Glaoua
The Berber tribe of the Glaoua (also Aglawou ) ruled under its leader Thami El Glaoui (1870-1956) in the first half of the 20th century large parts of the south and southeast of Morocco . The ancestral seat of the Glaoua clan was the village ( douar ) Telouet near the Tizi n'Tichka pass.
history
As early as the middle and the end of the 19th century, the Glaoua clan, an amalgamation of several Masmuda tribes or family clans, was of great importance in the large-scale south of the country, largely unnoticed and undisturbed by the Moroccan central power, which includes both the mountains of the high and Middle Atlas as well as the semi-deserts of the Sahara foreland located south of it and interspersed with isolated oases . In 1918, six years after the start of the French protectorate , Thami el Glaoui, who was born in 1870, rose to become tribal leader after the death of his half-brother Madani and collaborated with the colonial power, which granted the tribe extensive autonomy. Within a few years, Thami el Glaoui managed to expand the tribe's sphere of influence and to secure it by building numerous clay castles ( kasbahs ). The Glaoua clan also owned magnificent city palaces in the cities of Marrakech and Fez . With El Glaoui's death in the year of Morocco's independence (1956), the power of the Berber princes and tribes also ended; most of their imposing castles and splendid palaces fell into disrepair.
See also
literature
- Gavin Maxwell: Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956. Arrow Books Ltd 1991, ISBN 978-0099729006 .