Water, fields and markets

Hart describes the agricultural cycle of the Usikis valley, near Msemrir, rather than that of the south: in the Saghro, he writes, agriculture is much more limited, and in the Dra and Tafilalt oases the date harvest belongs to relations between Aït Atta and Haratin. At Usikis, ditches (tarugwa) with permanent water irrigate barley, wheat, turnips, potatoes, carrots, maize and lucerne, as well as walnut trees near each igherm. The water is divided into four parts, one for each major igherm (Ait Yʿazza, Ait Unibgi, Ait Taʿdadat and Ait Bu Iknifen), which irrigate in turn (swifa, from the French suivant, or nuba, nubt): about five days and five nights each when water is plentiful, up to ten when it is scarce, with fines for anyone who takes it out of turn.

Elsewhere water is scarce. The Ait el Fersi of the Saghro have no springs or rivers, only wells: they measure irrigation time with a water clock, a small pierced bowl placed in a pool, which takes exactly an hour to sink before the process is repeated. At Tazzarine water is measured in a pierced couscous dish, and each owner uses only what it holds.

At Usikis the cycle begins and ends in summer, when the transhumants are in the high pastures: those who stay behind irrigate. Autumn brings ploughing and sowing of wheat, the maize harvest in September, walnuts at the end of October, potatoes in November. Barley is sown at the beginning of February, ploughing ends in mid-March, lucerne is sown in May as summer transhumance approaches, and the sheep are sheared only every other year. The slack season, from August to early October, is the time for weddings. Among the Ait Bu Iknifen of Talmast the cycle is shorter: barley, sown without irrigation in September, is harvested in May with the help of ikhammasen from the lay lineages of the Ihansalen.

For work beyond a single family (building a house, clearing land, threshing and above all harvesting) people call a tiwizi. Whoever needs help announces it at the market; young men come for a fixed time, usually two or three days, fed at his expense, and leave if the work is not finished. Hart finds it more common among the Ihansalen than among the Aït Atta, and increasingly rare as young men went down to the plain to harvest for wages.

Weekly markets, the hallmark of rural Moroccan life, are missing from the heart of Aït Atta country. Hart counts only two near that heart, south of the Saghro, both on Wednesdays, at Tazzarine and Alnif, and none in the Saghro before 1974. A dozen others, attended by Aït Atta, are held on the fringes: Msemrir and Zawiya Ahansal in the mountains, Tinghir on Mondays, Boumalne of the Dades and Tinejdad on Wednesdays, Nkob on Sundays, Zagora and Tagounite twice a week, Rissani for the Ait Khebbach of Taouz. Following Captain de Monts de Savasse, Hart sees in this the effect of a land-tenure system designed to keep strangers out of the territory: the mobile Aït Atta deal with them on the fringes, never at the centre.

To the south-east, among the Ait Khebbach of the Tafilalt, the geographer J. Lefébure describes another, flood-fed agriculture. In a depression of some 13,000 hectares, flooded under ten centimetres of water in good years, the Grand Mayder is open to all the Aït Atta: in 1962 each of 7,939 people was entitled to a strip about thirty centimetres wide and four to five kilometres long. A crop comes only one year in four. Since 1965, he writes, a dispute has blocked sowing: “rather than recognise full access rights for Black people” (translated), the Aït Atta preferred to give the collective land over to grazing. Lefébure also recalls that from 1918 to 1932 the French army had blown up the dam diverting floods to the Rissani palm grove in order to weaken the resistance; the water then benefited the lands of Merzouga, which Ait Khebbach and Dwi Menia brought under cultivation.