The Ait Sukhmann of the moroccan central Atlas : an ethnographie survey and a case study in Sociocultural Anomaly
Authors: Hart David Montgomery 
Published: May 2009

Résumé Comprenant 26000 âmes selon le recensement marocain de 1960, les Ait Sukhman dans la province centrale marocaine de Béni Mellal chevauchent les chaînes du Moyen- Atlas et du Haut-Atlas Central. Typiques en beaucoup d'aspects socio-culturels des tribus transhumantes des Imazighen dont ils forment un groupe, ils sont néanmoins atypiques en beaucoup d'autres : 1) Dans le fait qu'au moins deux de leurs clans-clefs réclament leur descendance d'un esclave noir de Mawlay 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilali (et ceci dans une région où les noirs et les Haratin sont vus traditionnellement par des Berbères blancs comme leurs inférieurs sociaux), bien qu'il ne s'y manifeste aucune trace visible d'ascendance noire ; 2) dans le bizarre système économique d'un de leurs groupements-clés localisés, les Ait 'Abdi du Plateau du Kusar (Koucer), qui gardent des chameaux à une altitude de presque 3 000 mètres, où ils se trouvent sous la neige pendant neuf mois de l'année, pénétrés de l'idée qu'ils en ont besoin pour le transport des grains ; 3) dans l'existence, sur leur territoire (et dans ce cas, chez les Ait *Abdi d'Aghbala) d'un grenier collectif dont l'entrée est gardée par des serpents venimeux, dans une montagne presque inaccessible ; 4) par le fait que même s'ils ont cinq clans, lesquels pour la plupart sont discontinus et redoublés au point de vue territorial, ici comme ailleurs dans la région, ils n'ont aucune notion du principe de khams khmas ou « cinq cinquièmes » qui apparaît avec une certaine régularité comme un facteur assez majeur dans la composition et l'organisation des tribus marocaines ; et finalement 5) dans le système inutilement embrouillé d'élections annuelles pour le chef local, encore chez les Ait *Abdi du Kusar. En d'autres aspects traditionnels socioculturels comme par exemple le mariage préférentiel entre cousins parallèles patrilatéraux, l'organisation et la profondeur des lignages, la segmentarité, le droit coutumier, les serments collectifs, la vengeance, le prix du sang et la guerre traditionnelle (surtout avec les Ait Hadiddu) ainsi que s'agissant des arbres et des lieux saints, des « marabouts », ou encore de leur mentalité reconnue par tous leurs voisins et par eux-mêmes comme «arriérée» et «sauvage», ils ressemblent étroitement aux tribus qui les entourent ; mais dans leurs aspects déjà énumérés ils s'en détachent suffisamment pour fournir une exception qui prouve la règle. The article which follows is based on approximately two months of anthropological fieldwork among the Ait Sukhman during the summers of 1959, I960 and 1961. The fïeldwork was carried out in connection with a wider overall project on the sociocultural anthropology of Moroccan Berber-speaking tribes which the author worked on from 1959 to 1967, and which was kindly funded by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to which institution he extends his thanks. His thanks must go equally to Professor Ernest Gellner of the London School of Economics for having introduced him to the highland Ait Sukhman at Anargi (Anergui) in the Moroccan Central Atlas in 1959. The Ait Sukhman are a Tamazight Berber-speaking tribal group of Central Morocco, consisting largely of transhumants and located in a single territorial bloc straddling the Middle Atlas range to the north and that of the bigger and higher Central High Atlas to the south. They are bordered on the northwest by the Ait r-Rba' and the Ait Sri, on the north by the Ait Ishaq and Ishqirn, on the east by the Ait Yihya and the Ait Hadiddu, both of the Ait Yafalman confederacy (with the latter having traditionally been among their principal enemies), on the south by the northernmost wing of the supertribe of the Ait 'Atta, the Ait Bu Iknifen n-Tlmast, as well as by the local groups of the Ait 'Atta at Usikis and Msimrir, and on the southwest by the Ihansalen and by the Ait Ishha of the Ait Massad confederacy (Maroc, Carte des Tribus: 1.500,000e, Rabat, 1958 and 1962). From an administrative standpoint they fall entirely into the province of Bni Mallal (Beni Mellal circle of 1-Qsiba and three rural communes of Aghbala, Fum 1-Ansar and Tizi n-Isli, circle of Wawizakht and two communes of Anargi and Tagalft, and circle of Azilal and commune of Zawiya Ahansal, with a population in 1 960, by our interpolation of the Moroccan census of that year, of 6,614 nuclear families and 26,182 total population (Royaume du Maroc, Service Central des Statistiques 1962: 162, 166, 167-8, 169-70, 176, 178-9) (1). Figures derived from any subsequent censuses have not been available to us. There is no question but that the Ait Sukhman, or their ancestors, as well as their neighbors, or the latters' ancestors, were integrally involved in the great and disorganized push of Berber tribal groups from the Jbil Saghru and southeastern Morocco northwest across the Central High Atlas and the Middle Atlas toward the Atlantic coastal plains, from the sixteenth century (or earlier) through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what Terrasse has described as « la poussée (montagnarde) venue du Sud, fait essentiel de l'histoire marocaine» (Terrasse 1949-50, cited by Couvreur 1968: 13; also Brignon et al., 1967: 259-62). According to Couvreur, the Ait Sukhman may have been established at Anargi in the Central High Atlas, which is generally regarded as their point of origin and where they were first divided up, as early as the thirteenth century (though in our view this date seems too early), and certainly by the sixteenth (1968 : 13-14) ; and two clans which were possibly Ait Sukhman or had become so, the Ait Hamama and the Ait Sa'id (w-'Ali ?), figure among those who sold land to Sidi Lahsin w-'Atman of the Ihansalen in the latter's famous land deed of 1598 A. D./ 1006 A.H. (Ithier 1947, unpublished), hence buttressing the sixteenth century date. Couvreur also notes that in the first instance there is a contradiction which a legend tries to resolve : Dawud w-'Ali, the ancestor of one of the Ait Sukhman clans, had a first-born son from the region but then adopted a second son who had come from the south. In this fact we may have a memory of the mixture of two groups of different origin (ibid. 14, n. 13). At any rate, Couvreur adds that apart from the Zawiya Ahansal land deed of 1598, an additional Arabic manuscript from another Ihansalen zawiya at Askar has them chasing out the last stranger groups from Anargi and consolidating their own position in the Anargi area around 1650-70 (ibid : 15). In any event, as Tarrit already noted in colonial times (Tarrit 1 923 : 53 1), it has come to be that if one speaks of the Ait Sukhman in the area of Bni Mallal and Wawizakht, it is generally admitted that one is dealing with these same Ait Dawud w-'Ali, while the Ait Sa'id w-'Ali, the Ait'Abdi and the Ait Hamama are all specified as such. The Ait Hamama came to occupy the right bank of the Asif n-Wirin, after they were pushed out of the Azagharfal by he Ait'Abdi, while the latter occupy its left bank up to and including the crests of Ijbartan, Imghal, the Amalu n-1-Kusar and the Amalu n-Zaimuzen, the twin massifs of the Kusard and the Zaimuzen. (It is no accident that the Kusar massif and plateau, at a height of almost 3,000 meters, was the scene of the magnificent last-ditch resistance of the Ait Sukhman to the French before their final surrender on September 3, 1933, the date which marked the end of the French 'pacification' of the Central Atlas). The Ait Dawud w-'Ali control both banks of the Wad 1-Abid River from Bu Tfarda to the Jbil Sghat, as well as being in control of the Anargi Pass, the Tizi n-w-Anargi, while the Ait Sa id w-Ali, the lowest-lying clan, form a territorial triangle the high point of which is supported by the Wad 1-Abid and the base of which is at Fum 1-Ansar (Tm. Imi n-1-Ansart) and at Bni Mallal itself, virtually on the edge of the flatlands where the massive wall of the Central Atlas begins to rise up. The reasons behind these present-day Ait Sukhman clan locations — and we shall consider the clan structure presently — can probably be summed up by the two socioeconomic and ideological imperatives of pastureland and politics. But before we take up these issues, we discuss that thrown up by the name Ait Sukhman itself; and that this is but the first of a considerable number of anomalies of a sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical kind — which serve to set the Ait Sukhman off from their other Tamazight- speaking Berber tribal neighbors - will soon become apparent. The etymology of the name Ait Sukhman is in no doubt, but its attitudinal repercussions are of some interest : for although the question may not be one which bothers or puzzles the tribesmen themselves, it certainly throws up a degree of ambiguity in the mind of the oustide observer. The name Sukhman is derived from Tamazight ismakh (pi. isimghari), or "black", and the Ait Sukhman are hence "people/ descendants of a black". Now this etymology, which is indisputable, is very curious on two counts. The first is that it seems to be known and invoked by only the members of the two highest and most inaccessible Ait Sukhman clans, the Ait Dawud w-'Ali of Anargi (also known as the Ait w-Anargi) and the Ait'Abdi and their close kinsmen the Ait Bindaq of the Kusar and the Zaimuzen ; and not to or by any of the others which inhabit lower-lying areas where under normal circumstances a rather greater number of blacks might be expected to be found. The second point is that even though Sukhman, the putative black ancestor and tribal point of definition, is locally held to have been a slave of the great saint Mawlay 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilali (whose connections with Morocco and its people are legion, even though he himself never lived there and is buried in Baghdad), and even though the Ait Sukhman themselves tend, as Central Atlas Berbers go, to be rather dark-complexioned — a fact already noted by de la Chapelle ( 1 93 1 : 48, n. 1 0) — they do not look in the least negroid, or at least not to this observer, but rather as fully Caucasoid and Mediterranean as any of their