Igherman: fortified villages and granaries

Permanent homes, igherman (plural of igherm, ksour in Arabic), are fortified villages of earth and stone, often several storeys high, which also serve as collective granaries where each keeps his share of grain, under the watch of a guardian.

Hart describes Igharm Amazdar in 1961 as about a hundred houses “in the several-storied kasbah style” found throughout southern Morocco. The photographs of 1955 (building a rammed-earth wall) and 1935 (kasbah façades in Ouarzazate) show this raw-earth architecture.

Hart specifies that the Aït Atta almost always call their permanent dwellings igharman rather than qsur, and that in the Central Atlas the word also means the collective granary. Three to five storeys high (about 20 to 25 m), igharman consist of four towers of mud and stone joined by walls around a courtyard; square in the Central Atlas, the towers taper towards a flat, crenellated top from the Dades to the Dra. Each igherm houses the families of several related lineages of one clan, two to five hundred people at Usikis; staircases lead to each family's rooms, and each lineage has its guest room, kept locked, at the top of the stairs.

As a granary, mainly in the Central Atlas, the igherm is a tower set apart from the houses, with several gates and a watchman paid in kind by the community; it is divided into small cubicles (tahanut), roughly as many as there are families, with roughly as many doors as there are lineages. Dwellings and granaries together make up the local community (tamazirt). At Usikis Hart counts eight igharman, most named after the clans living in them. The presence of several clans in one community, as at Usikis, Igherm Amazdar or Taghbalt, may in his view reflect a deliberate safeguard for territorial defence.

Thirty years earlier, Spillmann had already described this double function. In 1936 he wrote that almost all Aït Atta, even herders, own “a ksar, a tirhremt or a house” of their own: “essentially storehouses”, built at a usual camping place, on an unavoidable route or near an economic centre, which serve the nomads as a “home port” and as a “precious defensive redoubt” (translated). Hart had read Spillmann: the two accounts are not entirely independent.