SSHRC Project 2008-12 *

‘The Invisible People of Southern Morocco and Mauritania: the hratin

Hratin are both black and white, slave and free. In the Sahara, broadly construed to embrace its northern and southern sahelian ‘margins’ (in Morocco and Mauritania, respectively), hratin are both the living legacy of a shameful past and the contemporary voice of promised democracy. The hratin are social constructs, specific to time, place and class perspective. They are also real people whose perceptions of themselves are dynamic and volatile. Yet, for most of the world – the so-called Western as well as the culturally closer Muslim world – hratin are invisible. It is their inherent fluidity as a social, racial, historical ‘class’ that lends itself to this cultural camouflage. The principal objective of this study is to ‘remove the cloak of invisibility’ from these people, their experiences and their roles (past, present, future) in shaping social realities. The second is to show how and why history is integral to explaining contemporary struggles and vulnerabilities.

The project involved a Canadian historian with some thirty years of experience researching (archives, oral interviews, photographing family documents) in Morocco and Mauritania, and a Mauritanian ‘sociologue’, similarly with thirty years of research in the fields of historical sociology, anthropology and development, currently teaching in France. Drawing on the combined skills and experience of both, the research drew together scattered references to this social grouping in Saharan and external sources from the fifteenth- through the nineteenth centuries, combed colonial archival and published records, and finally conducted extensive fieldwork involving interviews in selected areas of southern Morocco and Mauritania to uncover the hratin evolution. ‘Hratin’, as suggested above, are neither a single nor a static social class; but because they ‘fit’ neither the upper (‘noble’), white (bidan) class, nor the lowest (slave), black (sudan) class – in spite of their predominately ‘black’ skin colour – they lie outside the traditionally dichotomized politics of the region.

As long as power (economic, political, religious) lay with unchallenged ‘noble’ classes, hratin were seen principally as extensions of these upper-class clans and families; they were not considered independent agents. But since Colonial administrations attempted to create from them a ‘working class’ to man modernizing economies, since post-independence political economies have been increasingly influenced by international migration and democratizing processes, and since climate change has inflicted, during the past few decades, major long-term droughts driving desert peoples (of all classes) out of the Sahara and into overflowing bidonvilles or onto scarce cultivatable lands – hratin have increasingly become the catalysts to social change. And the key to the politics of democratization. This was most dramatically evidenced in 2007 Mauritanian election (the first truly democratic election following on a coup-d’état in 2005) in which a hrtani ran as presidential candidate. While he did not win, the demographic dynamics of the election indicate that hartani votes were the critical decision makers. Morocco has been quieter on the election front, but the hratin in the southern regions have been no less significant in pushing for local political and economic change. This was the ideal moment to create a holistic picture of these hratin, in order to better understand these dynamics and provide both academics and policy makers with a ‘story’ they can fruitfully use.

The project ultimately generated some one-hundred interviews ‘in the field’ in Mauritania, and approximately forty similar interviews in Morocco; these were complemented by another twenty or so interviews with intellectuals, journalists and government officials commenting on their understanding of the ‘question of hratin’.

The project generated a Workshop in Paris (Sept. 2011) in which several international scholars contributed their opinions to the issues our interviews raised.

* Completed

Publications: