A Selection from Land of Dissidence: Moroccan Schemata of Power, Colonial Ethnography and the Western Sahara
<Note: this is what I have been doing since last spring>
2.Bled as Siba: Colonialism and Ethnography
Ernest Gellner, in Saints of the Atlas, writes that pre-colonial era Morocco was “remarkably unaffected” by the outside world, failing to produce any local equivalents of “young Turks." (1969, 17) While it’s true that Morocco had fewer dealings with Western Europe than, say, the Ottomans or Algeria, Gellner is quite wrong to see pre-colonial Morocco as isolated or at the mercy of foreign powers. From the fall of Grenada in 1492 to the colonial era, Moroccan influence spread to the south and east, including Saharan trade, Sahelian realpolitik, and European trade on the coastlines. (Scheele and McDougal: 2012; Seddon:1981, 81; Dreissen: 1991) Moroccan diplomacy even reached across the Atlantic; the Kingdom of Morocco was the first sovereign power to recognize the newly independent United States of America after independence. (Al-Fasi:1954, 393) However, post-1850s, the timbre of Moroccan diplomacy would change greatly, as European penetration of the kingdom increased.
With the conquest of the rest of North Africa by the French in the first half of the 1800s, Moroccan trade routes to Mali and Algeria floundered, and the kingdom was forced to rely on Atlantic and Mediterranean trade with European powers, often at unfavorable rates. This led to increasing European penetration of Moroccan infrastructure via loans and forcible investment. (Seddon: 1981, 25) Post 1880s, “the process of European penetration had become so far advanced that the political economy of Morocco was fatally undermined and the power of the state to maintain its integrity totally compromised.” (ibid:1981, 25). In debt, the Moroccan state, or Mahkzen, was unable to maintain order and was increasingly beset by localized rebellions, known as Siba, as the populations of the hinterlands tried to avoid taxation or central control or expressed their displeasure at European influence.
These Siba rebellions served as invaluable pretexts for invasions by European powers. The first of such actions took place in 1859, following a raid by the Andjeras tribe of Riffians on Spanish-controlled Ceuta, long a source of regional tension. (Driessen: 1991) Using the city as a launching ground, the Spanish brought in a force of over 35,000 men to pacify the region, marching south and occupying the regional center of Tetuan. In 1911, similarly, the Spanish used a “tribal disturbance” near Ksar el Kabir in the Western Sahara as an excuse to occupy the entire territory, disregarding the Sultan’s complaints and sending in two warships. (Rezette: 1972, 54) Despite this dubious claim to the territory, the Spanish had little impact on the interior until the French presence in Mauritania had “broken the back” of Saharawi resistance (Hodges: 1983, 55). Mirroring the Spanish strategy, the French took advantage of riots within Fez, thus entering forcibly into Moroccan politics. By invading from Algeria, the French put down the rebellion and gained control of the Sultan who had been besieged by angry rioters. In French custody, the Sultan signed the Treaty of Fez in 1912, and then promptly abdicated, and was then replaced with a more tractable relative who ruled in name only. (al-Fasi: 1954, 387) The Treaty of Fez divided the country into the Spanish protectorate in the north and in the south, and the French protectorate in the center, which included most of the areas traditionally administered by the Sultan. While both the protectorates maintained the fiction of serving the Sultan’s interests, in reality, the Mahkzen had been replaced by European military authorities, who effectively dominated the country, extending their reach through aggressive actions against the rebellious tribes.
As elsewhere in Africa to preserve colonial authority, European policy in Morocco during this time followed the divide-and-rule strategy. The French, especially, used the rural Berber-speakers, who were often considered to have proto-European ancestry (Laroui: 1977, 19), as a “subject race”. (Mamdani: 2001) By setting up a system of caids, or regional governors, who controlled virtual fiefdoms carved out of the kingdom, the French bypassed the political and military authority of the Sultan. (Hoffman: 2010, 858) Building on this, by 1933 the French sought to establish a new legal system that would allow the tribes to report directly to the French. More controversially this exchanged urban Sharia laws for customary/tribal laws, (Munson: 1993, 103) which Moroccan nationalists projected to be a part of widespread conversion campaign of the Berbers to Christianity. (al-Fasi: 1954, 119) Following this disruption, the French and their Berber caid allies eventually managed to depose Sultan Mohammed V entirely in 1953. (Hart: 1984, 165)
While solidifying European power over the periphery, these policies had the unintended effect of fomenting the beginnings of Moroccan nationalism. An effect of the Berber policies was a switch of the “zones of insecurity” from the rural areas to the urban areas, which were becoming hotbeds of anti-French nationalism, especially after the deposing of the Sultan. (Gellner: 1969, 20) French domination, and particularly the removal of the Sultan was the crucial ingredient for the quick-spreading Salafism (fundamentalist Islam) and nationalism of ‘Allal al-Fasi and the Istiqlal party, who agitated resistance, reform, and the return of the Sultan. (Zeghal: 2008, 22-23) Geertz said much the same thing in his discussion of oppositional versus circumstantial Muslims, where he contends that colonialism is the catalyst for political Islam. (1968, 64) Indeed, it is largely because of such political Islamic movements that Sultan Mohammed V was returned and nationalist riots forced the French to formally grant the kingdom its independence on March 2, 1956.
2.2 A Compromised Ethnography
The conquest of Morocco by European powers advanced not just through military and economic means, but also through the use of discourse. Framed properly, the colonial powers could claim that they always were fighting defensive wars or coming to the aid of the beleaguered Mahkzen, which was unable to properly control its borders or subjects from the 1850s on. Moreover, as the Berber laws and the use of caids and tribal rulers to disrupt royal authority demonstrates, the protectorates had a tremendous interest in the portrayal of Morocco as divided, fractious, and impotent; an “ethnographic fiction” (Geertz: 1973,15) which was ‘proved’ and reinforced by colonial and early post-colonial ethnography. This process of division is described by Hammoudi as a “virtuality […] shaped by French power and know-how.” (1997, 111) Thus, the increasing Siba rebellions since the 1850s and the penetration of Morocco (Seddon:1981, 17, 23), were transformed from periodic rebellions to a state of rebellion: Bled as-Siba, contrasted with the state of government: Bled al-Mahkzen. This was deliberately done by the colonizers and was contrary to facts on the ground observed in the first decades of the 20th century asserting that “virtually all of Morocco […] undergoes the action of the Makhzen”. (ibid: 30) By the 1930s, artificial divisions were at the heart of European knowledge of Morocco, with corresponding policy implications. (Laroui: 1977, 380)
Quickly colonial understandings of Morocco were extended into the distant past to color even the pioneering works of Ibn Khaldun, (Gellner: 1969, 4) whose model of “pessimistic” history and “sense of doom” were taken by the colonial powers and “inject[ed] with their own racial prejudices.” (Laroui: 1977, 218-219) Siba and Mahkzen became ethnic designations; Bled as-Siba associated with the Berber-speaking tribes of the periphery, while Bled al-Mahkzen became synonymous with the Arabic-speaking imperial core of the country, both of which were seen as historically discrete units. As part of the divide-and-rule policy in the country, it is no surprise that the terms were given ideologically tinged translations, ones that supported Berber-French partisanship. Under the French anthropologists, “it is Siba that allows the tribes to take breath for a while,” while the Mahkzen is “despotism.” (Montagne: 1978, 75, 76) The Berber, in the European model, was “infatuated with their own freedom,” or living within a “tribal republic” (Driessen: 1992, 62) in contrast to the assumed oriental despotism, “fanaticism,” and Arabism of the cities. (McDougall: 2010, 27)
It is no doubt that this Arab-Berber division is a product of colonial history and ethnographic “knowledge”. Prior to the colonial period, identity was based on a flexible “Maghrebi” label (McDougal: 2010, 28), or subsumed under Islam. (El Mansour: 2010, 66) Moreover, there is a tremendous amount of evidence as to the artificiality of “Arab” ancestry, which could be purchased by powerful rural families to give themselves legitimacy. (Laroui: 1980, 157) French language policy, however, reinforced the perceived Arab-Berber divide, punishing Berbers who attempted to speak Arabic, something associated with “Islamization” and “Anti-European sentiment.” (Hoffman: 2008, 75) These systems of divisions were necessary for the colonial bifurcated state, which was founded on the myth of the ‘uncontrollable’ Berber and the grasping and ‘impotent’ Arab. (Montagne: 1978, 75, 82)
Anthropologists after Morocco’s 1956 independence tended to re-interpret the colonial stereotypes without challenging them, seeing in Bled as-Siba as a pre-industrial and traditional society beset by modernity. Gellner, following Bourdieu (1958, 27), writes of the Berbers as “Démocratie vécue,” and “romantic”, (1969, 28) maintaining a strong discourse of what Abu-Lughod (1990) terms “the Romance of Resistance” toward the Berbers’ perceived holdouts to modernity and urban Islam. Thus, while the Moroccan tribes were romantic and “good to think”, (Levi-Strauss: 1969, 89) they are seen to “underpin[ning] a Euro-centrist viewpoint” as semi-historical relics in static pre-capitalist societies without institutions, save ancestry. (Masbah: 2012, 261-262) Despite the Anglo-Saxon anthropologists’ clear interest in and admiration for their subjects, their focus on segmentation merely reproduced the elements of the order / disorder colonial dichotomy. While works like Driessen (1991), Hammoudi (1997) and Hoffman (2008; 2010) call to attention this “invented tradition” (Howsbawm & Ranger: 1983), it is still often replicated to varying degrees, and has been marshaled by pro-Moroccan writers to justify violent expansion and repression.
Even works that have managed to stand the test of time, like Geertz’s Islam Observed, which was cited by Edward Said as “discrete and concrete enough [not to be] animated by orientalism,” (1978, 326) seem to present a model based on “elegant fantasies”. (Munson: 1993, 182) While Geertz can give us an interesting overview of the history of Islam in Morocco, he too maintains a focus on dualisms, especially the “intrinsic” vs. “contractual” divide (1968, 76), which transforms reality as lived into mere representations. Geertz’s understanding of Moroccan power, while correctly identifying cultural features and symbols involved with authority, is strangely bloodless—a vision of power as mere ritual and performance similar to his work in Negara, where “power served pomp, not pomp power.” (1979, 17) This vision of authority is deeply problematic, especially in regards to the violence of the Moroccan state, leading Munson to write that Geertz, and interpretivism in general “ignores the secular facets of power.” (1993:183) This criticism fits neatly into that held by Mitchell, who maintains that the interpretivist understanding of “text” is a particularly western one, ignoring the medium and focusing on an “unphysical” entity. (1990, 561)
2.3 Anthropology come home to the (sub)tropics
Recent scholarship has attacked many of the old dichotomies of the colonial period and of the ‘segmentary-obsessed‘ (Driessen: 1991, 76) anthropologists. As such the disjuncture between Siba and Mahkzen has been found to be overstated and in the interests of the colonial powers: “Intervention of the state at all levels of tribal organization is a deeply rooted phenomenon in the history of Morocco, contrary to the colonial claim of segmentary independence.” (Masbah: 2013, 273) Instead of the concrete dichotomies of Siba and Mahkzen or Arab and Berber, recent scholarship has re-asserted the interconnectedness of the kingdom and the local tribes, and the inability to divorce periphery from center. Even Geertz maintains an essential monism towards Moroccan politics, writing that “rural and urban society were variant states of a single system.” (1969, 5)
This denial of dualisms in favor of an interconnected monism can be termed, with apologies to Dr. Latour (1993), ‘Anthropology come home to the subtropics.’ This is a shedding of the dichotomies and webs of exoticism that encourages ethnographers to focus on agnatic descent and the cults of the saints, and ignore the effects of the nationalist revolutions or the place of the Monarch as a saint. It is a refusal of clearly delineated phenomena in favor of “the whole shebang.” (Latour: 1993, 101) What goes on in the Rif, or the Atlas, or indeed, in Rabat, can help us contextualize what is going on in the Western Sahara. This paper, then, uses the mapped out margins of Morocco to understand the maneuvers of the center, elucidating a large-scale national idiom of power from works overwhelmingly focused on the local.
This paper also reconciles elements of interpretivism, namely Geetz’s understanding of Moroccan kingship as manipulation of ritual (1968, 31), and his conception of power as theatre, (1980, 102), with both Mitchell’s and Munson’s criticism. I believe the key to this is Lila Abu-Lughod’s expansion of the ethnographic field to include media in The Interpretation of Culture(s) after Television. (1997) Here, she calls to attention the created nature of media, as “produced deliberately for people, under conditions that vary politically and historically.” (1997, 112) Similarly, this paper views official gestures, from speech to troop deployment to be “created,” texts that, following Mitchell’s understanding, are both medium and message, statements written in blood, concrete, or merely in ink. An official gesture is a ritual used to “make and unmake the nation” (Kaplan: 2006, 99) in a variety of different idioms and is intended to be interpreted. That is, the violent and repressive aspects of the state are as much part of the “common aesthetics of power and modalities of expression,” (Mbembe: 1992, 13) as the manipulation of local symbols of power and authority—gestures to be interpreted by the nation.
The following sections of this paper will build a frame for understanding the exercise of power in Morocco, utilizing the ‘redeemed’ fieldwork as well as more recent and less bounded works to define Moroccan idioms of power and, more importantly, to understand their role in the exercise of power, authority, and violence in the Sahara.
