Sahara

For the package-tour brochures, the Moroccan Sahara starts at Ouarzazate, just over the High Atlas; but this is a choice of convenience, tailor-made for the buses. In actual fact, the Sahara starts farther on: at Zagora, where a sign says "52 days to Tombouctou by camel caravan"; or at Erfoud, and the northernmost dunes of the country; or at Goulimime, where the Saturday market draws hundreds of nomads in blue chech (hcadclodi). They are not tuarejj but r'jjuibat, though they have the customs and pride of their more famous cousins.

It is a strange Sahara, that of Morocco: it has not the boundless distances filled with nothing that cover countries such as Algeria, Chad or Mauritania. The views are similar, it is true: sometimes animated by dunes (erjj), often stretching out in stony, moon-like plains (hammada). But here oases often appear amid sand and stone and they are frequently reached on good asphalt roads. The symbol of this Sahara, arid but not extreme, burning but with intervals of shade, is the date palm; according to a local saying this plant "grows with its head in the fire but its feet in the water". Date palms are to be found in all the oases, but especially at Tafilalt, the region around Erfoud, which has almost 7,000. In many ways, however, this part of Morocco has much in common with the rest of the Sahara: language, for instance (die r'jjuibat of Goulimime understand the Ìñþãå across the border far better than the Arabs of Casablanca), and religion (in the north the holy place par excellence is Moulay Idriss, but here Tamgrout is more important; it conserves ancient copies of the Koran, illuminated on gazelle hides). Also, the local hero is Ma el Amine, theologian and warrior of the Sahara, who at the beginning of this century wrote 450 books and kept the French invaders on the run for nine years. Lastly, typical of the Sahara is the mentality of the people, who consider the desert one country and the frontiers simply a bizarre theory found in atlases, with no true correspondence to reality. That the frontiers are optional is after all demonstrated by the matter of the former Spanish Sahara, the region that borders the Atlantic, south of the Draa valley as far as Mauritania. Invaded in 1976 by a "Green March" of Moroccan civilians, then occupied by regular troops, that sea of sand was the scene of a bitter war with the local independence-fighters of the Polisario Front. The conflict ended in 1988 with the promise to entrust the future to a referendum. Rabat has actually occupied the region, which brought with it the phosphate deposits at Bou Craa, one of the richest in the world. The referendum has still not happened.