Public Story
The Berber People of Morocco
Summary
This photo project looks at the Berber people who live in the villages of the Atlas mountains and, increasingly, in the urban areas, predominantly Marrakech. As life becomes harder in the mountains, many families seek a better life, and education for their children away from the agrarian lifestyle of the mountains.
Life in the mountains is hard and remote. Each village jointly farms and owns, tracts of land around the village itself. The crops include fruit such as cherries, apples and citrus but also walnuts and corn crops.
In the morning the village workers can be seen leaving at about 7 or 8am to go into the fields; they will travel with or on their mules, the main transport in the Atlas mountains. The women spend all day harvesting hay with small, and often blunt, sickles, returning at 6 or 7pm in the evening with huge and heavy bundles of hay strapped to their backs. They then prepare food for the rest of the family. Life is tough and the days are long for women.
Because life is difficult in the mountains - hot in the summer and cold in the winter - the standard of living is sparse and parents want their children to have an education so they can escape the hard manual labour here; there is a gradual exodus from the mountains to the urban areas and especially Marrakech where the population is predominantly berber. It is made up of a permanent and a temporal population with some people coming to sell their wares at the market and then disappearing until next week.
Tourism is one of the main generators for the economy and has brought an increase in living standards to the region.
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