At the market

- June 24, 2018

Every Tuesday, the people from the small villages on the slopes of the High Atlas mountains, come down to the city of Amizmiz. Here they sell their goods and shop for the necessities for the week to come.

For the past few weeks we've been living just half an hour from Amizmiz and we've enjoyed visiting the busy weekly market with its farmers, traders, weavers, and ceramists.

The people of the Amazigh (what outsiders call the Berbers) are the descendants of the pre-Arab population of the Sahara, and Amazigh culture stretches back at least 4000 years. They created several kingdoms before the Arabs made their conquests in the 7th century.

During the following centuries of Islamization, the language and the culture of the Amazigh almost disappeared until the French took over Morocco just before the first World War.

The French used the distinction between the Arab majority and the indigenous people in the mountains as a way of 'Dividing and Conquering' and it was the French who encouraged the Imazighen (the people of the Amazigh) to see themselves as a unique people under the modern name of the Berbers.

Today, the present regime views the Berber identity as a colonial artifact and a hindrance to national unity.

They try to suppress it, but here, around Amizmiz, the Berber culture seems to be strong.

You can see it in the architecture, the massive mud brick buildings, scattered across the plains below the Atlas: In the kasbahs, the small castles of former Berber lords with thick mud brick walls and square corner towers and in the ancient, fortified villages, which are still in use to this day.

And - this Tuesday, you can definitely feel it as you're crammed inside a taxi with six Imazighen, going to the market (around here you don't have buses, everybody hails and shares taxis going to and from the city)

When we arrive in Amizmiz, we now know our way to the market. Down a few narrow lanes, then to the right and there we are.

First, we enter the stalls for used and new clothes, pottery and woodworks. Then we reach the greenery section..

Here, everything seems to be for sale. The fresh spices, mint, thyme, coriander, lemon verbena and other green herbs are mixed with dried cinnamon, turmeric, raz el hanout, ginger, pepper and the overwhelming, lovely smells get you filled with all kind of ideas for cooking.

The vegetables, tomatoes, cucumber, potatoes, aubergines, are sold by men dressed in traditional djellabas often with the added effect of fancy pairs of trainers.

The meat department of the market has small stalls selling chicken (with machines to defeather them), others sell rinds, offals, hoofs and heads of sheep.

All parts of the slaughtered animals are for sale and in this way, the local food produce is indeed really sustainable.

When the smells, the sounds and the sights get to be too overwhelming for us Northerners, Michael and I have found some steps leading up to the local bank, where we can sit, rest and look at all the shoppers milling around.

Today, the steps were already half filled with a little family - a mother and her two small daughters. The little one wanted to touch us and she tried to reach out. Her sister saw this and took over. She squeezed herself in between me and the baby, shyly looking up to me through her long dense eyelashes.

She was just adorable and I totally melted.

As we daily do, when we meet the Imazighen. The Saharan plain may be a dry, barren wasteland to look upon, but the people, living on it, are far from dry. Never in our many travels have we been among people so smiling, so open, so curious - so eager to shake our hands and try to communicate with what little French the possesses.