Eamonn Gearon If you think the world’s largest desert is an empty wasteland, then you’re in for a surprise. You’ll be amazed at the Sahara’s geographic and cultural diversity. At the empires that rose and fell there. At its vast network of trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa. And its many stories of exploration and travel. The Arabist and...
A Christmas Day hike above Imlil We left haunted Telouet in silence, to rejoin the main road and cross the mighty Tizi-n-Tichka pass before winding our way back down to the flats in search of another route that would lead us to the High Atlas village of Imlil. As is the way of sat nav shortcuts, we were slightly misled. The road soon became a single lane track hugging the side of...
Telouet, stronghold of the Lords of the Atlas It was time to leave the desert behind. We followed the route of camel caravans as they made their way from palm groves to mountain passes, up the winding valley of the Ounila, past Ait Benhaddou and a string of ruined casbahs, and into the foothills of the Atlas. Our destination was Telouet, the birthplace of the Glaoui and their base of power...
Looking back at the route we followed We would visit many other casbahs during our stay in the oasis, but none held the peace of our rooms at Ben Moro. I finally bumped into the owner of our casbah, and asked him how a Spaniard had ended up in such a remote desert place. “I found it twenty years ago,” he said. “I wanted to restore an old casbah. I’m sure you’ve noticed this valley is full...
Skoura Oasis from the roof above our rooms We found lodgings in the midst of the massive Skoura oasis, some 30km east of Ouarzazate, where we took a suite of rooms in the Kasbah Ben Moro, a mud-walled fortified 18th century dwelling surrounded by date palms that spread to the distant horizon. We walked among the palm groves, where clean alleys were bordered by hand-patted mud walls, and...
Headed into the Drâa Valley It was in the Atlas Mountains — and beyond — where we would find the Glaoui’s most enduring traces, and so we set out in a rented car and ventured into their traditional domain. I decided to start at the fringes and work backwards, bypassing their stronghold of Telouet and driving straight to the gateway of the desert. Aït Benhaddou The Drâa Valley is the...
T’hami el-Glaoui’s Marrakesh palace The dizzying chaos of the Marrakesh bazaar existed in opposition to the serenity of the riads, those old village houses that present their blank doors to the street. From the alley, every house looks more or less the same. It’s impossible to imagine the world that exists behind such plain walls: two or more stories of wandering passageways linking...
Lost in the maze of old Marrakesh The souk was an overpowering lungful of two-stroke motorcycle exhaust, human sweat, sizzling food, and the pungency of a tannery that seemed to soak into my clothes and permeate my skin as I navigated passageways clogged with bicycles, donkey carts and tightly-wrapped humans who strode with determination rather than shuffled along. For the newly initiated...
Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon in this hilarious follow up to The Innocent Anthropologist. “Returns” is a bit of a misnomer. In truth, he’d only just left. Barley spent 6 months in London upon completion of a year and a half of anthropological fieldwork among the Dowayo people, a group of mountain pagans. But he’d barely settled back into academic life when rumours reached him via the bush...
Nigel Barley was a rather unhappy “desk anthropologist” at a British university. His fieldwork-hardened older colleagues never stopped reminding him of this, because back in their day, it wasn’t enough to camp out in a library cordoned off by stacks of journals. You had to get out and live with the natives. I can relate to Barley, in a sense. Not just because I read Anthropology at uni, but...