Adjou Moh

Adjou Moh appears in none of the period documents consulted by SAGHRO (archives, officers' accounts, ethnographies). She is known through local memory, as published by the journalist Maïmoun Oum Laïd, from Zagora, in a Hespress article of 8 March 2016, an excerpt from his book “أوراق بوكافر السرية”. For the facts concerning her, the author relies on “witnesses who lived through these events”, without naming them.

According to this account, she was born around 1905 in the Saghro, of the Aït Maarir of the Ilemchan tribe, and came to Bougafer with her husband, Lahcen n'Aït Bouh. During the fighting she carried water to the fighters and encouraged them with ululations and songs. After her husband was torn apart before her eyes by a shell, she took up the rifle of a fallen fighter, then sent rocks rolling down onto an assault column. She is said to have died in March 1933 and to have been buried on the mountain where her husband was killed; poets are said to have composed verses in her honour, which the article does not quote.

These elements belong to oral tradition reported by a third party and are confirmed by no other source consulted. The article's title, which credits her with killing “40 French”, puts forward a figure the text does not substantiate. Her memory is no less real: she has become a figure of women's participation in the resistance, taken up since by the press, online pages and a novel.

A second tradition, printed earlier, makes her known through oral poetry. The historian Qasim al-Hadik (2017) quotes, in Arabic translation, lines by the poet Hmad Oubasso, presented as a Bougafer fighter, mourning Adjou Moh and setting her against those who accepted the negotiations, as well as a chant by Sidi Baddou Oumessaoud; he relies on collections published in 2000 (L. S. Amrani) and 2004 (A. Rakkouk), which SAGHRO has not consulted. According to these authors, she was born at the end of the nineteenth century, carried a rifle at the Bougafer and was killed there on 28 February 1933, at about forty. The two traditions agree on her part in the fighting and on the poetic memory she left; they differ on the dates.