Nationalism and the bled: the Jbala from the Rif War to the Istiqlal

One of the striking features of the study of nationalism in the colonial era in Morocco is the way in which the rural world hardly features in histories of the movement. Issues such as the RifWar and the Jaysh at-Tahrir (Army of Liberation), or even the Rif Rebellion, tend to be treated in isolation, not as integral parts of the overall resistance to colonialism that developed from the 1920s onwards. In part, this is the problem of the ‘subaltern’, in that the rural world has not enjoyed an autonomous historical voice in the same way as has urban nationalism. In part, too, it is due to a lack of professional interest and, until recently, access to the relevant sources. The archives of the French ‘Affaires Indigènes’ (the body responsible for rural administration after the French conquest), for example, were closed for many years. The article below is an attempt to begin the process of developing a history of rural nationalism by examining the ways in which nationalist awareness evolved in the countryside around the Jbala town of Wazzan, from the ‘primary resistance’ of the Rif War epoch to the ‘secondary resistance’ of the 1950s. It seeks to establish how a nationalist discourse was diffused throughout the Jbala region, divided as it was between the French and Spanish zones, by looking at the interactions of town and countryside and the role of markets as arenas of information exchange.