The lead of Mfis, an Ait Khebbach mine

The lead of the Tafilalt was worked long before the twentieth century: the ceramists of Fez obtained it there, and the Taouz massif keeps many traces of trenches. According to Lefébure, the engineer Contamine, guided to the outcrops, identified the vein that bears his name and obtained from the “Service des arts indigènes” in Fez a monthly order of three tonnes of galena from the Ait Khebbach. As the region was reserved to the State, a “native cooperative” was set up with technical assistance. With fifty workers, Contamine extracted in four weeks what Fez expected in ten; six months later, with three times as many men, he obtained 160 tonnes of galena and covered France's monthly needs for vanadium.

In 1951 the Taouz area came under the ordinary mining regime, and a company with a large State stake turned Mfis towards industrial working: a thermal power station, a washery of 300 tonnes a day, seventy dwellings. The plant never ran at more than a third of its capacity, the reserves having proved discontinuous. But the 2,700 Ait Khebbach artisans, assisted by as many Dwi Menia “employees”, delivered 9,900 tonnes of concentrate in 1957, 8% of Moroccan lead output, then ninth in the world; the same in 1958. Industrial working then stopped, and the housing that had sheltered 300 single men and 40 families soon had only 145 inhabitants.

Lefébure describes piecework (tâcheronnage) and attributes the decline to the technical limits of artisanal extraction and to falls in the price of lead, in 1966 and from 1973. He sees it as one of the forms taken in the twentieth century by the shrinking of the Ait Khebbach world: once open spaces became specialised, “herding on the dried-up or disputed mayder, farming at Merzouga, lead around Taouz” (translated).