A Zemmour Tale
This story is a work of fiction inspired by my research into the history of the Zemmour tribes of Morocco.
While based on historical facts about their culture, independence, and struggles, I've taken creative liberties with characters, events, and certain customs to serve the narrative. The Zemmour tribes were indeed known for their fierce independence, the Thada ritual did exist, and they did resist French colonization, but the specific characters and many scenes depicted here are fictional creations.
This story represents my personal journey to connect with a heritage that exists largely outside of written history.
…The old man's fingers traced the faded emblem on the coin, a mounted warrior with raised sword encircled by strange letters.
"What does it say?" I asked.
"ⴰⵣⵎⵎⵓⵕ" he replied. "Zemmour = The olive"
He turned the coin over in his weathered hand. "My grandfather gave this to me when I was your age. He said it would help me remember."
We sat beneath the twisted olive tree at the edge of Khémisset, the afternoon sun warming us as I typed his words into my laptop. For three months, I had been recording the old man's stories, a journey back to my own roots, a search for the history that school books never taught me.
"But there are no records of Zemmour coins" I said, still skeptical despite growing up on these lands.
The old man smiled. "Not everything true is written down, Son. Not everything remembered was ever recorded."
He looked at my laptop screen where we had saved our progress yesterday. "Now, where were we?
"The battle against the Beni Ahsene," I said. "When Aït Zouggouatt took the Mamora forest."
He nodded, eyes distant. "Ah yes. The Sultan himself had to go around our lands after that. Too afraid to cross directly." Pride flickered across his face, as if he had ridden alongside the warriors two centuries ago.
Maybe, in some way, he had.
I stare at my computer screen, cursor blinking at the end of this paragraph. I have spent months researching my own people, the Zemmour, pulling threads from colonial archives, translating fragments of oral histories, studying carpet patterns and folk songs for clues about my ancestors whose story exists mostly in the spaces between official histories.
How do I write about people who didn't leave written records of themselves? How do I capture the essence of those who defined themselves precisely by what they refused to become?
I look at the artifacts arranged on my desk: a replica coin based on descriptions from elders, a small vial of olive oil from trees near my childhood home, photographs of Amazigh carpet patterns my grandmother once wove. Tangible anchors to my past.
I begin typing again.
The tale of the thada ritual came next in our interviews. The old man described how Zemmour enemies would become brothers by sharing a meal mixed with mothers' milk.
"My grandmother told me about the last great thada" he said.
"After a blood feud that had claimed twenty men, the Aït Ouribel and Kabliyine tribes met at the shrine of Sidi Ali. The women brought their babies and exchanged them during the ceremony, each nursing the other's child."
"Then they collected milk in a wooden bowl and poured it over couscous. Everyone ate together, and when it was done, they gathered all the men's right shoes into a pile." He chuckled at my confusion.
"They matched shoes randomly, pairing men from opposing sides. These pairs became 'shoe-brothers,' sworn to protect each other even if their tribes fought again.
Clever, no? How can you fight a tribe when your sworn brother might be among them?"
I typed his words, pausing to look up at him. Part of me was skeptical – it almost sounded like a children's tale, too clever to be real history. But nothing in all my research, all the diplomatic treaties and agreements I'd studied, had ever mentioned such a deeply human approach to building peace. No formal accord ever mentioned shared milk or matched shoes. No Western peacekeeping strategy ever thought to make enemies into brothers.
"Did it work?" I asked.
"For a time," he replied. "Peace always works—for a time."
I pause again, troubled by the weight of responsibility. In crafting this narrative about my own people, am I romanticizing those who were simply trying to survive? Am I projecting modern ideas of freedom onto practical choices made in harsh times?
But then I remember the fire in the old man's eyes when he spoke of the Zemmour's refusal to submit to the Sultan's authority. That pride wasn't my invention. It was the ember of something real, passed down through generations—the same pride I felt when my father told me these stories as a child.
My fingers return to the keyboard.
"Tell me about the French," I said on our final day together. "Your father would have seen them arrive."
The old man's face hardened. "My father was sixteen when they came to Khémisset in 1911. He told me how they built their fortress on the hill above Ain Khmis—our spring where the Thursday market had gathered for generations."
He looked away. "Before the French, a man from Zemmour answered to no one but his tribe. After..." He shrugged. "After, everything changed."
I waited, sensing there was more.
"They tried to turn us against each other with their Berber Dahir in 1930. Separate laws for Arabs and Amazigh. Divide and rule." He spat on the ground. "But we were Muslims first, Moroccan second, Zemmour always. We fought back with petitions, protests. Three Zemmour men signed the Independence Manifesto in 1944."
He reached into his djellaba and pulled out a faded photograph. Three serious men in traditional dress and European-style jackets, standing proud.
"My uncle," he said, pointing to the youngest face. "He died before seeing Morocco free."
I studied the photograph. These were not the fierce horsemen of his earlier tales, but their descendants—men caught between worlds, adapting to survive without surrendering their core identity.
For the first time, I saw the unbroken thread connecting the warrior Aït Zouggouatt to the men in the photograph to the old man sitting before me. Different battles, same resistance.
I sit back, suddenly uncertain about my project. The story feels both incomplete and too neat, the messy complexity of lived history packaged into narrative arcs that might not have existed for those who lived them.
Even as someone born to this land, what right do I have to shape this story?
But then I remember what the old man told me on our first meeting: "You're one of us. If you don't write it, who will? If no one writes it, who will remember?"
I take a deep breath and type the final section.
On our last evening together, the old man invited me to his home for dinner. His granddaughter, a university student in Rabat, served us couscous and translated when his Tamazight became too complex for me to follow.
After dinner, he brought out a small wooden box.
"For you," he said, placing the ancient coin in my palm. "So you will remember our talks when you write your book."
I protested—such an heirloom should stay in his family.
He smiled and spoke in Tamazight. His granddaughter translated: "He says the coin was never the important part. The story is what matters. He's entrusting it to you now."
That night, as I organized my notes and recordings, I realized what had been bothering me throughout this journey. My people, the Zemmour, didn't disappear when the French conquered them. They didn't vanish when Morocco became independent. They adapted, preserved what mattered most, and continued.
Our story wasn't a tragedy of lost freedom or a simple tale of noble resistance. It was messier, more human—a continuous negotiation between who we had been and who we needed to become.
The coin sits on my desk now as I write, its mounted warrior eternally charging forward. Not a relic of the past, but a bridge to it. Not proof that the Zemmour once existed, but evidence that we never stopped existing.
The olive tree bends with the wind, but its roots hold firm. So, too, with the people who took its name.
I save my document and close my laptop. Tomorrow I will continue, knowing that the story of my people—like the Zemmour themselves—resists neat conclusions.
Some stories aren't meant to end. They're meant to be remembered, retold, and carried forward.
Like blood. Like olives.