The Berbers of Morocco: A History of Resistance by Michael Peyron

Author:Michael Peyron [Peyron, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Thus speaks Terwillal hill: “A wild boar have I wed;

Go, live with mountaineers, O Hammou ou ‘Amr, head

Into the hills beyond, better becomes you bitter cold

Than cowardly knuckling under to Christian dogs!”38

Terror on Tishshoukt: Prelude to surrender

During these quiet years on the Atlas front, nowhere was this more obvious than among the Ayt Seghroushen. Though cut off from neighboring clans since the 1923 campaign, Saïd ou Mohand’s faithful war band, some 400-strong, had retreated with womenfolk and children to the inner fastnesses of Jbel Tishshoukt for a final stand. Despite the hardships of life at altitude—hiding in caverns or miserable, dung-insulated hovels, squatting over small fires and shivering till dawn—they managed to hold out up there for three winters.

Better still, they kept hunger at bay by sowing and harvesting barley at well above 2000 m in the valleys of Ikkis, Ljoua, and Bessam—something of an agricultural record for the area.39 On certain nights, having kept their powder dry, small groups would steal softly down the slopes and wake up the French garrison at Skoura, or rustle cattle from villages that had gone over to the French.

Meanwhile, a new hakim had taken over the Skoura outpost: Laffitte. This was bad news for the Ayt Seghroushen. Something of a rough diamond, this controversial individual was quite different from the usual polished, St. Cyr-trained officer. A somewhat loutish, latter-day condottiere and a firm believer in brute force, he had served in South America, with the Foreign Legion, with the Turks, and in the Great War. According to one observer, a saber-cut across the nose “gave him a most formidable appearance, and he added to its effect by an aggressive and overbearing manner which sometimes aroused the resentment of his seniors.”40 A fellow officer, however, claims that his ugly features were occasionally redeemed by a “charmingly friendly smile.”41 With a name equal to his reputation, that could be interpreted locally either as la’afit, “fire,” or la’afrit, “demon,” it was obvious that the Seghroushen were in for a rough time. They soon discovered that his anti-raider operations, conducted with a personal guard of Berber partisans, were as ruthlessly effective as their own raids. After one of their bands had found shelter in a friendly village, Laffitte punished its inhabitants by forcing all the men to strip, then sending them up the slope in their birthday suits to join the dissidents.42 The resultant loss of face proved as damaging as it was hard to live down. Even worse, hard on the heels of a serious attack on a settled village, which had allegedly broken a truce engineered by Laffitte, many of the participants were later killed by a crude explosive device he had planted along one of the paths they were wont to use. Worse still, he concealed a hand grenade in a sugarloaf and had it surreptitiously dispatched to the amghar whom he suspected of having instigated the attack, with fatal results the next time tea was served in that notable’s tent.

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