During his duties at the festival, he says, he has married 50 couples and divorced only two. Aysha, who speaks no Arabic like all her peers in the area, shakes her head to indicate that on this occasion she has not found a partner. Apparently her shyness is due to our presence, for we are definitely strangers in this remote region. Little has changed in these mountains for generations. Many believe that Mohamed V, the grandfather of the present king, is still monarch.
Television is virtually non-existent, and life is simple.
However the local people have remained proudly Amazigh, though their understanding of their identity has little in common with that of the Amazigh independence activists in Morocco's big cities. However more recently their aims have changed, he says, and they have now gone beyond cultural demands and seek instead to diminish the national role of Arabic, claming that it undermines their language. Although more than 60 per cent of Morocco's 29 million inhabitants are Berber, Arabic has been the country's only official language since independence. Tarefit in the north, Tamazight in the central Atlas Mountains and Teshlahit in the south. And while the Amazigh insist that theirs is a proper language, Arabists like Al-Kitani say that it cannot be properly written, and even if it could, there would still be the problem of which dialect to choose.