important zawiyat in relation to learned migration. See also Eickelman (1985) for a discussion of Moroccan notable education in relation to rural–urban movement.

6. See Skounti (1995) on questions of transhumance and Berber identity.

7. Ilahiane (2001, 382) lists five negative attributes imputed to Haratine in the southeastern Zis valley: dark skin colour, landlessness, obtuseness, clientage, and laboriousness.

8. See Aouad-Badoual (2004, 352) and Ensel (1999, 25–26) for discussions of Drawi deracination and dependence.

9. The caïd function contrasted directly with a previous system of local authority based in a village assembly (jma'a or taqbilt) of lineage elders who elected an annual leader (amghar), a position that rotated among the tribal fractions represented in the ksar.

10. The legitimacy of Haratin property ownership in the oases was gradually recognised by the dominant tribal groups, as was their eventual representation in the jma'at of the various ksour where they resided. Yet, as Salahdine (1986, 225–226) has emphasised, citing official texts from the Résidence Générale in Rabat, the Protectorate supported the khmass system in the name of stability (cf. Petit and Castet-Baron 1954, 22–23). Indeed, the French rural administration continued to forcibly extract Haratine corvée labour for public works projects (Ilahiane 2001, 389).

11. A royal decree (dahir) of 27 October 1931, enacted in the midst of an economic crisis, eugenic anxieties over the weakening of the French race, and fears of Protectorate officials losing its workforce to the metropole, required overseas emigration candidates to compile a dossier of six forms obtained from five different administrations: a passport, work contract, identity card, anthropometric data card, medical certificate, and a deposit receipt to the cover the costs of the emigrant's repatriation. Attempts to reform this dahir and simplify the process failed, and as a result the vast majority of emigration to France during the Protectorate occurred without authorisation (Devillars 1952, 3–4).

12. Indeed, the original North African immigrants to France were recruited from Berber-speaking regions, particularly Algerian Kabylia and the Moroccan Sous valley, and these populations still remain over-represented in the metropole. Of the approximately 19,000 Moroccans in France in 1952, as many as 13,000 were from the Sous (Devillars 1952, 19). See Dirèche-Slimani (1997), Khellil (1979), Sayad (1977, 1994), and Silverstein (2004) for more recent histories of this immigration. The 2006 film Indigènes (Days of Glory) includes a felicitous sequence where Berber Ait Segrouchen tribesmen are recruited on the basis of the fact that they were the ‘fiercest’ fighters during the recently concluded wars of ‘pacification’.

13. Rapport Trimestriel, Bureau Régional de Territoire de Tafilalet, 4e trimester, 1939 (No. 256 A.I.T.), 2 (unsigned). CADN Meknès, 215.

14. These ‘colonies’ notably included shurfa who left to become shopkeepers (Jouandon 1954, 10).

15. The first recruitments of temporary workers for France in the southeastern oases actually began in 1938 and met with some success in Goulmima and Erfoud, where ‘the numbers of volunteers exceeded expectations.’ Bertot, Rapport Trimestriel, Bureau Regional de Territoire du Tafilalet, 2e trimester, 1938, 1. CADN Meknès 215. However, such labour recruitment was quickly interrupted by the war.

16. Crawford (2008, 145–174) makes a similar point in his nuanced discussion of the role of urban labour migration in the maintenance of ‘articulated’ household economies in a Berber High Atlas village.

17. For a parallel discussion of this process in the anti-Atlas, see Alahyane (1990).

18. In 2003, the most popular song on the Moroccan airwaves was entitled ‘[Give me a] Visa or Passport’ by chaâbi singer Abdelaziz Stati.

19. By 1950, 13% of the total number of immigrants to Casablanca were Haratin from the southeastern oasis (Aouad-Badoual 2004, 352), a figure massively out of proportion with their general representation in the Moroccan population.

20. On the colonial education of rural Berber notables, see Benhlal (2005), Bidwell (1973, 237–257), Eickelman (1985), and Leveau (1985, 172–193).

21. Bulletin de Renseignements Poliqtiques (Tafilalet), 20 nov. – 5 déc. 1950 (No. 893 AITC/2). CADN Meknès, 217.

22. The Merghadi's father had previously served as caïd from 1946 until the end of the Protectorate.

23. See Silverstein (2010) for a discussion of one such project involving the sale of 5 hectares of arid collective land to a non-Merghadi for the construction of a tourist complex.

24. The shaykh also established the equivalent of a lost-and-found box in the ighrem where even the smallest piece of firewood dropped in public spaces would be deposited. Compare to Ensel (1999, 187–190), his discussion of the Shurfa discourse of adab (civility) and their judgement of the Drawa's contrasting ‘zigzag behaviour.’

25. For parallel Haratin future-oriented narratives, see Ilahiane (2001, 391).

26. On the Amazigh discourse on Berber traditional religiosity and secularism, see Ben Layashi (2007) and Silverstein (2012).

27. See ‘Bulletin fin d'année du Territoire du Tafilalet’ (signed Parlance), 25 Feb. 1955, 2. CADN Meknès, 108.

28. Communiqué from Général de Division Miguel, Chef de Meknès, No. 104, 6 Dec. 1954. CADN Meknès, 286bis.

29. On the political situation in the southeastern oases in the immediate wake of independence, see Leveau (1985). On the role of Goulmima in the 1973 coup attempt, see Bennouna (2002). For a beautiful, fictionalised account of the ambivalent reception of nationalism in the southeastern oases (Ferkla), see Layid (1992).

30. Goulmima is also the site of a disproportionate number of security installations, including a municipal police force, a large gendarmerie, a battalion of rapid response troops (groupes mobiles), a (now largely abandoned) army base, and a hilltop radar station.

31. For a history of the Berber cultural movement in Morocco, see Aourid (1999), Maddy-Weitzman (2012), and Pouessel (2010).

32. For a more detailed history of Amazigh activism in Goulmima, in all its scalar dimensions, see Silverstein (2013).

33. For an overview of these various institutions and services, see the website of the Moroccan ministry, ‘Moroccans of the World,’ http://www.marocainsdumonde.gov.ma/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=52