The “south-east” does not exist on the administrative map, the researcher Jacopo Granci points out: it is a group of provinces, from the eastern High Atlas to the desert on the Algerian border, that its inhabitants call by that name. In the early 1990s, in Goulmima, a few guitarists gave shape to a genre later called “Amun Style”. The first of them, Moha Mallal, from Tamalte in the Dadès valley, had written his first songs in the 1980s while listening to the Kabyle singers Idir and Aït Menguellet, in contact with students of the Amazigh cultural movement.
The turning point came in 2007 with “Muha”, the first album of Saghru Band, the band of Mbarek Oularbi, known as Nba, from Mellab. Dozens of bands then appeared, almost all self-taught, from Goulmima to Ouarzazate; their names, Tagrawla, Tawargit, Imal, Imenza, express in Granci's view rejection and a wish for change. They record in small studios, press their records at their own expense and reach their audience mainly online.
Their first subject is language. Singing in Tamazight, Granci writes, is “an act of existence and emancipation” in a country that long imposed classical Arabic at school and in the administration, before the creation of IRCAM in 2001 and the official recognition of the language in 2011. They also sing of the land and its emptying villages, as in Moha Mallal's “Amersal”, the “salt land”; of the marginalisation of a region without infrastructure; of emigration; and of prison: the poet Omar Derouich spent a year in detention in 1994 for banners written in Tifinagh, and Nba sings one of his texts in support of political prisoners in Meknes and Errachidia.
These musicians see themselves as heirs to oral poetry. In the High and Middle Atlas, the imdyazen, itinerant poet-singers, told and criticised the news of the day; modern song takes over that role, and people still, in a phrase Granci reports, “read with their ears”. The model is the asfru, the short committed poem. Granci does not discuss the timnaḍin: the link with the poems sung by the women of the Saghro remains to be documented.
The memory of 1933 runs through this music. The name Saghru Band refers to the massif where the fighters held out; the band Ayyur recorded a song called “Bougafer” in 2012; in 2011 Tawargit gave its first album a title that calls the Saghro an “eternal revolution”; Meteor Airlines released “Warru” in 2020 in memory of the victims. Granci sees these artists as “passers-on of memory”, for whom the theme of the “return to the mountain” becomes a call for civic engagement.
Since Nba's death in 2011, a new generation has taken over: Meteor Airlines in Kelaat M'Gouna, Tenalt in the Dadès, Ismail Titaou in the Mellab area, Tasuta n-Imal, which runs workshops for young musicians. Infrastructure remains scarce in the region, and several of them criticise festivals for reducing their art to folklore.
Assisted translation, not validated
⚠ None of the sources consulted links these musicians to the Aït Atta: each entry gives their origin as the sources give it (Dadès, Mellab, Goulmima, Tinghir). Singing about the Saghro does not make a song an Aït Atta work.
⚠ Commitments are reported as the artist states them or as a named source interprets them; no song lyrics are reproduced and no recording was listened to for this page.
⚠ Searches without result: no source was found on a band called “Tighermatin”; “Malal Band” does not appear as a band distinct from the band Mallal; Saghru Band's 2009 interview with Hespress and the article on its 2014 concert in Lyon could not be found online.
Terms
Sources — 7 sources cited · 7 independent documentary line(s)
- Bellahsen, 2015Full text consulted · Moroccan press
- Desert distortion: the modern shape of Amazigh music, 2025Full text consulted · Foreign press
- Dominguez, 2025Full text consulted · Academic research
- — « Saghru Band »Full text consulted · Encyclopedic synthesis
- Ennassiri, 2020Full text consulted · Moroccan press
- El Jamii, 2024Full text consulted · Moroccan press