About salt caravans

In the reportage about Ousmane Dodo, I retraced in my last post, salt caravans are mentionned. They are one of the last ressources of nomads, after being one of their main wealth...

And it reminded me the impressive display of a Swiss artist, Not Vital, who spends a part of his life in Agadez. He built there many works, and developped a school and local artwork.

In an 2006 exhibition in Bielefeld Kunstahlle, I discovered "Salt", where he displayed 21 tons of salt, what a caravan brings back. And just beside, what the worth of these 21 tons in food, just a hundred kilo of spaghetti ! (Spaghetti which were sent to the country after the exhibition)

Photo found on artnet, ©2007 artnet - The art world online. All rights reserved. artnet is a registered trademark of artnet Worldwide Corporation, New York, NY.

Ousmane Dodo, doctor of the desert

Tonight on the international French TV (TV5) a reportage by Claudia and Günther Wallbrecht about a Tuareg doctor.

I was fascinated by the similarities and differences.

Many customers tols us Tazzarine and the desert around the Oasis (specially Serdrar) looks like Mauritania. I've never been there, but tonight I recognized it for true. The colors are very similar, the dark tones of the stones, that give a strange athmosphere to the landscape. Sand in yellow-ochre, but the light is somehow dimmed by the black reflection of all these stones. From place to place, a solitary tree, which is good enough to provide a small shadow shelter in the deep heat of the day.

Ousmane Dodo is a doctor who turns around this desert 10 months a year, spending very rare times with his own family. He can be up to three or four days alone, and needs to use his inherited knowledge of the desert to be able to direct himself. He went with caravans also when he was young, before being trapped in school (which is compulsory there, and nomad children are boarded in cities), and knows the real hardships and condition of life of the nomads, who trust him because he is one of them. A nomad of another kind, not looking for grazing fields for his cattle, looking for people to cure and help.

His patients don't know how to read, so he has to explain the drugs, and be simple. He often receives tablets from european people, and when he doesn't know what they are for, he looks at the latin names of the ingredients to understand the composition. He relies on drugs as well on traditionnal medecine, specially because most of the drugs, even the low priced one are too expensive. The average monthly earning in Agadez is of 30 euros per month...

Life is hard, the drought is important, and families have to move more and more to find places where they can stay a few days, maybe one week or two. Ousmane meets a clan where a young mother has lost her child, born too early, at seven month. No chance to survive for the baby, and the mother is worn out, because the family could not wait. No water anymore, and the day after they had to move again.

One child out of four, born in the desert, will die before reaching his fifth birthday...

But not everything is dark in this life.

Ousmane attends a traditionnal celebration, before the salt caravans leave for a 1200 kms over one month trip through Tenere. This is similar to moussems in Morocco, and I would love to see in Goulmine a camel beauty pageant as in Mauretania. The beasts are splendid, the men honour them, the place is out of time. Some Targui, in their best traditionnal clothes, protect themselves from the sun under modern coloured umbrellas, there is nothing but sand and rugs in the "center", nothing... but also micro, loud-speakers and an electric guitar to play the traditionnal sounds. I'm suddenly thrown back in Morocco, the orchestra of five young women singing traditionnal songs is so similar to Awach and other Berber rythms we here in the Draa valley... the rythm, the way they danse with the music, and even the voice, high and regular !

Words are different, Tamasheq is difficult to understand for a Amazight like Bilal, of a Chleuh (south of Morocco), and personnally I can't grab a word. Nevertheless, it sounds familiar. Names of places are familiar, Agadez, Aguelmane could be in Morocco.

Women are free. Women are not veiled, they can talk with men, Ousmane even explains how he met his wife : "I saw her, and I asked her if whe would accept to marry me, and then we discussed the whole night. And I was coming back and we where discussing tthe entire night, and we were making love, and I married her". Even if Muslim, women and men can have relationship before the wedding, and Targis are usually monogamist.

Two things I would retain, more than anything, because they really show how different our worlds are. Ousmane discusses with one of his friend who went to Europe "Over there, you have to pay for everything, you take the bus, you pay, and even when you park you caar you have to pay."

And his joy, before the celebration, when he can bath in the pool made by the cascade in Aguelmane. Because that happens to him only once a year to find a place with so much water. His few minutes in the water are his yearly treat....

Jewish Moroccan heritage.

A long story that started very early, around roman times.
A tradition says that the Kahina, the Berber Queen who resisted the lattest to Arabic conquest, was actually leading a jewish tribe (Kahina would be a form of Cohen). However, jews were very early well integrated in the Berber tribes in the souts, and used, for example, in spite of their dhimmi condition, to wear and use arms to defend their tribe during the permanent raids and feudal disputes. Priviledge which was totally forbidden in most of the other countries, ans specially in all Europe !
A second wave of jewish immigration came with the fall of the Cordoba caliphat, and populated for example Fez and Essaouira...

More recently, Moroccan Jews were protected during WWII, and the King gave them moroccan citizenship, to protect them, refusing that they wear the yellow star or get deported.

If many of them left Morocco during the sixties and seventies, mainly for France and Israel, there is still a community, whose best known member might be Andre Azoulay, one of the nearest King's advisors. And there are still a lot of jewish "marabouts", graves of holy men, where people come in pilgrimage.

I translate here a very interesting article from Larbi's blog, unfortunatly in French.

Jewish part of Moroccan identity is still not well known, and that's a pity. Islam and Moroccan Judaism bear many similarities (traditions, rite...) which supported in the past a beautiful jewish-muslim fusion in Morocco. Here are a few examples :


Synagogue Moïse Nahon in Tangiers.

A Ketouba : Moroccan jewish wedding contract. According to the tradition, it is written in aramaic. You can see how much it looks like the muslim wedding act : both are impossible to decipher, and signed by religious officers.
For wedding, the rite is nearly identical in both communities : Legrama (Gifts and offers), henna ceremony, zgharit and even the old fashioned exhibition of the white sheet maculated with blood to prove the spouse's virginity.


I never knew why God enforced this punishment on guys, child of a Jew, child of a Muslim, both must be circumsed, taht's called Brit Mila by the Jews, Thara by the Muslims. Calendar is quite short for the first ones, avec the ceremony must be performed by the father on the eighth day after the birth, while the lattests are not bound by a formal limit (but they must not delay too long). nowadays, Muslims and Jews cheat a little bit and delegate the operation to hospitals and doctors.


Moroccan people, jewish or muslim, are highly superstitious and fear evil spirits. Hence the Khmissa to fight bad luck and protect oneself from the eye [bad eye means evil wish, bad luck, or anything negative sent on you by other people's wish or magic]. Khmissa is, by the way, no muslim religious sign, as I often hear it in France, but a sign common to all Morrocans, independantly from their religion.


This is a Moroccan cover of a Sefer Torah, a hand written copy of the Torah, stored as a roll. You can also spot the similarity with the decorations of Mihrabs and mosque, made with coranic verse (suras)


Photos: Association of Moroccan Jews

Earthquake in Casa

Well a small one, hardly noticeable, but noticeable...

One more opportunity for Moroccans to have fun, like you can read (in french, sorry) on the blog of Mohammed El Baroudi, les tribulations d'un Marrakchi à Marrakech.

To summarize, if you don't read french, they were rumors spread by SMS, that a second quake would happen at 14h30. Which would prove (choose the right answer) :

• scientists are now really good, and are able to make very precise calculations (what a pity they had a day off for the tsunami)


• Moroccans are really good for spreading rumors


• The earthquake, being very polite, left a little note when he left : "I come back in 3 hours and a half, big hugs!"

What I prefer is one of the comments : "An earthquake never leaves, it stays ...It's a natural phenomenon. Morocccan trains also, by the way!!!"

That's so unfair, Moroccan trains leave and arrive on time... sometimes !

Repertory of Moroccan blogs

To surf Moroccan blogshpere, an very complete aggregator and excellent idea : Maroc Blogs which went directly into my favs list !

Babel, a disappointment (spoilers inside)

In December, a friend call me, and tell me about Babel, pointing that the moroccan part happens in Tazarine.

I'm a little bit surprised, I did nothing about it, a moving shooting with Brad Pitt, I should have heard of it.

I don't have time before leaving, I don't have time in Morocco, and I finally went to the movie on Sunday.

I went out with a mixed feeling, which, as you can imagine if I say so, is not fully positive.
Morocco, catastrophs are also piling up.

Two young goat keepers are shooting with a hunting riffle. This gun was sold to their father to kill the jackals, by another Moroccan who received it as a gift from a Japanese hunter.

What an effort to be able to introduce in this story the third part of the world, this Japanese and his deaf daughter walled in her silence amidst the defeaning sounds of Tokyo by night. You can appreciate the strength and meaning of the symbols, in case you did not get it, some parts of the disco scene suddenly cut the sound, to put the final point on the ideogramme !

However, except for falcon hunt (an awesome experience), I ignored that Morocco was a top level hunting resort. Last lion of the Atlas was killed in 1922, and jackals, hyenna and panthers are more than seldom and threatened of local extinction.

So, our two Moroccan kids go to the mountains with their goats, and I'm still waiting that we arrive in Tazzarine (or Tazarine as they write in the movie), because we are more in the M'Goun, or Saro or off-road in the area of M'semrir and Tamtatouchte.

And here comes the sikmeth (another arabic word in english) our two kids argue about the gun, the oldest shoots really badly, and says that the gun is wrong, the youngest shoots correctly and wants to prove his brother the gun is good, he aims the bus and shoots, nothing happens, yes it does, the bullet is somewhere near the throat of the beautiful blond Cate who was sleeping at the window.

Worse than the accident in the Tichka pass this winter !

Sorry, I can't buy it, for many reasons.

The gun is expensive. The father pays it around 500 dirhams, for poor families without regular wages like the one shown, it is a huge amount (a manual worker receives around 50 dirhams for a 10-12 hours day work), this gun is precious, and I can't believe it is trusted like that to the kids, without warning and training. Specially as the father sees that the oldest shoots really bad. And we are here in a tribe of

Berber living in the mountains, these ones who rebelled the longest, being pacified around 1935. War, feuds and what means a weapon and his dangers are still something the people know by experience. And these children are young, yes, but they live in a world where you have to kill and prepare your own meat, and not buy it under plastic in a supermarket.

They know better than our children what life and death means, and I can't believe they would act like the stupid youngs of our suburbs....

But you have to make a movie, haven't you ?

After that comes the worst.

Our bus is of course schocked anpeople ask what to do. Ouarzazate is too far away, 4 hours drive, no hospital nearby, the bus driver offers the shelter of his home in Tazzarine, the bus makes a U-turn and heads to Tazzarine (wo we were more in the area of Alnif, and our goat keepers in the Saro).

So we reach Tazarine, at some point of time a sign says to turn left (eh ? Tazarine is on the main road). We see the entrance of Tazzarine, this I know, with the way leaving on the left to our doyar, and on the right the teleboutique (small shop where you can phone), often closed, at the foot of the hill with the old fortified tower on the top.

Tazarine and its palm grove

That's all we'll see of Tazzarine in the movie.

Instead of heading ahead to reach the center (where you have the tank station, the hotel, the caidat, and a little bit further away the big hotel with its swimming pool, that you reach in five minutes), the bus crosses a village of small house with flat roofs hanging on the slopes of the mountain, on a small road without tarmac, just like a berber village in the mountains. We see passing by women dressed... not like the women of Tazzarine, but like Berber of the mountains (do you feel I'm repeating myself a bit ?) or heavily veiled like Arabic women.

A woman veiled with the Arabic way in Marrakech

In the South, the clothes are still very traditionnal, and specially for women. When you really know the country, you can recognize their village (and hence their tribe) the way they dress. Women of the Draa valley have large skirts, a headdress of bounty colors and a large black cotton shawl embroidered with gaudy wool. When you see a woman plainly veiled from the top of the head to her shoes in a long heavy black veil without decoration, you can be sure she belongs to the few Arabic population, not the the Berber.

Woman of the Draa valley (in Agdz)

So we're in Tazzarine, there is no tarmac because someone decided to remove it, and just for the occasion, many women from different villages of the area decided to have a walk in the village. Come on !

Finally, the bus takes on the right (where you have actually a mountain in Tazzarine) and climbs.

Tazarine is a village in the Draa valley. Old houses are in the ksours, a kind of fortified village with very narrow streets, often covered, where such a bus would never ever pass. The houses in the ksour are over several levels, and they are not separated one from the other, like shown in the movie. And the very few houses built on the highs are modern ones, made of concrete.

Finally the poor woman is laid in a house, on a ground just covered with a small rug. It's hot, the sky is cloudy, the other tourists believe in an attentat, are scared and want to leave. Brad Pitt try to convince them to stay, the bus could be of any use (I still wonder which one), and he finally runs to the only telephone in the village, to try to get in touch with his sister, in the States, and have her manage everything, "call the embassy, they can find us, we're in Tazarine, take care of the kids..."

Even,... even if there was not an impressive quantity of teleboutiques (phone cabins) in Tazzarine...
Even... if the story happens before ADSL and Skype...
Do you really believe a Moroccan bus driver, in charge of a full Pullman bus, and without a cellular phone ?
Do you really believe in a Moroccan village without a cellular phone ?

I don't. And if you believe it, you've never been to Morocco.

The story becomes more and more irrealistic, the so-called sole ambulance (actually, we have two ambulances in Tazzarine, and two nearby) does not arrive, without us knowing why, and the scared tourists leave in the bus while Brad Pitt is making his phone call. Here also, I can't believe it. It's totally unamerican.

For the ambulance, we'll learned at the end of the movie that the embassy did not want to use the it, because it was Moroccan, and wanted to have them taken away in helicopter (like in Iran), and Moroccan authority did not want to open their sky to an american helicopter.

I bring to the attention of the scenarist that Moroccan army, Moroccan emergency services and international emergency companies like Europ Assistance have available a certain number of helicopters, and that, in any case, nobody would ever leave a wounded woman bleeding and risking her life in a place like depicted in the movie - and even in Tazzarine - for more than one day before help arrives. Moroccan civil services can be surprising, but they have, as Americans, a good sense of priorities.

(writing that I find it so stupid I really have to check on Babel's website, yes, it's for more than a day... )

And, cherry on the cake, the suture episod... Cate is bleeding, her wound must be stitched, and the bus driver looked for a doctor. The only doctor in Tazzarine... which will be a vet (and an old man, you see, not the style to have learned his tradein Casablanca's university). He will make the stitch with a big needle hardly sterilized on the flamme of a lighter, with a thread not so clean, which you don't want to imagine where it was before.

Nowadays, only the most remote places in the mountains have no nurse. In Tazzarine, not only have we two ambulances, we also have, permanently, a nurse, and there is a doctor. Nurse whom I met last time I was there. And who uses the most sterilized material, for example for the circumcison !

I agree, in a way I'm nitpicking. I focused on Tazzarine, because I was told the movie took place here. Instead of Tazzarine, it would have been a small village lost at the end of a track, in Saro or Jebel Kissan, I would haven't been disturbed by all these details.
But that story does not make sense either. It is impossible to bring such a Pullmann bus in such a place, so remote places at the end of a few off-road drive.

That's a small Berber villge in High Atlas

I can't have an enlightened opinion on the plausibility of the japanese part, I don't know this culture, I might be surprised by things which are possible...

In a way, it is a pity to remain outside of a story for such details. The purpose of Babel is not to describe Morocco, it is to show, in all parts of the world, people isolated in their sufferings and problems, at the same time very far away one from the others, in different situations, and at the same time very near and similar (well... if I understood correctly). But the film speaks (and not so well) of a place I love, it uses the name of Tazzarine, it pretends to show the life in this village, and what he shows is false. Would it have been so difficult to take another name ? Even to invent one ?

Tazzarine is already not so well treated in Lonely Planet and other guides, who pretend there is nothing to see... if it presented like a middle of nowhere, without ambulance, doctor, hotel, cyber...

On the other hand, one thing I really love was the photo. Sets are splendid, and, to fit with the dark mood, the sun is away. Landscapes, under this heavy blanket of clouds, are muted, red, ocher, dark, and splendid. Our country is beautiful under the sun, and beautiful also without sun...

Palm grove in Skoura

And I'm obviously not the only one to think so ! See here