Facing the Makhzen: distance, wars and negotiations

Hart characterises the Aït Atta by an extreme “marginalism”, geographical, linguistic and political, in their relations with the Makhzan, the Sultan's central government. In the 1960s few knew Arabic; transhumance, a still-working lineage system and a capital, Igherm Amazdar, which kept the customary law and where the supreme chiefs were elected each year, maintained in his view a strong unity.

Tradition and history tell the same conflicts differently. According to the tradition recorded by Hart, the first sultan to deal with the Aït Atta was the “Black Sultan”, who had the ears of forty recalcitrants cut off; later, the army of Mulay Ismaʿil, sent to chastise the tribe, is said to have perished in the snow through the baraka of Mulay ʿAbdallah bin Hsain. History, Hart writes, records instead that Mulay Ismaʿil defeated the Aït Atta in the Saghro in 1678; it was probably he, he adds, who had eighty Aït Atta ears cut off to adorn the walls of his palace in Meknes. He judges these contacts generally bloody, but sees close parallels between the legends and known history. The sultans' expeditions to the South are detailed in the dossier “History of the Aït Atta”.

According to Hart, the traditional policy of the Alawite sultans was to support the Ait Yafelman or the Ait Siddrat, potential victims of the Aït Atta, making them an instrument of the Makhzan and a barrier against Aït Atta expansion towards the Atlas. Mulay al-Hasan I (1873-1894) broke with this tradition. Fearing a French invasion of the Sahara, he chose to conciliate the Ait Khebbach: in 1892 delegations of Aït Atta notables, mostly Ait Khebbach, were received at the palace in Fez; without giving them sealed decrees of investiture, he obtained their assurance that all would be quiet when he reached the lower Ziz. He spent only a month in the Tafilalt, in October 1893, and his mediation met with only moderate success; but his main achievement, according to Hart, was to have preserved good relations with the Aït Atta. He died in June 1894.

The Ait Khebbach, whose expansion to the south-east had begun in 1830 if not earlier and who controlled caravan protection towards Touat, harassed the French columns after the occupation of Touat in December 1899. Hart dates the start of Aït Atta resistance to French penetration to 1899; among the Ait Khebbach it lasted until 1936. In 1903-1904, however, some took part in a Makhzen harka against the pretender Bou Hmara; for Hart they came mainly for weapons and loot, and their presence did not amount to joining the Makhzen.

Hart's reading is not the only one. For the same period, Spillmann writes that Mulay Hasan failed to restore the situation in the South, and his Arabic translator recalls agreements by which some Aït Atta undertook to serve the Makhzen. The sources therefore differ on the reign's record in the South: failure according to Spillmann, relations preserved according to Hart, who himself acknowledges the mediation's moderate success.

With their neighbours, according to Hart, Aït Atta wars usually ended in a stalemate: when men or livestock ran short, a truce (l-hna) was proclaimed, then fighting resumed, often with different alliances. Internal quarrels were not the same as war against the Ait Yafelman or the Ait Siddrat, among whom Aït Atta killers found asylum, as among the Ait Merghad and the Ait Hdiddou; these adversaries more often had the support, at least tacit, of the Makhzen. Hart sums up Aït Atta relations with the Makhzen as a combination of resistance, armed neutrality and bet-hedging; their organisation (five fifths, a chief elected each year, a capital, transhumance) allowed them to mass against their neighbours.