A Nomad in Morocco's Guir Desert
Morocco: Circa 1995
A Berber Nomad woman spots us standing on a nearby hill and runs to her tent. Most likely she is not afraid, but she is shy. She will be obliged by custom to let us enter her tent and offer us tea. Luckily, one of the men with us knew her family and her thirst for news from her relatives and friends in the village of Merzouga overcame her bashfulness. Soon she was chatting happily as she made couscous from scratch.
Couscous is pretty common now, but just in case you don’t know, it is a kind of pasta made from flour and water. The way this woman did it was to rub the flour and water into a rough, crumbly paste and then sift it. The small “pebbles” of pasta that remained in the sieve were the couscous. This was a tedious procedure as she had to repeat it over and over to get enough couscous (the Berbers call it ‘skeksu’). She did it all squatting on her heels over her worktable which was a square of woollen fabric. It was easy to see that she was getting some sand in there as well as flour and water. Desert nomads ignore sand in their food. Maybe they’d miss it if it weren’t there!
Her tent home is made of goat hair and is woven by the women of the family. It is divided into two sections: the women’s section and the men’s. The division is roughly even. The women’s part includes the ‘kitchen’. The fire is not made in the tent but right next to it and often behind a windbreak made from a tent ‘wall’. To divide the two sections, all the family’s belongings, packed in leather or woven sacks, are stacked to make a wall of sorts. The men can see the women and the women can see the men, but the men are not disturbed by the women working. They can stretch out and relax when they get home from shepherding their flocks.
Usually the babies are with the women, but often the men will take them in their arms and play with them. It doesn’t matter if the child is a boy or girl, they are loved equally by both mother and father.
Being a woman, I was always sent to the women’s side of the tent. When the men of the family were home, we stayed a long time as my guides and the nomads would talk and talk. I’d get bored and have to tell them that we needed to move on. Usually, the nomads couldn’t understand how a woman could be interrupting their conversation. I sometimes sensed a “what is this world coming to” consternation in their expressions.