Our road trip started in Marrakech and continued to Ouzoud Waterfalls – Imilchin - Dades Valley - Boumaline du Dades - Tinerhir – Todra Gorge – Alnif – Erfoud – Merzouga - Erg Chebbi - Sidi Ali - Zagora – Dra’a Velley - Ouarzazate – Marrakech.
We drove 1471 km mostly off-road through the High Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert, a rural area of spread-out villages with a population of mostly Berbers according to the book on Morocco. Driving along I have tried to catch a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people living here; we passed, it took a few seconds and a photo is left behind, without words. How authentic is it? Could it tell a story about how it is to live here?
Morocco’s population of 37 million people has two ethic groups: the Berbers and the Arabs.
The Berbers are recognized as the oldest population of all of north Africa; historically they were mentioned by the earliest ancient Egyptian civilization in the temple of Amun in Thebes on a plate dated to about 3200 BC; it mentioned the Berber tribe ‘Meshmesh of Tehrenu’ located in today’s Libya. The Egyptians and the Meshmesh were in perpetual border fights, hence they characterized them as the vile Meshmesh. There are petroglyphs even older attributed to the Berbers.
The Arab Historian Ibn Khaldum (1332-1406 CE) reported a legend, that the Berbers were descendants from Noah’s son, Ham.
The Romans called them the Berbers as ‘the people who did not speak Greek’; from that we got the word barbarians.
The Berbers call themselves the Imazighen (ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ ⵎⵣⵗ) the noble or free men and their language is Tamazight, an Afro-asiatic language related to ancient Egyptian and noteworthy for having a separate alphabet going back more than 2500 years. The Berbers are divided into tribes, speaking various closely related dialects; one tribe is the inhabitants of the Sahara Desert, the Tuaregs (the Blue Men). This tribe like other Berber tribes had a matriarchal society; an example is Queen of the Berbers, Dihya, she led the fight against the Arabs and Islam; she died 703 in the Battle of Tabarka in today’s Tunisia.
When the Jews arrived in Morocco in the first century after the Jewish Revolt, some Berber tribes adopted Judaism; later at the end of the Roman Empire, Christianity became wide spread among the Berbers.
The Muslim conquest of the Maghreb started 647 and was completed in 709, when all of north Africa came under the control of the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate and everybody were forcefully subjected to the Arab language and Islam. This cultural pressure of religion and language has continued until modern times, only in 2011 was Tamazight recognized in Morocco as an official language alongside standard Arabic. Today Tamazight is the language of the poor in the rural population like in the High Atlas Mountains and the Sahara, the areas we travelled.
A study published in 2017 (L.R. Arauna) showed that the genetic make-up of North African populations is heterogenous, a genetic mosaic resulting from migrations to and from Africa- the Arab world – Europe over centuries. They did not find strong distinctions between Berber and Arab ethnic background nor within members of different Berber tribes. This fact leaves the spoken language as the identifying cultural ethnic characteristic.
Today the Berber population is estimated to count 50-80 million spread over all of North Africa and also south of the Sahara. In Morocco there are 18-20 million Berbers, it is estimated that 30-40% all Moroccans speak Tamazight as their mother tongue.
According to Article 19 of the Moroccan Constitution of 2011 ‘men and women enjoy in equality, the rights and freedoms of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental character’. But a traditional religious way of life often clashes with liberal secular intentions of the law.
THE FACE OF MOROCCO
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