Trip to the Tafilalt Oasis

This weekend I had the chance to go on another fabulous field trip with my Contemporary Issues in North Africa class. The city where we stayed, Erfoud, is located along the Ziz River in eastern Morocco, very close to the Algerian border (which is closed). On the way there (it's about a 5.5-6 hr drive), we stretched our legs at a Berber tent rest stop on a cliff overlooking another, healthier, oasis... our professor explained that a healthy oasis has three levels of foliage: palm trees, fruit trees, and ground crops. It was a sliver of green amidst miles and miles of dusty brown.

Erfoud was built by the French, but there isn't much there today. Our hotel, creatively named The Tefilalt, was in some ways less chic and certainly much emptier than the one in Marrakech, but overflowing with rich carpets, tapestries, and fountains. After dinner, we went for a walk around the city. The population is supposedly around 34,000 and many desert movies have been filmed there, but it seemed much smaller -- there weren't more than a couple major streets. The town has really capitalized, though, on the Tuareg myth (my professors' biggest pet peeve). The Tuareg are a tribe, sometimes called the "blue men", are a nomadic Saharan people living in the inner Sahara, largely in West Africa and to a certain extent in Algeria. There have never been any in Morocco. But locals (not just in Erfoud) caught on to tourists' expectations, and have now begun dressing in flamboyant Tuareg costume, opening Tuareg stores (dozens of them in Erfoud), and even displaying Tuareg artifacts in local museums, claiming they were found in the area. While on our walk, we came across a buoyant procession in one of the streets and asked someone what was going on... it was a wedding. The bride was carrying a sort of lace-covered box on her head, and there were men in colorful attire playing long horns. Lots of the people in the parade didn't seem to know the newlyweds, and there were lots of miscellaneous children dancing wildly, so we didn't see anything wrong with joining in for awhile. As we peeled off to find a cafe (which, again, are really only for men here), we managed to attract a parade of very small children that followed us all the way back to our hotel.

The next morning, we headed out early as usual, making our first stop in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. Prof. Ross showed us a line of deep, wide holes in the cracked earth, part of a thousand-year-old irrigation system called "khtara". Water is gathered at a mountain base and carried by means of this network to the fields in dry places such as this. It was invented by the Kharaji, who ruled Morocco until the Murabitin came in 1070 and imposed Maliki Islam. (The Khariji were proto-Shia and the sect to which Moulay Idriss belonged. With a relatively open and meritocratic approach to religious authority, Khariji Islam was very appealing to the Berbers; Maliki Islam, in contrast, made it very difficult for Berbers to convert because Maliki adherents did not have to pay most taxes.) During the Neolithic Age, this region was extremely fertile, with all sorts of lakes and fauna. Date palms and camels, now ubiquitous, were brought relatively late (although before the Arabs).

Our next stop was the new sort of irrigation structure, sleek and concrete but very ineffective because its channels are open to the elements, resulting in major evaporation. Water rights here are inherited, like everything else. This gave Prof. Shoup the chance to talk to us about social classes in this region, which are rigid castes. The top two classes are the only ones that may inherit land, while the lower two may not. Even if a member of one of the upper classes sells to a member of the lower, he must pay a fine and the land returns to the original owner as soon as the immediate buyer dies. Paradoxically, the lower classes are in many instances now more educated, since the elite did not want its children educated at the schools established by the French. This has enabled many "haritin" (second lowest class) to work in Europe: yet when they return home with flashy clothes and big cars, they are still nothing. The classes are also reflected in women's apparel. The more color and embroidery found on a woman's dress, the poorer she is. The highest women wear unadorned black. Almost all the women we saw (and we didn't see many -- they don't go out) were wearing a loose black cloth around their regular clothes which they held across their faces with a hand. Sometimes not even a single eye was visible.

to be continued...