How 'Berber' Matters in the Middle of Nowhere

Fairfield University DigitalCommons@Fairfield

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Publications Sociology & Anthropology Department

Summer 2001

David Crawford Fairfield University, [email protected]

Peer Reviewed

Repository Citation Crawford, David, "How 'Berber' Matters in the Middle of Nowhere" (2001). Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Publications. 10. https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/sociologyandanthropology-facultypubs/10 Published Citation Crawford, David L. “How 'Berber' Matters in the Middle of Nowhere” in The Middle East Report, issue 219, Culture and Politics. Ed. Chris Toensing. Pp. 20-25. Washington, D.C.: MERIP Summer 2001.

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David Crawford

Anestimated 40 percentof Moroccansspeak some variety of Berbebras theirfirst or only language. Today Berbers are pressingfor what they argue are basic humanrights: the freedomto speakBerber in schools andcourtrooms, and for Berbersto take their deserved place in the official historyof the nation. In the mountains,Berber language-the varietyexamined here is called Tashelhit-mattersin some waysto mosteverybody who speaks it, andsometimes it mattersin waysthat mightbe consideredpolitical.

In the HighAtlas valley of the Agoundis,less than 100 other Morocco entirely, one lacking car exhaust, televisions kilometersfrom Marrakech'sinternational airport, the lives and noise of urban life, telephones or even toilets. But the of Berber-speakingfarmers move in what seems a timeless Arcadian surface of village life obscures deeper realities:the rhythm. Men manipulate intricate stone canals, drawing perennial brutality of physical labor, but also a landslide of water to steeply terracedplots of barley.Women in bangles social, political and economic changes. These changes are and bright scarves lash huge loads of wood to their backs related-but not reducible-to processes of migration, for- and pick their way down precarioustrails. Fires from family mal education and "development"occurring everywherein bread ovens send thin tendrils of smoke into the sky while Morocco. But in the Agoundis Valley, as in much of high- cows low, hungry in their pens. Young boys throw rocks and land Morocco, there is an important difference: the people lazily tend goats; girls sing as they gather water or fodder or here do not speak Arabic, the national language. wash clothes in the river, their younger siblings strapped to The issue of Berber language and culture has received them. The people of these mountains seem to live in an- considerable attention, much of it shedding more heat than light. Colonial scholars and anthropologists tended to posit David Crawfordis a doctoralcandidate in the DepartmentofAnthropology at the an isolated Berber culture detached from urban life and the Universityof California,Santa Barbara. He is currentlya visitingstudent researcher at theLondon School ofEconomics and PoliticalScience. broader currents of Arabic and Islamic culture. After Mo-

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MIDDLEEAST REPORT 219 * SUMMER2001 20 MIOOLEEAST REPORT 219 s SUMMER2001 roccanindependence in 1956, nationalistscholars reacted throughthe valley,dining on the breadand tea,asking ques- againstthis and denied any distinct existenceto Berbers, tions,making promises. The peopleof thesemountains have includingthem in the modern,homogeneous Arab-Islamic long interactedwith the Arabicspeakers of the plains,but nation.Today Amazigh (Berber) activists are challenging this outsidersnow seem to be arrivingmore suddenly and in greater nationalistproject, pressing for what they argueare basic numbersthan ever before.Generally these outsidersspeak humanrights: the freedomto speakBerber in schoolsand Arabic,but also English, Germanand especiallyFrench. courtrooms,and for Berbersto taketheir deserved place in Throughprocesses of migration,education and development, the officialhistory of the nation.Since an estimated40 per- the ordinary,often invisible fact of speakingBerber is coming cent of Moroccansspeak some variety of Berberas theirfirst to matterin new ways. or only language,this is no small issue. In the mountains, Berber language-the variety examined here is called Migration,Homecoming and Language Tashelhit-matters in some ways to most everybodywho speaksit, and sometimesit mattersin ways that might be Today the new road into the Agoundis allows people to consideredpolitical. The way that Berberlanguage operates come andgo muchmore easily, and the casheconomy gives politicallyin the Agoundismay be idiosyncraticin some them a reasonto do so. Landlessmen can now maintain ways, but Berberspeaking regions across North Africaare householdsin the villageand "commute"for a few weeks experiencingmany of the samechanges. or a few months to jobs in mines nearbyor to commercial agriculturalareas further away in the plains. Becausethey Arrivalof the "Outside" arelandless, these men would not normallyfigure promi- nently in villagepolitics, but now cash wages allow some I visited the Agoundis Valley as a tourist in 1995 and of them to "buy"influence in local affairs.Some migrant was impressedmostly with the hospitality of the people workerscan also pay "fines"to be exempt from labor on and the lush, seemingly sustainable communalprojects. As such,wage earn- agriculturalsystem. It was a drought - ersremain "inside" the villagesocial and yearand most of the countryhad been political system preciselybecause they scorchedto a dusty grayand dun. The For som Ej Berber havepaying work "outside" of it. The cities wereswollen with farmersdriven road also facilitatesthe movement of off the parchedland. Tangierswas ra- m igrant Norkers, cash. Girls working as nannies in tioning water that could only be speaking Tashelhit Marrakechand boys workingon farms delivered by tanker, and the air con- as far awayas Demnat can expecttheir ditioners of Rabatwere working over- has beco n ne an act fathersto arriveon paydayto collect time.But the Agoundis was green and of homecl remittances,leave a smallallowance and cool with the shadeof massivewal- f h )ming. returnto the village. nut treesand floweringpomegranates. Migration also affects the way lan- It seemed the very model of a poor guageis usedand the way differentlan- but vital subsistence economy. guages are understood to matter. In 1998 I returned to the valley to do researchin a People who spend any time in the city learn that particularvillage, Tagharghist,and I soon realized that Tafransist,the Tashelhitword for French,is the language life was not percolatingalong in timelesshomeostasis. In of the educated and the hip. Migrantsalso come to see the short period since my previousvisit the people of the that there are several equally "Arab"alternatives to Agoundis had built a road that allowed trucks access to Derija-the colloquial Arabic of the Moroccancities- the valley, at least on market day. The village of including the Egyptianversion so often seen in movies, Tagharghisthad a Peace Corps worker, the first one in and ModernStandard Arabic, the languageof newsbroad- the area.With his help, the villagerswere busily construct- castsand formalspeeches. Agoundis Valley migrants who ing a potablewater system. After the locals chiseleda flat encounterBerber speakers from other regionsalso come spot out of the mountainsideusing nothing but sledge- to see their Tashelhitas but one variety of Berber,and hammersand iron bars,the Moroccangovernment sent a they are far more likely than non-migrantsto say that crew to build a modern school, the first cement building they can understandother dialects.Villagers who haven't in the village. traveledtend to define Tarifit (the dialect spoken in the While men still followedmules backand forth through northernRif Mountains)as "thelanguage of the north," ancientfields, trucks now carriedother men to andfrom jobs for instance, and feel it bears no relation to Tashelhit, outsidethe valley.Boys still herdedgoats while girlshauled while people with more experiencemoving aroundMo- fodderand firewood, but their younger siblings could be heard rocco more correctlysee Tarifitand Tashelhitas varieties countingin Arabicin the brightpink schoolhouse.Women ofTamazight,the generalterm for Berber,the indigenous stillbaked tanoort and men made tea for any visitor willing to languageof North Africa. sit long enoughfor waterto boil, but representativesof na- Travelersbring these understandingswith them back tional and internationaldevelopment agencies swarmed to the village on summer vacationsor during Ramadan

EASTREPORT 219 * "SUMMER 2001 22 MIDDLEEAST REPORT 219 SUMMER2001 and other holidays. They bring bits of these other lan- girl who had lived partof her life in Marrakechdid some guageswith them and valuationsabout what they mean. translating,but many childrenwho couldn'tcomprehend For some migrants,speaking Tashelhit has become an act what they were supposedto be doing were beaten. (Cor- of homecoming, an assertionof a local identity in an in- poral punishment is contraryto governmentpolicy, but creasinglyde-localized world. Where languagesand dia- is widely practiced and accepted by many parents as a lects mix, the meaningof what is said becomesintimately disciplinarynecessity.) The teacher'sbooks-written en- bound to the languagein which it is uttered.This pro- tirely in Arabic and full of pictures of crosswalks, cess is only beginning in the Agoundis, but it is sure to refrigerators,streetlights and modernovens-were incom- continue. In the Moroccansouth everyperson I evermet prehensible to rural children. Enthusiasm for school who felt passionatelyabout speakingBerber was a person quickly faded, and punishments were administeredfor who had spent time in placeswhere Berberspeakers were absenteeismand tardiness.The teachertoo becamefrus- a minority.Increasing migration thus seems likely to en- trated, often shortening the school day or calling it off hance a sort of Berberconsciousness, and with it the po- entirely.She was a sophisticatedurban woman unused to litical potential of the Amazigh, or Berber culture, and unexcitedabout her primitiveand lonely life in the movement. village. Parentscouldn't read the written school reports and anxious mothers asked me to explainwhat the vari- Goingto School ous checksin the variousboxes might mean. The teacher asked for a transfer,and the students were releasedfor In the past, the children of Tagharghisthave been edu- the summerto await the new rookie teacher.1 cated in the mosque, where they focus on religion and The impactof school was not restrictedto the children some rudimentarymath. Thefqih (religiousinstructor) who enduredit. Despite the schoolteacher'saloofness, lo- is highly valued by the community.As in other villages cal teenagedgirls quickly began to wear their scarvesin in the valley,the governmentpays him, but residentsgive her style.To them the teacherwas a womanwho had made the fqih a hefty supplement of wool, grain and sundry her own way in the world, the only woman they had ever items. This paymentgives the villagersleverage over the seen who did not have to haul impossiblyheavy loads up fqihs responsivenessto the needs of the village children. and down steep paths, who could buy her own clothes Still, the villagersdo not see religiouseducation by itself ratherthan giving money to a man to purchasethem at as adequatelypreparing children for life in contempo- market, who could travel by herself. The teacher was raryMorocco. With immunizationshelping more people haughty,but men showedher respect.It was hardto parse than ever to survivechildhood, and with the government whetherthe teenagerswanted to emulateher urbanityor requiringever more literacy to function as a Moroccan her strident piousness, her governmentposition or her citizen, it is clear to everybodythat a more formalized, lifestyle.But her languagewas Arabic.The teachermade urbanor "modern"style of education is needed. Parents no attempt to speakTashelhit and nobody seemed to ex- know that therewill not be enough land to feed the next pect that she should. She told the villagersthat her own generation.To marryand startfamilies of their own, chil- dialectof Arabicwas the closestpossible to the languageof dren will have to move to the city. Life in the city re- the Qur'an,and thusvery nearly God's language. Tashelhit, quires training unavailablein the mosque. she said, was a languagescarcely better than the babbleof In 1998, the men of Tagharghist toiled for weeks children.To the dismayof at leastsome of the olderwomen, in the hot sun to hack a flat platform from the teenagedgirls could soon be heardaddressing one another mountainside that would be suitable for a government in simpleArabic. school. Once they'd finished government workers ap- peared,and up went the schoolhouse, with a toilet (only "Traditional"Education the second in the village), glass windows, desks, black- boards and a coat of shocking pink paint. The villagers Many Berber and especially Tashelhit students move were exuberant.Every child lucky enough to get a gov- throughthe mosque-basededucational system to become ernment-issue backpack filled with school supplies religious teachers.All of the teachersin the mosques of would not take it off, and for weeks the matriculating the AgoundisValley speak Tashelhit as theirfirst language, class prancedaround the village waiting for the first day and many are from this or nearbyvalleys. I never met a of school. No rock or wall was safe from the newly ac- teacher in a mosque who thought that children should quired chalk, and even I was pressed to do short arith- only know Berber,or that Tashelhitwas superiorto Mo- metic lessons in Tashelhitto mollify studentsimpatiently roccanArabic. But unlike the "modern"schoolteachers, awaiting the arrivalof the teacher. religiousteachers didn't have a problemteaching in a bi- Finally,she arrived.She was pious, wearing her scarf lingual environment. tight around her chin in the urban style, and monolin- This becameclear to me one eveningas I watchedthe gual, an Arabicspeaker from Casablanca.Her initial at- fqih finish his lessons.The childrenhad completedtheir tempts to conduct class were hamperedbecause most of religiousstudies and some practicedoing long divisionon the students couldn't understanda thing she said. One a small,much abusedblackboard. Gathering the boys and

" 23 MIDDLEEAST REPORT 219 * SUMMER2001 23 girls around him on a reed mat, the fqih waited for the However, the way people discuss the linguistic di- class to fall silent. Very quietly, in colloquial Moroccan vide is extremely complicated. After a visit by an offi- Arabic, he asked, "What would you like today?"Evidently cial who seemed always to demand more than he the children knew the drill well. The fqih needed only to should, a local man told me, "Only Christiansare hon- look at a student for her to reply with an imaginary item est." He went on to say that all "Arabs"were dishon- from a grocery store. If the child gave the name of the item est. I took "Arabs"to mean Arabic speakers, since the in Tashelhit, the teacher would look official who had demanded the to another eager face, and then an- - bribe spoke only Arabic. But other, until somebody gave the Ara- when I pressed the question he bic name. There were no beatings Evenif ruraII villagers said all Muslimswere dishonest, or raised voices. lackthe den onstrations a peculiar sentiment given that Sometimes in a single lesson, the l k t n he himself was Muslim. He cer- was fqih teaching Qur'anic Arabic, or Internetdiscussion tainly did not mean that he him- Moroccan colloquial Arabic and self was dishonest!In this context Tashelhitwithout degradingany of groups Of Ur banBerber the local man was conflating them. Certainlythe "religiouslit- Muslimsand Arabs,and juxta- activst th ereare stillll eracy" promoted in the mosque ac tivists, thI( I s[ a posing this whole group to schools is locally valued, and this shifts in ho V mountain Christians, whom he equated would seem to help the Moroccan with all foreigners. As a mono- governmentto build a certifiably Berberssee I themselves lingual Tashelhit speaker and a Muslim citizenry.By contrast,the and their wi 1rld. devout Muslim, the man consid- government'sattempt to providea th a lrldU. ered himself "Arab"in the con- more "modern" education in the text of this one exchange. This Berber-speakingmountains appears man was not really making a destined to generate the very linguistic polarization it seems point about ethnicity or even language, but was con- designed to avoid, one that serves neither the interests of trasting the actions of foreign development workers Amazigh cultural activists nor the nationalist interest in who gave money with local officials who took it away. creating a linguistically homogeneous citizenry. The fqih Given this linguistic confusion, and despite the slip- and the schoolteacher from Casablanca clearly had very pery conceptualcategories of "Arab"and "Berber,"some different personalities, but the more important difference people in the Agoundis clearly asserted that Arabic- arose from the fact that the schoolteacher was assigned to speaking officials are generally more corrupt than the village while the villagers themselves hire thefqih. This Tashelhit-speaking officials. If this is true-which is difference in local control and pedagogical method is too unclear-the reasons surely relate to the fact that easily perceived locally as a difference between Berbersand Tashelhit speakersare typically lower in the graft hier- Arabs. Significantly, the most radical activists for Berber archy.They would be able to take less. Tashelhit-speak- rights that I met lived in areas that had modern govern- ers are also more likely to live locally and have family in ment schools far longer than the Agoundis. These activists the area.Local connections are no guaranteeagainst op- often described ill treatment and discrimination in schools portunism, but the social pressurethey exert provides as factors that led them to a more politicized Berber con- some safeguard.While there is a democraticsystem for sciousness. some governmentalfunctions, the officialswho have the most power in the high valleysare appointed rather than Languagesof Corruption elected; they answer only to (Arabic-speaking)urban- ites. As roads and development extend the reach of the The almost viscerally unpleasant English word "corrup- state, more relativelypowerful Arabic-speaking officials tion" does not capture the Moroccan way of doing things. come into contactwith more relativelypowerless Berber- At least in the countryside, what we call "bribery" is speaking citizens. When these officials demand exorbi- merely the exchange of gifts for the services of govern- tant gifts, the blame for their greed too easily adheresto ment officials. It does not necessarily have the moral over- their Arab ethnicity ratherthan their governmentposi- tones of the English concept. Many decry corruption, but tion or their personal ethical failings.2 everyone understands it as the modus operandi. Villagers only become outraged when the cost of services seems Translatingfor the WorldBank excessive. So what might be called "bribery"elsewhere is here a complicated negotiation for the appropriate price Internationaldevelopment agencies also must deal with of services rendered. The problem is that in Berber-speak- corruption,but they run into additionallayers of linguis- ing areas these negotiations often occur across a linguistic problems.The World Bank-which is funding a se- tic divide. The officials are often Arabs, or speakers of ries of programs in the Agoundis and other valleys Arabic and French. The locals are all Berbers. borderingthe new ToubkalNational Park-is very con-

219 * SUMMER2001 24 MIDDLEEAST REPORT 219 ? SUMMER2001 cerned that as much Bank money as possible ends up be- hosted the meeting was not keen to sign for the World ing spent on the projects for which it is intended. To this Bank money directly. But it is a safe bet that he will end, one day in 1999 the Bank sent a representative to have much to say about how to spend whatever money Tagharghist to discuss the terms for disbursement of finally filters down-which canals should be improved funds. Nearly a dozen Moroccan bureaucrats accompa- or whose house gets piped water. The host presented a nied the French-speaking representative, representing plausible claim that that he had the linguistic resources various government agencies. Most spoke French and all necessary to lead the villagers in this crucial interaction spoke Arabic. None spoke Tashelhit. with the outside world. The outsiders were, in effect, When the two 4x4 trucks pulled up the tracks the vil- creating local leaders. lagers knew something important was happening. Chil- dren were dispatched to call the men from the fields and WiderAmbits they streamed in, gathering at the home of the one man in the village who claimed limited fluency in Arabic. Aided by new communications media, urban Amazigh Women from several families cooked an impromptu feast (Berber) activists have managed to articulate a sense of cul- of meat, bread and tea, the likes of which local people tural identity as Imazighen (Berbers), but in the country- would only eat once a year, at the 'Id al-Kabir (the Mus- side there are no demonstrations or press releases, no lim Feast of the Sacrifice). The food was not for the vil- Internet discussion groups, magazines or newsletters. In lagers, of course, but for the visitors. much of the mountains, radio reception is patchy and il- The presumed translator and host of the meeting had literacy is almost total. But even if rural villagers lack the gained his knowledge of Arabic by listening to the radio sort of Berber consciousness one finds in urban or interna- and studying the Qur'an. A landed, politically powerful tional contexts, there are still shifts in how mountain patriarch with no need for cash wages, he had not spent Berbers see themselves and their world. time in the cities. The men who had spent time work- Increasingly the social and political ambit of ing among Arabic speakers were, of course, off work- Tashelhit-speaking mountain farmers includes Arabic- ing. What ensued was tragicomic. French sentences that speaking schoolteachers and government officials, de- began, "We require transparent accounting" were ren- velopment agents speaking French, German and English, dered into Moroccan Arabic by the coterie of officials, and a rising tide of multilingual migrant workers. This and then into Tashelhit by the host. At the end of the expanding movement and interaction generates a real translation chain, these sentences sounded something cognizance in the mountains that life without electric- like "Do you want money?" The answer from the villag- ity, adequate medical care or sanitation facilities is less ers, not surprisingly, was yes. Later, most of the men in than wholly adequate. Such changes also foreground a attendance told me they had understood nothing of the central but long invisible fact about these Moroccan actual language, only the general idea that they were to farmers: they're Imazighen. The national language is not receive money for village projects, and they weren't sup- their mother tongue. It remains to be seen how these posed to steal it. changes in cultural perception "in the middle of no- The big and controversial question was whether the where" will play out on the main stage of Moroccan villagers wanted the money disbursed directly to them politics. They will surely have a role. U or whether it should be handled by an intermediate government agency. Both the Bank representative and the villagers seemed to believe that the Moroccan agency in Author'sNote: Thisarticle is basedon researchconducted in 1998 question would skim some portion of the funds. Ac- and 1999 withfunding from the AmericanInstitute of Maghrib cordingly, the Bank representative seemed to think the Studiesand the Near and MiddleEast Program of the SocialSci- villagers foolish when they decided to let this agency enceResearch Council. Several versions ofthis article have been posted deal with the money. He labored to explain the advan- online since November 2000 at http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/ tages of getting the funds directly, but the villagers held - crawford/berber_matters.html.Thanks to SamahSelim and Hillary firm. They believed that they would have to pay out a Haldanewho readearly drafts and helpedimprove the textconsid- portion of the funds as bribes one way or another. If erably.Thanks also to AbderrahmanAit Ben Oushen,Katherine they got the money directly they would be accountable HoffmanandLatifa Asseffar, who helped make the research possible to the Bank for all the money, including the sums paid in thefirstplace. out as bribes, and they wanted no such responsibility. From a it made far more sense to village perspective, Endnotes take what the government agency in question did not skim rather than risk getting in trouble with the Bank, 1 By the 2000-2001 schoolyear, the Moroccangovernment was employing Tashelhit-speaking a new and curious with uncertain teachersin the AgoundisValley. But teacherabsenteeism is reportedto haveincreased rather entity powers. than improvedthings. In March of 2001, villagerswere divided about whether the new matters here in terms of Tashelhit-speakingteachers were betteror worsethan the Arabicspeakers who came before Language simple compre- them. hension, but also in the sense that who can claim people 2 It shouldbe noted thatthe numberof officialslocally considered "corrupt" in the Agoundis comprehension are in a powerful position. The man who Valleyhas markedlydeclined between 1998 and 2001.

25 MIDDLEEAST REPORT 219 a* SUMMER2001 25