There may be barely a thousand of them, but no one has ever counted them: the Aït Atta nomads of Morocco’s High Atlas. Twice a year, they lead their flocks between the mountains and the desert. In autumn, when the sky heralds snow, Abba Addi’s family loads the camels and drives its three hundred animals south: 250 kilometres and thirteen days’ walk over the passes, which Christophe makes with them. But the children already have one foot in the town.
“Above all an inner journey”, Christophe says of this transhumance in which, he learns at the outset, “you never stopped, except when evening came”.
In the Atlas, the Berbers count as many tribes as valleys, but “there isn’t a nomad hiding behind every sheep”.On market days, the Berber soul of the High Atlas brings together men and animals, and reminds anyone who will listen that Berber means “free man”. Ali pulls teeth there, from market to market, within fifty kilometres or so of his home; in twenty-eight years, he has extracted perhaps twenty-five to thirty thousand. He also knows the nomads, with whom he once lived as a nomad. Without him, there would be no finding the camp at the foot of the rock. He entrusts Christophe to his old friend Abba Addi, warning him: “You’ll need nomad hands.” The camp’s pillar is Addi, the father; around him are his wife Fatima, the discreet shepherdess, a son, a grandson and a daughter, Kheira. Kheira weaves the tent’s band, the hardest weaving for a nomad woman, and shows her hands, “all rough, all damaged”. The goats’ wool must be cut, washed and spun, fifty or a hundred threads lined up: ten days for a few metres. The journey doesn’t frighten her. “It’s hard for those who aren’t used to it, but me, I’m used to it.” At the end of the day, the sky in turn weaves its sheet of clouds, thunder rumbles, and Addi decides that the urgency of the sky will sound the hour of departure.
As in most Atlas markets, it is the men who do the business.
Ali and Addi have been friends for a very long time, are about the same age and, says Ali, “we used to be nomads together”.
In the tent, they are surprised that Christophe travels without his wife: “You must come with her next time.”
They must leave before the snow: when the great day comes, the family is up at three in the morning to load the camels.The camels have not been loaded since May, and they make it known. Mohamed, the son, carries the camel driver’s stick for the transhumance; the rest of the year, he lives in town. Soon the caravan takes to the track, the flock to the pastures. Three to five hours’ walking a day, at the foot of peaks over 4,000 metres; a donkey carries sixty or seventy kilos, a camel a little over a hundred, and on a donkey’s back travels a cockerel. Hammou, the grandson, asks the mountain what it can give him to eat, smokes a squirrel out from deep in the rocks and grills it. He is always the one who fetches the water, and orders annoy him: “Me, I’d like us all to be able to help each other.” Later, he wants to own his home, so that no one can throw him out. “Nomadic life is good, but there’s nothing better than a house.” And the sky, the squirrels? “That’s true, but it’s poverty too.” When evening comes, the animals are milked, and butter is churned to make the hours go by.
A Berber proverb says: “the lion fights once in its life, dogs fight every day”.At noon, camp is set up not far from a spring. The men settle where the camels have decided; for the women, the day is far from over. Bread begins with wood, which the women fetch from kilometres away, and the oven is two kilometres from the camp. Kheira kneads, her face protected by a veil, and finds that Christophe has “nothing in his arms”. The men prefer fresh bread: it is made every day. Kheira can neither read nor write; she calls her family on the phone, and the phone is also used to ask relatives or other nomads “where exactly there’s grass”. She has never seen a horse in her life. She believes in God, and sometimes asks him to let her go abroad. Her husband, she will choose in the village, “a settled man”. “Nomadic life isn’t always easy. I’m tired.” Once the bread is baked, she shares it: “It’s thanks to the two of us, together.”
The dough must rise for two hours; in the oven, the bread bakes in about two minutes, and more is made every day.
In some valleys, gathering wood is forbidden: the women who carry it back on their backs are called “the walking bushes”.Abba Addi is sixty-three and walks as if he were twenty. He leads the flock towards the Tizi-n-Igourane, a pass at 3,200 metres. Three hundred head, and he says so without fear: whoever takes on Addi will have him to deal with, but to anyone who comes in good faith he can give everything. His sons, to hear him, don’t know what they want to do with their lives. His best transhumance was in 1988, plenty of grass, plenty of water. If there were grass all year round at home, he would be unhappy not to leave any more. Leaving “is good for the mind. Me, it fills me with joy”. Then comes the Dadès Valley, and the caravan files along the tarmac of Boumalne. Under a canvas shelter, Mohamed counts what is missing: in the village you can run a shop and stay sheltered, whereas the nomad misses the market and owns nothing. “The flock, that’s no life.” He tells his parents to change trade, “but they don’t want to”. On the thirteenth day, the grass is there. Addi has his head shaved and keeps his hair in a pile: if someone stepped on it, he could get a migraine, because of the spirits and the djinns. His road, he says, is his destiny.
In Berber, the track is called “the track”, tarmac “tarmac”, and the road “the chantier”, a word left behind by the French.
The temporary shelter adapts to the speed and frequency of the moves, and to the weight the donkeys and camels can carry.
“A thief, he hasn’t got a chance with me”: Addi is not afraid to say he owns three hundred head.
“Here, you don’t kill the father to exist. You shave him close to make him last.”“To stay without travelling is to live in prison.”Addi