The Zayan and 1914

At half past two in the morning on 13 November 1914, Lieutenant-Colonel René Laverdure marched almost the whole garrison of Khenifra out of the town. He left a note. He had been told twice by his commander, Lyautey, not to attack the Zayan camp at El Herri, because there were peace talks on. He went anyway, with about 1,230 men, guns and cavalry.

The raid worked at dawn. Most of the Zayan fighting men were away, the artillery hit the tents, the cavalry rode through, and the French looted the camp and took two of the chief's wives. By half past eight they were walking back to Khenifra. That is when the Zayan came. About five thousand of them gathered on the column and followed it across the Chbouka river, where the rearguard and the guns were overrun. The French formed a square. It broke. Laverdure was killed in the last assault. Six hundred and twenty-three French soldiers died that day, all the artillery and four machine guns were lost, and roughly nine officers in ten were killed or wounded. The Zayan lost at least 182. It was the worst French defeat in Morocco, and the Zayan War it belonged to ran for seven more years.

The chief was Mouha ou Hammou Zayani. Born around 1863, he had led the Zayan since 1877, when his cousin died in battle, and commanded something like four thousand tents when the war began. Each tent is reckoned at about five people. The French took Khenifra in June 1914 and found it empty; Hammou had moved his people into the mountains, and from there he fought a war of camps and columns through the Middle Atlas, the Moulouya and the Tadla. He kept Laverdure's body and the captured guns and showed them to the neighbouring tribes to bring in recruits. Three of his sons submitted in 1920. He was killed in March 1921, in a fight with Zayan who had decided the war was over, and his daughter Rabha married Sultan Abd al-Hafid. Resistance in the central Middle Atlas was put down that September. The last parts of the Atlas were not held by the French until 1934.

That is the war. The people are the Zayan, Iẓayyan in their own language, a confederation of Amazigh tribes whose land is the western Middle Atlas around Khenifra, on the Oum er-Rbia, with the Atlas cedar forests of what is now a national park to the east. They speak Central Atlas Tamazight. They were herders, and they moved: the Wikipedia entry on the people still describes two moves a year, down to the Azaghar, the lowland with the milder climate, and back up to the Adrar, the mountain, where the winters are very hard. The French occupied Khenifra in 1914 because it was the town that commanded the Middle Atlas. What the protectorate did next is on record for the Beni M'Guild next door: the agronomists who studied that tribe's herding found it barred from its winter plain after the conquest and pushed toward settled life. The Zayan's story ran on the same lines.

The rugs come after all this, and they keep more of it than they seem to.

A Zayan rug is a pile rug on a wool foundation, medium to deep, and it is almost always red. Deep madder red in the old pieces, a brighter packet red in the ones from the 1970s and 1980s, with ochre, dark brown-black and a little ivory for the drawing. The drawing is large and few: a column of lozenges, stepped diamonds, chevrons, sometimes bands of flatweave between the knotted sections. Beside a Beni M'Guild from the next valley, a Zayan is less crowded; beside a Zemmour, less busy. It is a rug that puts down three or four big shapes and stops.

Why red, and why so plain, nobody at the loom wrote down. What can be said is this. The Zayan were a tent people until the war, and a rug in a tent is a floor and a bed before it is anything to look at. Red was the dye the mountains had, from madder root grown in the valleys and sold at the souk. And a weaver who is moving twice a year has a loom that is taken down and set up again, which favours a composition that can be finished in a season and read from across a tent.

The second thing the rugs keep is the knotting itself. The war ended with the tribes held in place, the plains closed to them, and the French building roads and posts through the hills. A woman who had learnt to weave in a tent in 1910 was weaving in a stone house in 1930 and teaching a daughter who would weave in the 1960s. The rug did not change much. The red, the lozenge, the stripe of flatweave, the heavy wool, carried through from the camp at El Herri to the pieces on the market today, because weaving was the one thing in the house that the war and the roads did not reorganise.

Dealers like to say that a Zayan rug is a warrior's rug, with the red for blood and the lozenge for a shield. There is no record for that. The rugs were woven by women, for households, and the only sure link to 1914 is geography: these are the same hills, the same wool, the same families.

The town has 124,000 people now. The mausoleum of Mouha ou Hammou stands at Ben Cherro near Tamalakt. And the rugs that come down from the Khenifra souk are still red, still large in their drawing, still heavy enough to be a bed, which is what they were for.