Memory & Heritage

After the agreement of 25 March 1933, the Saghro came under Protectorate administration. The syntheses indicate that tribal organisation and customary law were maintained within the framework of the so-called “Berber” dahir; at Igharm Amazdar the administration built a building for the istinaf.

Twenty years later, Duclos observed that the Aït Atta “loyally accepted to play the game, obligatory in any case, of the new institutions”, while remaining nostalgic for a past “of quasi-independence and expansion that they liked to recount”. English Wikipedia also mentions a French policy of “fixation” of nomads.

At independence in 1956 the customary jurisdictions were abolished, personal law came under Muslim law and criminal law under state courts; tribes and sections gave way to rural communes and caidates. In 1961 Hart found at Ikniouen a qaid from the Aït Baslam.

The geographer Andreas Kagermeier shows how the military posts and Native Affairs offices set up to control the region (Ouarzazate, Tinghir, Boumalne, Kelâat Mgouna, Goulmima, Ksar es-Souk) became the towns of the south-east: Zagora became a provincial capital in 1997, Tinghir in 2009. From the mid-1930s, roads built to supply the troops brought the first tourists, and the staging inns of the time became attractions in their own right (PDF pp. 3-6, 12-13).

The material conditions of the siege are known only in fragments: Bordeaux (1935, p. 306) reports that the women went down to fetch water at night, because partisans and goumiers “fired less at them”, and that the lack of water was “one of the causes of the surrender”; Saulay mentions the families who left Bou Gafer on 10 March; Gérardin notes the presence of women and families, in colonial terms. Nothing is said of food, care, or the fate of the wounded and the herds. No testimony by an Aït Atta woman has been found. The human toll remains unknown.

The main leads are identified: operational reports and war diaries held by the Service historique de la Défense; Protectorate holdings in the Diplomatic Archives and the Archives nationales d'outre-mer; the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco; the 1933 press digitised by Gallica; the books of Spillmann (1936) and Guillaume (1946) and Wanaim's article (2024); and oral testimonies, notably those collected for Bougafer 33.

SAGHRO's architecture is designed to receive these documents: each new source, image or testimony is added to the database and updates events, comparisons and knowledge statuses.

Before the French troops, it was the authority of the pasha of Marrakech, Thami el Glaoui, that extended towards the Todgha. In 1930 Beaurpère writes that the Todgha and the Imider belong to the “Glawa command”, that the organisation left by the Glawa harkas of 1919 and 1920 had “crumbled” under the attacks of Aït Atta sections “wishing to free themselves from Glawa tutelage”, and that a khalifa of the Glaoui still held Tinghir with a handful of soldiers (pp. 205-206). In 1920, he notes elsewhere, the Glawa harka “carried out a raid” on the Aït el Fersi and burned their qsar (p. 265).

These advances relied on shifting local alliances. In the Imider, one section of the Aït Wahlim stood behind the family of El Hajj Faska, “champion of the Glawa cause” since 1919, against a rival section (Beaurpère, p. 259); Beaurpère says of the people of the Todgha that they “merely sided with the strongest” (p. 205): an officer's judgement, not a neutral observation. In 1933 other Aït Atta, already rallied, fought among the auxiliaries; in mid-March the command kept only 1,800 partisans, “chosen mainly from the harkas of the Draa and the Regg” (Saulay, p. 60).

Rejection of the Glaoui was at the heart of the final negotiation: according to Hart, Assou Oubasslam demanded that the pasha's authority never extend to the Saghro (p. 185). The colonial forces themselves (goums, Legion, artillery, air force) were commanded by French generals (Huré, Catroux, Giraud); the legal framework was that of the Protectorate, in which customary courts were created by dahirs (Hoffman 2013, p. 3).

The sources read do not allow us to go further on the role of the sultanate and the central institutions of the Protectorate in these operations: no Moroccan archive or administrative correspondence was consulted. SAGHRO therefore attributes to no institution and no community a responsibility that the documents do not establish; the alliances described here are those of specific families and sections, at specific dates.