the end of domestic slavery in fes, morocco

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The End of Domestic Slavery in Fes, Morocco

R. David Goodman

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate Schoolin partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degreeDoctor of Philosophy

in the Department History,Indiana University

October, 2009


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UMI Number: 3386679

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Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee John Hanson, Ph.D.Claude Clegg, Ph.D.

Phyllis Martin, Ph.D.

Ruth Stone, Ph.D.

Date of Dissertation Defense – November, 20th 2008


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© 2009R. David Goodman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


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In spite of all those who preserve benefits through double standards which degrade life and

obstruct people’s basis of well-being—yet far, far more so— in honor of all those who somehow

create previously unavailable means to our greater humanity…


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R. David Goodman

The End of Domestic Slavery in Fes, Morocco

This dissertation examines how the social institution of domestic slavery declined and ended in

Fes, Morocco. This very gradual and complex twentieth-century historical transformation is

approached through attention to the limited influence of French Protectorate (1912-1956) policy

forms of economic and social change as experienced through Fasi household labor and family

life, and relevant personal registers within the lives of slaves and their children. The extensive

archival and field research which it is based upon (supported by a Fulbright-Hays doctoral

dissertation research fellowship, a grant from the American Institute of Maghribi Studies, andseveral awards from Indiana University) assembles and analyzes a range of distinct original

sources, including colonial documents, Fasi court records, and oral interviews with former

slaves, slave owners and their descendants. The historical contours of this social change have

been reconstructed through a critical interpretation of French colonial documents, alongside a

careful consideration of the substantial detailed evidence of Islamic court records, and

compelling oral testimony representing intimate power relationships and their transformations

over time. This work is an effort to contribute an innovative and thorough case study of

relevance to Moroccan and North African history, as well as to the study of slavery within Arab

and Islamic contexts and beyond.


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CHAPTER ONE: Introduction

Introduction 1

Introductory Historical Background 5

Questions, Approaches and Relevant Literature 11

Sources and Methods 31

Note on Organization of Chapters 37

Note on Language 38

CHAPTER TWO: The Contours of Protectorate Era Official Sources and the End ofDomestic Slavery 39

Protectorate Policies and Slavery 45

Fasi Families Use of Muslim Law and the Decline of Slavery 67

Protectorate Era Attitudes toward Slavery and Blackness 76

Conclusion: Limits of Formal Sources 102

CHAPTER THREE: Fasi Domestic Slave Labor and Beyond 107

Economic Change and Fasi Domestic Slavery 108

Protectorate Economic Policies and Slavery108 Socioeconomic Changes in Fes116 Fasi Socioeconomic Changes and Women127 Post-Independence Changes and Continuities130

Experiences of Fasi Domestic Slave Labor and Shifting Power Relations 134

Fasi Domestic Slavery and the Organization of Household Work136 Work Conditions and Slave’s Experiences145 Controls and Punishments153Slave’s Responses162 Sources and Patterns of Household Change176 Working Beyond Slavery181 Socioeconomic Continuities and Changes187Struggles for Meaningful Freedom Beyond Slavery195

Conclusion 200


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CHAPTER FOUR: Familial and Personal Changes in the Decline of Fasi Domestic Slavery202

Social Changes and Slave Owning Fasi Families 203

Education, Nationalism and Elite Moroccan Women205 Shifting Contexts of Material Culture216 Reorganization in Patterns of Marriage and Family Life223 Post-Independence Changes and Continuities229

Fasi Family Legal Practices During the Decline of Domestic Slavery 236

Marriage, Concubinage and the Recognition of Children240 Property and Inheritance249 Housing258

Continuities and Changes in Social Attitudes and Personal Relations263 Slaves, Former Slaves and their Descendents: Experiences and Changes in Relations,Recognition and Belonging 272

Slave’s Experiences of Fasi Family Holidays273 Marriages and Color277 Familial Assimilation and Tensions285 Power and Sexual Relationships291 Children and Recognition302 Childhood and Slave’s Families306 Dada322 Old Age and Funerals328 Meaningful Familial Relationships Beyond Slavery331

Conclusion 342

CHAPTER FIVE: Conclusions 344

BIBLIOGRAPHY 350

APPENDIX 1 Selected Glossary 369-371

APPENDIX 2 Maps (Moroccan Cities, Fes Jdid and Fes El-Bali) 372


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FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 1. References to Immediate Liberations. 70Figure 2. References to Liberations Upon the Death of Owners. 71Figure 3. Frequency of References to Slaves in Fasi Family Legal Documents. 75

Figure 4. Offical Annual Population of Fes 1921-1960. 115Figure 5. References to Former Slave Wives and Concubines. 243Figure 6. Legal Recognition of Children. 245Figure 7. Housing Inheritance for Slaves and Former Slaves. 260Figure 8. Frequency of References to Slaves from another Generation in Fasi

Family Legal Documents. 271

Table 1. Official Annual Population of Morocco 1921-1960. 114Table 2. Official Estimates of the Working Population of Fes Medina Organized by

Class. 117Table 3. 1938 Five Fasi Family Budgets. 122-124


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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The questions forming this PhD dissertation emerged from my long interest in and experiences

with Afro-Maghribi expressive culture and the historical construction of slavery in Morocco. I

the early nineteen-nineties I became enthralled by a particular form of Moroccan music—

Gnawa—and pursued information about its performers and practitioners, eventually writing an

MA thesis about the form. While undertaking this research, I came to increasingly question

historical assumptions and representations surrounding Gnawa music and its performers,

deciding to further explore Afro-Maghribi history in Morocco. My pursuit inevitably led tohistorical questions of slavery and abolition, the focus of this PhD dissertation.

Gnawa music and related North African forms have long presented highly recognizable

examples of Afro-Maghribi culture. One popular myth— or at least a distorted and incomplete

historical representation— woven into the promotion, socialization and consumption of the

Gnawa form as it underwent expanded commoditization and festivalization, gaining wider

national and international recognition (particularly from the early nineteen-nineties onward), ha

been the notion that the Gnawa were the descendents of slaves captured in the 1591 Saadian

transaharan military expedition. This historical account of the Gnawa form is readily disputed

by the various comparable North African forms beyond the plausible impact of Saadian

Morocco’s imperial presence in West Africa. From the Fezzan in Libya to Tunisia and Algeria

there were and continue to be Afro-Maghribi-based forms and practioners of “Gnawa” musical

culture. While the history of these cultural forms and their particular relationship to slavery

remains unclear, durable and vague historical assumptions are maintained through a traditional


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generalized intellectual de-emphasis reflected in a lack of scholarship from which to address th

significant reality of human geographical blackness in the Maghrib.

Though widely known of and readily conceded to have an historical role, my initial

investigations uncovered little conceptual or historical clarity concerning Afro-Maghribi

contributions to North African history. Well beyond the scope of any single event, the vast

temporal and geographic history of the trans-Saharan trade networks entail essential features of

Afro-Maghribi related migrations. Furthermore, blackness across the longue durée of North

African history encompasses even more complex dynamics than the challenges of retracing and

assessing the historical migrations of West African slaves and their descendents in the region. Ithe longue durée of regional interaction and color, in addition to pre-Saharan population factors

are those of the Saharan world and its fringes, of which “haratin” communities within North

Africa comprise an important example.1 To be certain, multiple factors call for a more inclusive

and nuanced treatment of neglected and closely intertwined dimensions of North African histor

otherwise dominated by attention to Arab and Berber peoples, rendering an insufficient

recognition and reconstruction of this regional and inter-regional heritage.

As my continued survey of this problematic area made me cognizant of its daunting

breadth, I sought to establish relevant questions with which I could undertake manageable

research. My pursuit of severalras l’khite(the loose head of threads) in this process led me to

the pivotal historical context of slavery, and very specifically a focus upon the end of domestic

slavery in the city of Fes. In the early nineteen-nineties I began traveling to Morocco as a

merchandise buyer for a London-based instrument manufacturer. Summertime travel and work

1 For a concise summary of the historical problems raised by the term Haratin, see Rita Aouad-Badoual, “Esclavage et situation des “Noirs” au Maroc dans la première moitié du XXe siècle”in Les relations transsahariennes à l'époque contemporaine - un espace en constante mutation (Paris: Karthala, 2004).


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in several Moroccan locations gave me opportunities to pursue my interests in Gnawa music an

further my acquaintance with the country’s divergent socio-economic landscapes. Once during

lunch with a Professor from Meknes I accepted his invitation to visit Fes. That afternoon we

drove directly to the palatial Dar Mokri in the Fes medina. In retrospect, it is clear that my

entrance into the enormous, ornate, declining and outright empty interior implanted the space

within my larger curiosities. At the time I wondered how my observations of the power relatio

among domestic servants and the nouveau riche Moroccan elite of Rabat connected to the

interior surroundings of zelij work and architectural detail which evoked historical differences

and uncertainty for me. My slow walk throughout the rambling rooms of the long structureeventually translated into my questioning what the dynamics had been within slave owning Fas

households, how the Fasi elite and the domestic slaves and servants who worked within such

houses had lived their lives, and what changes their descendants had lived through. I came to

wonder what historical forces had swept through what clearly had been until recently a way of

life which confidently projected itself as fully developed, all encompassing and stable— What

happened to this internal world? How had this household functioned? Had slaves worked in the

household? Who were they and what were their experiences? Though at the outset such

questions seemed disparate from my Afro-Maghribi concerns, they nevertheless continued to

prove evocative and constructive points of return for approaching slavery in Morocco.

Several years later, with the generous support of a Fulbright-Hays doctoral dissertation

research award as well as a research grant from AIMS and various awards from Indiana

University’s history department, I began to fully operationalize my research interests. My

preliminary bouquet of proposed questions— stalwartly themed around furthering our

knowledge of Afro-Maghribi cultural production and the end of slavery— again forced my


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return to sorely needed foundational historical research. As I confronted the practical difficulti

and real complexities of reconstructing the end of domestic slavery in a single relatively small,

but truly dense urban location, Fes as a specific case study, posing great challenges yet offering

immense promise, was progressively settled upon and reckoned with. A schedule initially

budgeted for three months gathering data within Fes as one location among several others came

to require over two years of daily work.

An extended period of constant sustained efforts to track down archival and legal

documents eventually produced sources which were steadily relevant or even indispensable,

occasionally fascinating or even inspirational, and at times pierced into the heart of questions propelling my research. Ultimately however, informants and their shared oral histories made th

most meaningful personal and intellectual impact of all the features and experiences of this

doctoral research. Perseverance and good fortune helped me through the arduous process of

developing interested and competent contacts. Acquiring useful interviews grounded my

understanding and approach to an interconnection of relevant topics in surprising and evermore

realistic ways. My efforts to reconstruct the end of the social institution of domestic slavery an

the slow and generally unclear forms of related social change that occurred were repeatedly

refuted, refined, thrust into perspective and enriched by my slowly growing relationships and

greater access to oral histories reflecting intimate personal perceptions and experiences. As gre

as my initial attraction had been to sweeping, interdisciplinary and eventually comparative

scholarship, my certainty became even greater that advancement upon the kinds of research

questions which had long stirred and sustained my interests demanded highly original and

detailed foundational historical work.


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I hope that any readers of this study might recognize ways in which larger research

interests I continue to share have been channeled into the present treatment of particular and

worthy questions within twentieth-century Fasi and Moroccan history. It is also my hope that

this study serve as a contribution to areas deserving further painstaking research including the

reconstruction of slavery along with its end and aftermath in North Africa, a more

comprehensive twentieth-century history of Fes and Morocco, the development of Afro-

Maghribi historical and social scientific concerns, and diverse comparative possibilities. Along

with my nod to the custom of an author’s complete claim of responsibility for the doubtless

persistence of faults and shortcomings within their work, it must be duly acknowledged that fulcredit for this dissertation extends far beyond myself. In addition to the abovementioned

institutional sources of financial support, I acknowledge my lifelong appreciation to all the

friends, associates, contacts, family and strangers within and beyond academia who contributed

to the formation, undertaking and completion of this study.

Introductory Historical Background

For many readers some broad relevant historical background will be useful at the outset of

considering the original historical detail developed throughout this dissertation. Contemporary

Morocco occupies the most western lands of North Africa, bordering the Mediterranean sea,

Atlantic ocean, and Sahara desert in an immediate geographical proximity to Iberia. The

complex long-term overlap and interaction among peoples within this area is often glossed over

with vague imagery of a crossroads producing a cultural and human geographical mosaic.

Indeed there are multiple dimensions to consider. In the larger Mediterranean world of North

Africa prior to Muslim presence, the control of Mediterranean cities and coastal plains from

Alexandria to the Straits of Gibraltar historically changed hands many times among Africans,


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Middle Easterners and Europeans including Berbers, Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, and

Byzantines. To the south, the Sahara was a well traveled “sea of sand” throughout and followin

the gradual desiccation of its prehistoric pasturelands which culminated around 2000 B.C.E. In

the first centuries C.E., the well-suited camel became extensively used for Saharan trade

transport allowing for caravans and oases marketplaces to link settlements and cities across

North Africa with those throughout the sahel (Arabic for ‘coast’) region stretched along the

southern end of the desert from present day Senegal bordering the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan (fro

the Arabic “bilad al-sudan” or “land of the blacks”) bordering the Red Sea.

A major organizing force within Moroccan history was initiated with the westwardMuslim expansion across North Africa. It is often noted that Islam moved westward across

North Africa at a remarkable pace, advancing into Spain by 711. A more inclusive description

takes into account that religious conversion and Arabization moved at a more gradual pace than

Islamic military and political control. Local non-Arab peoples were variously incorporated

throughout this expansion, the majority of which initially remained non-Muslim subjects. Fes

itself was founded in 789 by Middle-Eastern-Arab-in-exile Idris I, amid Arab military expansio

and Berber resistance and alliance, intermarriage and conflict. Though Arabization in North

Africa still continues to unfold in an historical patchwork of reciprocal adaptation, conformity

and contention, it can be broadly noted of this early period that sedentary coastal Christian

Berber peoples converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language and Arab culture more

rapidly and thoroughly than traditionally resilient Berbers who were nomadic or lived in remote

mountainous areas. It should also be noted that in its first centuries Islam spread throughout

North Africa in very different forms. The Sunni caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty (C.E. 661-75

centered in Damascus, then relocated and continued from C.E. 755 to 1042 in Cordoba, Spain)


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and the ‘Abbasid dynasty (C.E.750-1258 centered in Baghdad) were challenged by Khariji

Muslims who rejected the Middle Eastern caliphate entirely and Shi’i Muslims who sought to

reformulate the rightful basis of Muslim authority and leadership. In the eighth century Khariji

refugees from the Middle East aligned themselves with Berbers who resisted Arab dominance

and founded small communities in North African mountains and Saharan oases. A network of

Khariji merchants traded extensively across the Sahara desert and along the Sahel regions of

West Africa, often introducing Islam through their commercial contacts. By the eighth and nint

centuries Muslim merchants from the Sahara were exposing and converting West Africans

through commercial interactions in the interregional trade in gold, slaves, salt, cloth, horses andother goods.

A relevant middle historical period of North and West African Islam was initiated by

Western Saharan Berbers. With the influences from the Islamic presence in regional commerci

centers, religious pilgrims returning from Mecca, and North African Islamic scholars, they

became highly organized around a strict adherence to the Maliki Islamic legal school and

founded the Almoravid empire (1042-1148) stretching from Mauritania to central Spain and int

western Algeria. However, unyielding Almoravid doctrines along with military controls were

challenged by another Berber initiated movement from southern Morocco, the Almohads (1148

1269). The Almohads briefly controlled the entirety of Muslim Spain, Tunisia, Algeria and

Morocco, promoting a broad and influential “Unitarian” understanding of Islam across the regio

which helped consolidate Sunni religious authority with strong local influences. By this time

period the Maliki legal school became the North African norm, and within societies of North

Africa, urban Islamic universities such as Al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, which were dedicated to the

study of Quranic scripture, Islamic law, the natural sciences, philosophy, history, and geography


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co-existed alongside Islamic sufi associations (tariqas) often centered around rural lodges

(zawiyas) and the shrines of patron saints, as well as the predominate popular cultural traditions

and beliefs entailing local, regional, and pan-Islamic rituals and celebrations.

During the periods of these empires and of subsequent Moroccan states, domestic slaver

was integral to the ordinary functioning of Moroccan elites and fell heavily upon enslaved dark

skinned and Sudanese-origin peasants. Though regional forms of “slavery” predated the Islam

presence in North and West Africa, being of a non-Muslim status and the stipulations of Islamic

law came to have considerable and enduring meaning within the reproduction and social

organization of the institution. Enslavement and slavery long continued alongside the Trans-Saharan transmission of values and knowledge. West African Sunni legal thinking adapted

strong influences from the same Maliki school predominate in North Africa, developing local

legal traditions which combined community involvement and customary officials with the

concepts and administration of Islamic law. By the sixteenth century hand-written books, often

on paper from North Africa, were greatly valued trade items, with rare works being more

expensive than the average price of a slave. In 1594 leading Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba w

captured by Moroccan troops who had invaded the region and was forced into exile in Morocco

for over a decade. Ironically Ahmad Baba himself was a great advocate against the enslavemen

of West Africans, arguing forcefully for the basis of their recognition and freedom as fellow

Muslims.

European-Moroccan involvements, both indirect and direct, define another complex and

extended layer of historical influence within Morocco. The geopolitical turns of the Reconquis

led to the migration of many Sephardi Jews from Portugal and Spain into Morocco, where they

rapidly established communities. Another byproduct of the European expansion of this era was


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the establishment of various Iberian coastal colonial footholds such as Ceuta and Mellila. Yet,

must be noted that despite the closeness to Europe, repeated military incursions remained of

limited impact. Rather, as experienced elsewhere, deepening Moroccan ties with and eventual

dependence upon expanding European economic interests led to the culmination of more

profound political consequences. When the current Alaouite monarchy consolidated political

control of the Moroccan state (Dar al-Makhzan) in the mid-seventeenth century with the initial

support of a black slave army (Abid El-Boukhari), trade with Europe remained restricted. By t

mid-eighteenth century commerce and finance had grown significantly, leading to the 1760

construction of the port city Mogador, and an overall increasing presence of commercial agentsand European consuls.

European imperial pressures became more dramatic over the course of the nineteenth

century. In 1830 when the French began decades of violent colonization in Algeria, the core of

Algerian self-defense was politically and militarily organized around a zawiya controlled by

‘Abd al-Qadir (d.1883). Official Alaouite support for the widely admired ‘Abd al-Qadir ended

following a military excursion from the French in1844 at the Battle of Isly, after which the

Moroccan state re-charted its lasting course of self-preservation. While French colonists worke

systematically for much of the nineteenth-century to disintegrate the political potential of

Algerian tariqas, they remained popular and often transnational networks. One such tariqa, the

Tijaniyya, was founded by Ahmad al-Tijani (d.1815) of the western Algerian Sahara and

extended an influence far across West Africa; Al-Tijani was buried in Fes at what continues to b

a major center for pilgrimage from Tijaniyya Muslims.

Amid decades of Spanish, French and eventually German efforts to extend their

influences within Morocco, Alaouite monarchs preserved their political independence into the


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twentieth century. The Dar al-Makhzan responded to combined external and internal pressures

including fears of disgruntle Berber peoples, through costly attempts to modernize and reform

the military and economy while not altering the socio-political and religious basis of their powe

within Morocco. In this context of limited reforms, there was no intension to dismantle the

ruling elite’s basis or symbols of power, and the slave trade and institution continued

unencumbered within Morocco. When economic and military dependence led to a formal

Protectorate relationship in 1912 with the lion’s share of Morocco falling under French authorit

and a far smaller area ceded to Spain, domestic slavery remained an acknowledged and routine

feature of Fasi life.Alongside the lofted principals of the French Revolution which led to the abolition of

slavery in 1794, nineteenth France remained divided and often officially accommodated slavery

This is reflected in the legal reinstitution of slavery in 1802, followed decades later by the legal

emancipation of slaves in French colonies in 1848. To be certain French colonial expansion in

North and West Africa in the nineteenth century did not axiomatically end or even substantially

challenge slavery. In fact, in the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of Europe

colonial ruleincreasing numbers of slaves labored within West Africa to produce the resources

and cash crops sought by industrial European powers that condemned though vastly expanded

the use of slave labor. Prior to the Protectorate, Moroccan merchants principally from Fes, took

advantage of expanded French controls within the Senegal River and Niger Valley to establish

coastal West African business networks. These limited channels of expanded North and West

African regional interconnections coincided with the late nineteenth century increase in slave

sales within Moroccan markets. Though it was a pillar of rationalization within the mission

civilisatrice and the Algeciras Conference (1906) referred to the need to end slavery within


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Morocco, French colonial policies and practices of accommodating Islam and aligning with

elites fostered and supported an operational acceptance of domestic slavery.

The unheralded and dateless end of domestic slavery in Fes marks a major shift in

modern Moroccan history, one which remains to be fully conceptualized and recorded. Despite

historical assumptions and historiographic conventions, the end of this social institution was no

the direct legal byproduct of a colonial tutelage. In 1956 the Moroccan monarchy and the

national economic elite emerged reformulated from Protectorate colonialism with a stronger,

more centralized state and basis of economic power than prior. Within and surrounding the dee

continuities of power relations and identities comprising domestic slavery, there was also anirrevocably reinvented world— there amid multiple shifting dimensions of Moroccan social

change domestic slavery ended as an institution. In recent decades important efforts have been

made to overcome the tendency of Moroccan historiography to uncritically reflect elite Arab

historical dominance. Despite the a notable entrance of histories dedicated to emphasizing

Moroccan Jews, Berbers, women and peasants, as mentioned, many complex and important

contexts of the Moroccan past have yet to be historically synthesized and written. What follow

is an effort in that direction.

Questions, Approaches and Relevant Literature

The central question of this study—how did domestic slavery end in Fes?, has been

approached through treating numerous related themes of inquiry including how did the

Moroccan encounter with Protectorate colonialism influence this social institution?, how were

forms of social, economic and legal change implicated in this historical shift?,andhow was the

end of domestic slavery experienced by slaves and their children? In turn each of these themes

has entailed many further questions addressed and developed throughout the chapters of this


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dissertation, which are outlined below. In order to further clarify the significance of the central

and subsidiary directions undertaken within this research, as well as how they have been

approached, it is useful to review relevant literature.

Amid Morocco’s overlap of historiographic worlds— including African, Arab, Berber,

Mediterranean, Muslim, and Saharan—the Atlantic border provides an ironic reminder of the

often arbitrary conceptual emphases and geographic practices among which regional and world

historical paradigms develop and function. Recent decades of growth in the historiography

addressing slavery and the African diaspora have been dominated by literature deemed to

comprise an Atlantic system or an Atlantic world, yet North African slavery and its relatedcontexts have remained scarcely integrated or investigated.2 In part this intellectual tendency

2 This underrepresentation is noted in Bernard Lewis’ Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), which organized and narrated a pioneering aggregate of primary sources within limited and problematic assumptions tied to agrandiose scope and a full disengagement from historical constituencies. John Hunwick’swritings have brought similarly rigorous textual attention, contributing translations of relevanttexts focused on Islamic Africa. Hunwick has repeatedly asserted the import of color and slavein North Africa and published the call for further study of these themes within North Africanhistory, most recently in a co-edited compilation of sources reflecting the “Mediterranean landsof Islam”. Yet Hunwick’s scholarship has focused neither on relevant in-depth case studies norupon developing the carefully grounded historical reconstruction and interpretation of theseconcerns. See “Black Africans in the Mediterranean World: Introduction to a Neglected Aspecof the African Diaspora,” in Elizabeth Savage ed.,the Human Commodity: Perspectives on theTrans-Saharan Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1992), “Islamic Law and Polemics over Raceand Slavery in North and West Africa (16th-19th Century)” in Shaun E. Marmon ed.Slavery inthe Islamic Middle East (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999), and John Hunwick andEve Troutt Powell eds.The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam(Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002). Indeed, a key point about the state of such broadlyrelevant scholarship is that the prospering reiteration that, “(f)or every gallon of ink that has beespilt on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its consequences, only one very small drop has beenspent on the study of the forced migration of black Africans into the Mediterranean world ofIslam,” (Hunwick 2002, p.ix), has itself remained couched among generalized questions andapproaches. The lack of in-depth case studies has been consistently accompanied by a strongtacit or direct tendency toward a sweeping frame of reference and/or a recurrent dominantorganizational feature which strives to examine and illuminate an assumed essentially “Islamicslavery”. The relevance of this point has been recognized in a self-reflexive manner by William


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was an unconscious or uncritical bequest of modern era European geopolitical and racial

approaches to slavery and sub- versus supra- Saharan Africa. Despite the fact that much of West

Africa shares greater direct historical connections and commonalities with the Kingdom of

Morocco than the Kingdom of Lesotho, ideological projections and excessive divisions have

rendered the rich intersections, multiplicities and contingencies of North African history

unnecessarily disconnected and betwixt and between. Throughout long periods of the expandin

and contracting reach of empires, systems of belief, and trade networks, slavery formed a

charged and complicated area of historical relations among and between North and West Africa

Our fuller foundational understanding of such interactions and the character of their contexts anconsequences requires further specific reconstructions, resources and collaborative scholarly

interests needed for example, to produce a Braudelian quality of historiographic synthesis for th

Saharan world.3 While denoting grand requests, colossal authorities and teaming masses of

scholars might also exceed the limitations of Braudel and tendencies within large-brush-rendere

regional historical understandings through further establishing the undeniable basis of an

expanded representation of North African history within Mediterranean and early modern

Gervase Clarence-Smith who recently noted in the Envoi to his sweeping Islam and the Abolitionof Slavery (India: Oxford University Press, 2006), “(d)eeper studies of religious attitudes towardservitude and abolition are urgently needed, because the subject has generated so much vulgar polemic,” (p.233). In fact, serious case studies related to slavery, its end and aftermath in theArab and Islamic world have been slow to emerge amid the burgeoning early twenty-firstcentury vested political and military interests in Islam. Perhaps a recent book by Ehud Toledananticipates a shift in its effort to engage concerns of contemporary scholars working on slaverywithin the history of Muslim communities through bringing detail and nuanced focus to the largterrain of nineteenth-century Ottoman slavery intent to recover “voice”, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).3 Drawing heavily on British archival sources John Wright has produced an ambitiouscontribution, seeThe Trans-Saharan Slave Trade(London: Routledge, 2007). For a discussionuseful for comparing the development of the field relative to the Indian Ocean world see GwynCampbell,The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass,2004).


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Atlantic worlds. Beyond representing a sheer fantastic wish list, these vast and at times comple

lacuni, areas of de-emphasis, and ambiguous boundaries form the world historical backdrop

against which the present study joins the relatively few historical studies of slavery in Morocco

Proceeding from chronological and thematic interests periodized by the seventh-century

Islamic presence in North Africa onward we begin with the work of Fasi historian Abdelilah

Benmlih. Benmlih’s pioneering doctoral research drew very heavily upon Islamic law in a fairl

straightforward manner to examine slavery in North Africa and Andalusia, particularly during

the eleventh to thirteenth-century period of the Almoravid dynasty, and became the basis of thre

recent publications in Arabic.4

His first book provides a relatively brief overview of socialhistorical conditions of slavery within the Almoravid Empire. His second book is a similar

survey, with a somewhat widened period and themes, and his most recent related publication is

an extension of themes based upon his dissertation research. Benmlih’s interpretative

approaches have steadily fused a range of concerns and insights culled from medievalist

scholarship in Europe and the Arab world with the broader conceptual and geographical studies

of slavery. For example, his interest in Charles Verlinden’s historical reconstruction of slavery

within Europe is paired with gleanings from Claude Meillasoux’s anthropology of slavery based

in West Africa. His scholarly contributions to expanding the study of Moroccan and North

African slavery would be greatly complimented by a dialogue of further related study of this

time period as well as works which bridge the significant gaps prior and following his period of

interest.

4 Abdelilah Benmlih,Zahirat al-riqq fi al-Gharb al-Islami, (Rabat, Morocco: Manshurat al-Zaman, 2002), Al-Istirqaq fi al-gharb al-Islami bayna al-harb wa-al-tijarah (Oujda, Morocco:Jami‘at Muhammad al-Awwal, Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-‘Ulum al-Insaniyah, 2003), Al-Riqq fibilad al-Maghrib wa-al-Andalus (Beirut, Lebanon: Mu’assasat al-Intishar al-‘Arabi, 2004).


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Allen Meyers’ doctoral research on the ‘Abid al-Bukhari produced another highly

innovative and provocative contribution to an underrepresented related area of study— military

slavery in Morocco.5 Meyer’s examination of the history of Moulay Isma’il’s 'Abid al-Bukhari

troops, formed in the later part of the seventeenth-century and remaining directly consequential

for the Maghzan until the mid-eighteenth-century, entails an important attention to ethnicity.

Using a core of evidence from Makhzan sources he establishes convincingly that these “black

troops” were enslaved from within Morocco, drawn particularly from haratin communities,

overturning assumptions that such slaves were Sudanese born.6 Along with ethnicity and color

within Moroccan history, his work also attempts to contextualize slave soldiers as a significantvariable within larger Moroccan political contexts during the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries.

Several scholars deserve mention for their attention to sources reflecting the historical

contention stirred amongst Islamic religious authorities concerning Moroccan enslavement.

Arabist John Hunwick has examined in detail and published translations of broadly relevant

primary sources, for example concerning Ahmed Baba’s forced sojourn, and produced writings

which reflect a mixture of awareness, interest and caution concerning color and slavery in North

5 Allan R. Meyers "The 'Abid 'L Buhari: Slave Soldiers and Statecraft in Morocco,"(Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1974). Also see “Class, Ethnicity, andSlavery: The Origins of the Moroccan 'Abid,”The International Journal of African HistoricalStudies, (Vol. 10, No. 3. 1977), “Slave Soldiers and State Politics in Early 'Alawi Morocco, 1668 – 1727,”The International Journal of African Historical Studies, (Vol. 16, No. 1. 1983).6 Meyers analyzes European sources to suggest that 18th and 19th century writers embellishedearlier sources and provide our first record of the claim that the slaves of the Moroccan ‘Abidarmy were originally “Bambareens” or from the “Coasts of Guinea”. Such an embellishmentwould coincide with these and other terms and categories circulating within the trans-Atlanticsystem. 1977 (p.430-431). Elsewhere (2002) I have expanded upon this line of interpretation positing “Bambara” as an historical continuum of varied identities and identifications inMorocco concerning the Gnawa.


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African history.7 Aziz Abdalla Batrán, wrote an essay in John Ralph Willis’Slaves and Slavery

in Muslim Africa which addresses the issues confronting the ulama and haratin in Fes during the

Moulay Isma’il period.8 More recently Moroccan-born American Professor Chouki El Hamel

has added awareness to these themes and drawn upon sources reflecting the religious debates a

the awkward social and legal status of the haratin during this time period and beyond.9 Another

notable feature of El Hamel’s ongoing research interests and interpretive orientation is the effor

to illuminate and widen connections among interest areas of color and social stratification in

Moroccan history through engagement with current dialogues within the African diaspora

literature. This has brought attention to Moroccan and North African experiences of “internaldiaspora” within the Atlantic-centered diaspora literature.10

The nineteenth-century has received the most well-known treatment of Moroccan slaver

in Mohamed Ennaji’sSoldats, Domestiques et Concubines.11 Ennaji’s pioneering contribution

draws upon a vast and rich selection of Moroccan and European archival materials, including

those gathered from his rural sociological background in collaboration with seminal scholar Pau

Pascon (a Fes-born Frenchman who adopted Moroccan nationality after Independence). The

central feature of the study is Ennaji’s effort to broadly survey how slaves were a part of

7 See 1.8 "The 'Ulamá of Fas, Mulay Isma'il, and the Issue of the Haratin of Fas," in John Ralph Willis,ed.,Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, Vol.I: Islam and the Ideology of Enslavement ,(London: Frank Cass, 1985) pp.125-59.9 “`Race’, Slavery and Islam in the Maghrebi Mediterranean Thought. The Question of the Haratinin Morocco” in Journal of North African Studies (London: Frank Cass, Vol. 7, No. 3,2002) pp.29-52.10 Michael Gomez’s recently included Chouki El Hamel’s essay “Blacks and slavery inMorocco: the question of the Haratin at the end of the seventeenth century” in his edited volum Diasporic Africa: a Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2006) thus stretching thedominant attentions of African Diaspora studies.11 Mohammed Ennaji,Soldats, Domestiques et Concubines: l'esclavage au Maroc au XIXe siècle (Casablanca, Maroc: Editions EDDIF, 1994).


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nineteenth-century Moroccan life, noting a wide range of occupations. Although the work is

ostensibly about soldiers, servants and concubines, rural workers are also given considerable

mention. Numerous estates with dozens of slaves and several estates with hundreds are noted,

including the house of Iligh, near Tiznit in southern Morocco where seven-hundred slave

households were claimed by the family.12 In fact it is crucial to note of the period he covers, a

remarkable rise in world historical terms of the overall volume of slaves sold in Moroccan

markets in the early 1890's exceeded six thousand slaves annually, as corroborated by urban tax

records.13

This dissertation shares principal concerns with Ennaji’s work, but differs repeatedly inapproach, leading to particular differences in emphasis and interpretation. Ennaji’s

interpretations are consistently driven by an interest in contextualizing and illustrating the

variations of slavery throughout Morocco. In one example of an area of methodological and

interpretive difference, Ennaji shows how concubines have been treated well– “(m)any of these

women enjoyed love, admiration, and the highest consideration in their master’s houses.”14 This

enduring generalized image will be challenged and detailed in this study. In another theme in

which the present study differs in emphasis, the violence of slavery is situated amid broader

12 Ennaji, 1994 p.8. It should be noted that in addition to domestic labor in this region, anenduring plantation system which once produced sugar through slave labor was located insouthern Morocco. See Paul Berthier,Un Episode de L’Histoire de la Canne a Sucre: Les Anciennes Sucreries du Maroc et leurs Reseaux Hydrauliques. Etude Archeologique etd'Histoire Economique. (Rabat: Imprimeries Françaises et Marocaines, 1966). Paul Lovejoyrightly suggests several regions where slavery appears to be have been linked to overall levels o production in surveying “the Frontiers of Islam, 1400-1600,” pointing to the need for furtherevidence. SeeTransformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Second Edition)(U.S.A.: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p.24.13 See Daniel Schroeter, "Slave Markets and Slavery in Moroccan Urban Society," inSlaveryand Abolition: The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, edited by Elizabeth Savage, (London: Frank Cass & Co. 1992).14 Ennaji, 1994 p.25. Here he also notes in passing the extreme image of slaves having theirhands kissed, which risks distorting the accuracy of his survey.


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social forms of abuse. As suggested, “…in 19th c. Morocco violence spared neither slave nor

free… it was everywhere… husbands mistreated wives, landlords –sharecroppers and bosses

their employees.”15 This line of argument culminates in the conceptualization that,

…in nineteenth-century Morocco, no sharp line divided freedom and slavery. A fine setof gradations marked the continuum running from one to the other even if theytheoretically remained polar opposites.16

This perspective is succinctly echoed through his sweeping generalization that “liberty had its

slavish side.”17 Interestingly, Ennaji also summarily deemphasizes the overall historical

significance of color in Moroccan slavery.18 Though it strongly seems that these interpretive

lines of emphasis are intended to distinguish the specific dynamics of Moroccan slavery fromdominant models of the Atlantic world, Ennaji does not directly engage this literature or fully

clarify an orientation. In the present case study of slavery within Morocco there has also been

intention to directly develop a sustained engagement with the Atlantic literature, which has bee

a function of the development of an analysis of this historical context based upon its own terms

even so, the evidence and contexts considered in this research repeatedly resulted in analytical

differences. Where Ennaji works through a panorama of examples to confirm variations, a maj

feature of this study is its effort to engage variation in order to describe dominant patterns and

experiences. An example of the consequences of Ennaji’s emphasis upon extreme

contextualization, or what is perhaps best understood as a deployment of relativity within his

analysis, he asserts a blanket rejection to any possibility of ‘primitive rebels’ or ‘organic

intellectuals’ among the former slaves turned bandits. He argues in fact that many times master

can ‘seem almost unfortunate,’ and reads bandit actions as personal matters,

15 Ibid. pp.28- 30.16 Ibid. p.81.17 Ibid. p.57.18 Ibid.p.60.


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It would be difficult to argue that all these individuals were really victims of society,avenging the humiliation of their condition through crime, since neither poverty norconsciousness of the inhumanity of their status grounded their career choice. Rather,they were men at arms, accustomed to power and used to looking down on the masseswith the parvenu arrogance of the servant.19

The present study has approached the “arrogance of the servant” as a point of entry and inquiry

not as a conclusive distinction. Ennaji’s study represents a decisive— though in some ways

inchoate— turning point with major limitations regarding the fully detailed, clear historical

reconstruction of slavery and slave’s lives within nineteenth-century Morocco. His contextual

approach often confronts and complicates reductive images and assumptions surrounding varie

forms and contexts of slavery throughout Morocco. However, his orientation is combined witha broad survey approach, sparse sustain attention to relevant processes of historical change, and

deliberate commitment to outlining slave’s roles in society and how slaves were understood by

non-slaves while not pursuing documentation and interpretations of nineteenth-century

Moroccan slave’s experiences and perspectives, all of which represent areas of limitation.

Several historians have researched and addressed slavery in twentieth-century Morocco,

offering texts which have served as a reference point.20 Moroccan scholar Rita (Ghita) Aouad-

Badoual’s graduate work in France included archival work in Aix-en-Provence and Nantes,

Morocco and Mali to produce a Memoire de Maitrise, on Moroccan slavery between 1880-1922

and a dissertation on French colonization and Moroccan-West African relations. She has

published two important though brief essays outlining themes of the end of slavery in Morocco

The first of these brings particular attention to the role of the Protectorate, while the more recen

represents widened interests including a cautious engagement with the historical consciousness

19 Ibid p.44.20 Edouard Michaux-Bellaire, “L’esclavage au Maroc.” in Revue du Monde Musulman, VolumeIX, Paris: Éditions E. Leroux, 1910.


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of color in Morocco.21 Aouad-Badoual’s Moroccan-wide and often tentative interpretations have

increasingly found relevance in the questions posed within the wider literature concerning

slavery, and in articulating questions and areas of inquiry for further research. Several features

of her work, particularly her provocative essays have been expanded upon in this dissertation.

American Madia Thompson has represented her extensive doctoral research drawing upon

interviews and archival work related to slavery in Southern Morocco in a dissertation ostensibly

framed by “modernization” within the colonial period and attempting to address a complex

regional context of rural social transformations including the end of slavery.22 Sudan born

American Professor Ahmed Alawad Sikainga has published a brief article representing hisresearch into Moroccan legal archive sources concerning the end of the domestic slavery

nationally.23 Like Aouad-Badoual’s work his piece attests to the very gradual changes in slavery

in Morocco that occurred during and following the Protectorate. A distinguishing feature of hi

piece— which has been expanded upon here— is his attempt to critically consider slave and

former slave women’s expressions of historical agency in representing their own legal interests

Canadian Ann McDougall has conducted oral historical research in southern Morocco and

published a path breaking article which examines identity and very personal meanings within th

transformations entailed beyond slavery in the postcolonial era.24 An overlap of provocative

21 Ghita Aouad, “L’esclavage Tarid Au Maroc Sous Le Protectorat,” Revue Maroc-Europe : Histoire, Economies, Societes, vol.1 (Rabat, Maroc: 1991), Rita Aouad-Badoual, (Paris:Karthala, 2004).22 Madia Thompson, "Modernization, Slavery, and the Transformation of Social Hierarchy inSouthwestern Morocco, 1912-56." (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 2005).23 Ahmed Alawad Sikainga, “Slavery and Jurisprudence in Morocco,”Slavery & Abolition (19(2), 1998) pp.57-72.24 E. Ann McDougall, “A Sense of Self: The Life of Fatma Barka”Canadian Journal of AfricanStudies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, (Vol. 32, No. 2, 1998) pp.285-315.


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issues which McDougall has addressed repeatedly surfaced and developed through the ongoing

oral histories collected and analyzed in this study.

The relative paucity of literature addressing slavery in Morocco is underscored by the

vast and often rich literature concerning numerous other variously related contexts, as is given a

brief outline here. Throughout the research process and during the analysis and writing, such

works, however flawed, proved entirely invaluable for developing a thorough historical

framework with which to organize the gathering and interrogation of evidence. Before

considering wider areas of Moroccan scholarship and thematically relevant studies of slavery

including other locations, we first turn to pre-Protectorate and Protectorate era predominatelyFrench writings focusing on Fes. As Edmund Burke has recently noted of francophone North

African intellectual history, “In 1900, France possessed little reliable ethnographic knowledge

about Morocco other than elite gossip and anecdotal details. Thirty years later, an extensive

colonial archive on Moroccan society had been compiled.”25 He rightly interprets that in the

process there was an invention or projection of “traditional Morocco” which had a pervasive

influence upon Protectorate era attitudes and the dialogical construction of a political and social

status quo, which in turn entailed Moroccan domestic slavery. Orientalist French scholars’

dominant and calculated preoccupations with Islam, the elite, and amassing insights into politic

and economic life facilitated a matter of fact acceptance of domestic slavery as an enduring and

embedded feature of the Moroccan social order. Joining the widening, ongoing stream of

traveler’s accounts were the academic writings to emerge from the 1903 founding of the Missio

25 Edmund Burke III, “The Creation of the Moroccan Colonial Archive, 1880-1930,” History and Anthropology, (Volume 18, Issue 1 March 2007) p.1. For an earlier representation of some ofthese ideas see Edmund Burke III, “The Image of the Moroccan State in French EthnologicalLiterature: A New Look at the Origin of Lyautey’s Berber Policy.” in Arabs and Berbers, ed.Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1972).


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scientifique du Maroc, the Archives marocaines (1904), and the Revue du monde musulman

(1906), within which Fes became a focal site for varied European intellectual interests, resonan

across areas of mutual overlap among scholars, policy makers and inquisitive entrepreneurs.

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century English and French pre-Protectorate era

travel writings and scholarship concerning Fes anticipated and shaped how slavery within Fes

and across Morocco would be approached, understood, responded to and represented in

specialized and popular writings of the Protectorate era.26 Certainly from the time of Pierre

Loti’s highly descriptive account in Au Maroc (1890), recurrent orientalist attitudes toward

slavery in Fes can be found, appearing similarly in Eugène Aubin’s Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui (1904) and Gabriel Veyre’s Au Maroc. Dans l’intimite du Sultan (1905).27 To the extent to

which travel writings were to remain distinct from the increased presence of systematic

scholarship such as undertaken by Edouard Micheaux-Bellaire, a shared feature can be found in

that any expected impulses toward an abolitionist condemnation of domestic slavery were mute

by the greater force and proximity of both general political concerns and specific ethnographic

details.28 It has been succinctly noted that, “By 1912 the picture was all but complete: thereafter

the literature largely fills in the blanks, adding detail and colour, rather than developing new

categories of analysis.”29 Thus in the heart of Protectorate era the brothers Jerôme and Jean

Tharaud’s extended period of observations in Fes ou les bourgeois de l’Islam produced

26 See for example P. D. Trotter,Our Mission to the Court of Morocco in 1880 under Sir John Drummond Hay (Edinburgh, 1881) and Stephen Bonsal, Morocco as it is. With an Account of SirCharles Euan Smith’s Recent Mission to Fez(London: Allen, 1893).27 Pierre Loti, Au Maroc (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1890), Eugène Aubin, Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui (Paris : A. Colin, 1904), Gabriel Veyre Au Maroc. Dans l’intimite du Sultan (Paris: LibrarieUniverselle, 1905).28 See for example Edouard Micheaux-Bellaire, Description de la Ville de Fès (Paris: Leroux,1907).29 Edmund Burke III, “Fes, the Setting Sun of Islam: a Study of the Politics of ColonialEthnography,” Maghreb Review (Vol.2 IV, 1977).


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extensive, matter of fact, even cynical passages about the centrality of domestic slavery.30

Likewise, slavery is again observed repeatedly from the vantage of a selective relativism in wha

still remains the single most important and rigorous effort of Fasi history and urban studies—

Fes avant le Protetorate was defended at the Sorbonne in 1949 by Roger Le Tourneau, some

four years after having joined the Centre des Hautes Etudes d’Administration Musulmane as an

administrator and researcher.31 A capstone to this tradition came after independence with the

German scholar Titus Burckhardt’s Fes, Stadt des Islama work which marshaled an even greater

orientalist and ahistorical gilding of the medina, resonant within the ongoing campaign for the

preservation of the Fes and its traditions,Historically, slavery can be explained by the law of war of nomadic and semi-nomadic people, for whom it was not possible to keep prisoners in camps. When the prisonerswere not ransomed by their relatives, they remained slaves of their captors until theycould redeem themselves by their own work, or until their master accorded them theirfreedom, an act which the Koran and the sunna declare to be particularly pleasing to Godand which constitutes an expiatory sacrifice for a multitude of sins of omission. It wasonly later, with the development of city culture that the obtaining of slaves in BlackAfrica became an end in itself, while the struggle for the propagation of the faith servedas a pretext. Since, however, the Islamic perspective does not permit the despising of anrace, slavery in Islamic countries never assumed the brutal character which it had inancient Rome and, in the nineteenth century, in the southern states of America. The slavwas never considered as a mere ‘object’; if he were treated unjustly, he could ask the judge to order his master to sell him. As a human being, he had a right to respect; the facthat he was not free, did not itself contradict his humanity, since all men are the ‘slaves oGod’.32

This approach was an effective apology for full resignation from and thorough disengagement

with ongoing historical realities and lives, propagating a profound ignorance of and

disconnection from actual lived turbulent contemporary historical realities, deemed far less real

30 Jerôme & Jean Tharaud, Fez,Ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1930).31 Roger Le Tourneau, Fes Avant le Protectorat: Etude Economique et Sociale d'une Ville del'Occident Musulman (Casablanca: SMLE, 1949).32 Titus Burckhardt, Fes, Stadt des Islam (Olten and Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Urs Graf Verlag,1960), quoted from William Stoddart trans. Fez: City of Islam (Cambridge, U.K.England: Islamic Texts Society, 1992) p.106.


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or valuable than the pursuit of grand “traditions”. The lasting intensity of the historical force o

orientalist mystifications is registered through such literary and academic efforts in which

slavery was repeatedly obscured and rationalized while being plainly acknowledged.

Other Moroccanist urban and rural studies concerned with socio-economic changes in

various locations leading up to and during the colonial era have specifically informed the lines

inquiry taken here concerning European involvements. Daniel Schroeter has provided a detaile

study of Essaouira covering four decades of the forces of nineteenth-century European expansi

with careful attention to the roles of Jewish merchants.33 Kenneth Brown’s study of the former

crafts center of Sale was innovative in its tracing the forces of change and perseverance among both formal social and economic structures and identifiably distinct patterns of social

relationships throughout the nineteenth-century until the watershed Berber Dahir of 1930.34

Stacy Holden has advanced an important dissertation emphasizing issues of shifting socio-

economic formations and negotiations of power and tradition between Fasi tradesmen and the

monarchy, also considering the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century.35 Other scholarship

examining Protectorate urban development have proved highly informative. Yvette Katan has

studied the northern crossroads of Oujda specifically probing how its social formations were

recast during the Protectorate period.36 Janet Abu-lughod’s deeply penetrating and standard

setting work Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Moroccodocuments the politics of urban planning and

33 Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).34 Kenneth L. Brown, People of Sale: Tradition and Change in a Morocco City 1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).35 Stacy Holden, “Modernizing a Moroccan Medina: Commercial and Technological Innovationat the Workplace of Millers and Butchers in Fez, 1878-1937,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,Boston University, 2005).36 Yvette Katan,Oujda, une ville Frontière du Maroc (1907-1956): Musulmans, Juifs etChrétiens en milieu colonial . (Paris: Histoire et Perspectives Méditerranéennes. Editions L’Harmattan, 1990).


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development. Though her study examines colonial era transformations, her analysis so clearly

unveiled the ramifications of urban power relations so as to have undeniable significance for th

post-colonial Moroccan elite.37 Andre Adam sheds light upon Casablanca’s marginality prior to

the early twentieth-century, underscoring that contemporary Casablanca is inseparable from the

protectorate and Moroccan proletarianization.38 Such works aided in formulating an informed

examination of the multiple, complex dimensions of twentieth-century Moroccan urban

historical changes Fasis lived through.

Often directly and nearly always indirectly tied with urban transformations within

Morocco, many very outstanding rural cases studies have greatly increased our knowledge ofregional experiences and national-scale historical reconstructions. Several works have been

influential for connecting processes of urban change with larger regional and national forces. I

southern Morocco Protectorate era scholar Robert Montagne produced an influential, detailed

examination of socio-cultural contexts through which political power underwent

transformations.39 Paul Pascon also offered key contributions to the study of Moroccan

peasantry, with remarkable insight into the Haouz region.40 David M. Hart was another

exceptional scholar of rural Morocco, setting a significant standard with his rigorous analysis an

37 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1980).38 Adam, André, Histoire de Casablanca, des origines à 1914 (Aix-en-Provence, France: Gap,Éditions Ophrys, 1968). For a very different analysis of the city see Susan Ossman, PicturingCasablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City(Berkeley: University of California Press,1994). Also see Hassan Radoine, “An Encompassing Madina: Toward New Definition of City Morocco,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2006).39 Robert Montagne,

(Groupe Chleuh) (Paris: F. Alcan, 1930).40 Paul Pascon and Mohammed Ennaji, Les paysans sans terre au Maroc (Casablanca, Maroc:Editions Toubkal, 1986), also see Paul Pascon, Ed. John Hall, Trans. C. Edwin Vaughan andVeronique Ingman,Capitalism and Agriculture in the Haouz of Marrakesh (U.S.A.: Routledge:1986).


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ethnographical research examining Rifi and Southern Moroccan culture and history.41 Directly

focused on the national scope, Will Swearingen’s study of the history of water access, irrigation

and dam construction is particularly exciting due its interest in the continuities from the

Protectorate developmental policies to the first decades of independent Morocco.42 The temporal

focus of this study investigates a similar periodization spanning from the introduction of the

Protectorate era to the first decades following independence.

Acceptable surveys of Moroccan power relations broadly conceived, and their historical

changes within the twentieth-century, have been a major challenge for Moroccanist scholarship

within history and social sciences. Two major historigraphical reference points have been provided by Abdallah Laroui and Jamil Abun-Nasr, both of whom are occupied with much

longer-term historical transformations.43 Laroui proposed challenging interpretations about the

nature of synthesis among Morocco’s historical encounters with colonial forces, and provided a

very suggestive perspective for periodizing Moroccan nationalism within the nineteenth-century

Perhaps balking at conceptual directions represented by Laroui’s scholarship for being an overl

Cartesian pursuit, by contrast Abun-Nasr stresses an entirely empirical, detailed approach

spanning across North Africa. In addition to their shared emphasis upon the state, there are

several highly notable complimentary studies to the extent of either scholar’s treatment of

twentieth-century history and the Protectorate period. Richly anecdotal and at times scathing o

41 David M. Hart,The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif: an Ethnography and History (Tucson: Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Universityof Arizona Press, 1976),The Ait 'Atta of Southern Morocco: Daily Life & Recent History (Cambridge, U.K.: Middle East & North African Studies Press, 1984).42 Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages: Agricultural Dreams and Deceptions, 1912-1986 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).43 Abdallah Laroui, trans. Ralph Manheim,The History of the Maghrib: an Interpretive Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, Jamil Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).


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French colonialism, Jacques Berque’s classic study of the interwar period is intimately well

informed about socio-political currents and shifts across the sweep of the Maghrib.44 Albert

Ayache contributed foundational studies of Moroccan labor history, and numerous scholars hav

offered major works on Moroccan nationalism.45 More recently, indispensible works by Daniel

Rivet and C.R. Pennell each fuse their respective impressive archival experiences into

subsequent surveys, both of which strive toward a synthesis of a vast range of secondary source

in an effort to further assemble and clarify challenging general features of modern Moroccan

historical transformations.46 While Rivet’s research focused initially on documenting and

interpreting with intense detail the historical role Resident-General Lyautey played withinProtectorate history, and followed with a thematically organized survey rich in interpretive

suggestions; Pennell initially focused upon the complex historical implications of a nationalist

movement and war in the Rif and followed with a remarkably lucid chronologically organized

survey. Though both historians concentrate upon political history they are fairly successful at

attempting to offer consistent wider insights into Moroccan social and cultural changes.

Adding to the disciplinary concerns of history many scholarly works have been

provocative for approaching power relations within the end of slavery in Fes and larger

Moroccan history. John Waterbury’s classic study of the Moroccan elite remains dated yet not

fully superseded, and contains many remarkable historical insights into the national role played

44 Jacques Berque, Le Maghreb Entre Deux Guerres (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1962).45 See Albert Ayache, Le Mouvement Syndical au Maroc (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1982), CharlesJulien, Le Maroc Face aux Imperialisms: 1415-1956 (Paris: Editions J.A. 1978), John P.Halstead, Rebirth of a Nation: the Origins and Rise of Moroccan nationalism, 1912-1944.(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967).46 Daniel Rivet, Le Maroc de Lyautey à Mohammed V: le Double Visage du Protectorat (Paris:Denoël, 1999), C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2000).


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by Fasis.47 Through distinct projects and approaches beyond the present scope of discussion

Abdellah Hammoudi, Dale Eickelman, Clifford Geertz, and Vincent Crapanano have presented

engaging conceptualizations of power relations in which attention to belief practices and socio-

political order are mutually illuminating, and frequently suggestive for historical interpretation.48

Lawrence Rosen has offered another resonant anthropological contribution in considering the

social construction of kinship and other organizational elements of Moroccan realities.49 Also it

must be noted that a major shift away from the symbolic and semiotic interpretive lens has take

place in the last two decades, bringing significant attention to women and gender.50 Stalwart

scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi has been generationally succeeded by a growing number ocritical scholars and women activists.51 Earlier straightforward feminist claims have been built

47 John Waterbury,The Commander of the Faithful: The Moroccan Political Elite. (New York:Columbia University Press, 1970). Also see Pierre Vermeren’s inspired comparative history of North African schooling and the elite, La Formation des Élites Marocaines et Tunisiennes: des Nationalistes aux Islamistes, 1920-2000 (Paris: Découverte, 2002).48 See Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: the Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledgeand Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Moroccan Notable (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1985), Clifford Geertz, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society:Three Essays in Cultural Analysis(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and IslamObserved: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1973), Vincent Crapanzano,The Hamadsha; a study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) andTuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1980).49 Lawrence Rosen, Bargaining for Reality: the Construction of Social Relations in a MuslimCommunity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),The Anthropology of Justice: Law asCulture in Islamic Society(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989),The Culture of Islam:Changing aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).50 See the overviews “North Africa: Early 20th Century to Present,” Donna Lee Bowen and“History Middle East and North Africa,” Mary Ann Fay in the ambitious Encyclopedia ofWomen & Islamic Cultures Joseph Suad, General Editor (Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2003-).51 A leading scholar and activist based in Fes, who is representative of this generation and itsgendered turn is Fatima Sadiqi. For an example of her ranging work seeWomen, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Boston: Brill, 2003). For an earlier perspective also see Amal Rassam,“Women and Domestic Power in Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, (Vol.12, No. 2., 1980). Some of the relevant contours of these debates are outlined by Alison Baker


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upon by attention to the more multifaceted dynamics of gender within varied social and religiou

movements, and their respective, collective interests and pursuits of influence upon laws and th

state, particularly concerning the Mudawana, or family code of Maliki law in Morocco.

Beyond scholarship directly addressing Morocco the most relevant literature influencing

the questions and approaches of this study directly concerns slavery. Several landmark African

historical studies have examined the roles played by colonial authorities in influencing

emancipation processes. Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn produced an important monograph

detailing the gradual twentieth-century end of slavery in Northern Nigeria.52 Their collaboration

represents both scholars’ long-term research, providing well conceived and detailed analysis, particularly provocative for their engagement with issues of accommodation and social change

within colonial rule. More recently Martin Klein published the generous and in many regards

invitingly incomplete culmination of over two decades of research, examining colonialism and

the end of slavery in French West Africa.53 Benjamin Bower’s doctoral dissertation drew upon

extended archival work in Aix-en-Provence to examine the theme of colonial policies and

practices toward slavery in Algeria.54 Frederick Cooper’s writings on East African plantation

slavery, slavery and Islam, and approached to slavery within African studies have formed

repeatedly useful reference points, helping frame and treat varied questions in the field, with

in Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women(Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1998).52 Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn,Slow Death for Slavery: the Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria 1897–1936(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).53 Martin A. Klein,Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998). Also see Klein’s volume co-edited with Suzanne Miers, Slavery and Colonial Ruin Africa (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999).54 Benjamin Claude Brower, “A Desert Named Peace: Violence and Empire in the AlgerianSahara, 1844-1902,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 2005).


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particular nuance concerning labor.55 Also among the many important and helpful models for

addressing the end of slavery are volumes edited by Klein and Howard Temperley,56 and works

by Ehud Toledano and Y. Hakan Erdem concerning the Ottoman world,57 Sikaninga’s work on

colonial Sudan,58 and Urs Ruf’s impressive research in Mauritania.59 Where several of these

works have drawn variously upon colonial and European documentation, this study attempts to

push for further legal and oral historical evidence.

Finally, thematic attention to women, gender and marriage within slavery has been

suggestive for this study. For example, Sandra Lauderdale Graham’s study of the transitional

lives of of slaves and servants and masters in late nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro illuminatesawkward and unanticipated paths toward freedom.60 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s classic

scholarship on plantation households in the southern United States offers an intimate and

suggestive consideration of various women’s positions and psyches within complex domestic

55 See Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1977), “Review: the Problem of Slavery in African Studies,”The Journal of African History (Vol. 20, No. 1, 1979), pp.103-125, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Laborand Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925. (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1980), “Islam and cultural hegemony: the ideology of slave-owners on the East Africancoast,” in Paul Lovejoy, Ed.,The Ideology of Slavery in Africa, (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1981),Co-author with Rebecca Scott and Thomas Holt, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor,and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2000).56 Howard Temperley Ed., After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents (London: FrankCass, 2000), Martin A. Klein Ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).57 Ehud R. Toledano,Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1998), Y. Hakan Erdem,Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise,1800-1909. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).58 Ahmad Sikainga,Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1996).59 Urs Ruf, Ending Slavery: Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 1999).60 Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: the Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).


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spaces, identities and power relations.61 Verena Martinez-Alier’s pioneering treatment of color

and class within Cuban marriage strategies and patterns, and Winthrop Wright’s solid analysis o

the subtle historical dynamics of color in Venezuelan national identity offered useful reference

points.62 Also the well-conceived comparative scholarship on women and slavery in the New

World represented in the edited volume by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine served

as an initially useful orientation for posing questions and locating sifting patterns of Afro-

Maghribi domestic life, engendered social spaces, and engendered forms of labor.63

Sources and Methods

In further introducing this dissertation, it is useful to note the archival and oral sources it has been based upon and how relevant research materials have been worked with in analyzing the

end of domestic slavery in Fes.64 Several archives were extensively consulted in France and

Morocco. The Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN) offered the most

abundant wealth of records in France for developing an overview of the Protectorate and served

as a major window into pertinent features of colonial encounter examined here. The Centre

d'études d'histoire de la Défense (CEHD) at Château de Vincennes - Pavillon du Harnachement

held numerous helpful materials, particularly for shedding light on early Protectorate military

relations in Fes. Despite the ostensible advantages of official French archival holdings, greater

61 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of theOld South within the Plantation Household(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1988).62 Verena Martinez-Alier , Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society(New York: Cambridge University Press,1974), Winthrop R. Wright,Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990).63 David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine Eds., More than Chattel: Black Women andSlavery in the Americas(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996).64 The Fes al-Bali and Fes Jadid areas of the medina were overwhelming organizational focus othis study, with no considerable focus given to either the Palace or the Mellah (Jewish quarter) omedina.


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budgets and larger facilities and staff in no way superseded the accessibility and helpfulness of

the Bibliothèque Générale et Archives du Maroc (BGAM) in Rabat for the end results of this

study. Ironically, the lion’s share of the documents which turned out to be the most valuable fo

reconstructing the relationship between the Protectorate and slavery were found inadvertently in

my first afternoon working there. After having made myself a fixture there, several mornings I

helped cleaning women as they mopped, moving unmarked cardboard boxes filled with

Protectorate era documents out of their way, so they could clean without getting the boxes wet,

and I could then probed their contents. The labyrinthine process of getting access to historical

legal documents from Islamic courts in the Fes medina (principally Rcif and Smat) wasultimately made possible by the dedication of an intrepid assistant and an intractable retired

notary who assisted me while these records underwent a major move to another location outside

the medina. Further access to many private and personal collections of family records,

documents, photos and material culture (often clothing), materialized and served as mnemonic

devices during the process of gathering oral historical interviews. These latter Fasi documents

proved an exciting compliment to Protectorate-sources and oral historical evidence.

The chief challenge of gathering oral historical data was to find and work with willing

and able informants. This was largely achieved through what then seemed endless social

interaction, waiting and visits to suggested friends and relatives who might offer further

suggested friends and relatives throughout the Fes medina. I almost always worked directly wi

an assistant in setting up and conducting the body of the over one hundred and twenty semi-

structured open-ended interviews which this research is based upon. I am particularly grateful

a loose network of interested, helpful and resourceful Fasi women who gradually generated

many useful contacts. In my research experience there were far more visits and conversations


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than formal interviews and it became clear that many informants appreciated knowing that

someone had a sincere interest in connecting to their lives and stories. Repeated visits often

allowed for my questions, as well as forms of rapport to develop. The majority of informants

were paid for giving formal recorded interviews, which averaged one and a half hours. Further

background details about who informants were are addressed within the following chapters.

Before describing the methods followed to address important conceptual issues which

arose during archival and oral historical research it is necessary to explain how “domestic

slavery” has been understood within this study. Firstly, domestic slavery has been understood

here as a social institution. This is significant because in the historical absence of a tenablemoment or patent periodization based on an outstanding official authority from which to

reconstruct the end of slavery in Morocco it has been crucial to evaluate and temporalize

collective social patterns alongside nuanced consideration of individual cases.

To further specify how this social institution has been defined and approached, several

features of how “slavery/slave” are understood are useful to consider. During the Protectorate

the Tharaud brothers questioned the adequate use of the term “slave,” 65 a point recently

reiterated by contemporary scholar Aouad-Badoual.66 Despite drastic, perhaps diametric,

differences in their respective historical backgrounds, these authors share concerns with the

potential limitations which the term “slave” may impose upon the Moroccan domestic context,

yet ultimately proposed no substitution.67 To an extent their concerns stem from challenges to

meaningful comparative history due to the conceptual supremacy surrounding Western

plantation slavery, however even more important for the present study is the problematic entaile

65 Jerôme & Jean Tharaud (1930) p.21.66 Rita Aouad-Badoual (2004).67 Toledano (2007) has recently advocated and employed the term “enslaved”.

8/19/2019 The End of Domestic