Protectors and protected: Aït Atta, Haratin and Jews

As they expanded towards the oases, the Aït Atta, armed pastoralists, established protection relationships with sedentary cultivators (mainly Haratin) and with Jewish communities. Hart writes that in exchange for Aït Atta protection the Haratin received one-fifth of the crops they grew for their patrons, a sharecropping relationship that still persisted in the 1960s.

Syntheses based on Hart report discriminatory customary rules: Haratin were forbidden to own land, carry arms or take part in councils, and fines punished the sale of a house or land to a Hartani. Land was the basis of social status.

These relationships were officially abolished after independence, with legal equality. However, the art historian Cynthia Becker observed in the 1990s the persistence of marriage discrimination among the Aït Khabbash towards their neighbours of the Black community of the Ismkhan.

Recent sources disagree on the nature of these ties. Among the Aït Khebbach, Marie-Luce Gélard describes a protection often paid with a fifth of the dates, “freely agreed”, variable over time, and notes that “no link any longer exists between former protégés and protectors”; she also notes the absence of words distinguishing dominant groups from former tributaries, except sometimes for descendants of slaves (2004, PDF pp. 3-4).

M'hamed Ahda, on the contrary, stresses hierarchy: the Rteb code he publishes keeps the mass of the Haratin away from power, excludes freed slaves and the descendants of the shurafa present before the Aït Atta arrived from the tribal djemâa, and the author speaks of a society where “the most destitute were ruthlessly exploited” (2001, pp. 89, 106). In 1930 Beaurpère calls the Haratin of the Todgha and eastern Saghro the “khammès of the Aït 'Atta”, sharecroppers paid a fifth (pp. 205, 237).