Against Imperial Continuity? Linking Amazigh Struggles Scheherazade Bloul

Oh poetry!
How much time do I need to warn
the herd that rushes to the summit
I have no more worries, I no longer expect the worst
Let them fall into the abyss without any rescue
Amazigh^{^[1]} poet Ali Chouhad

Tar Izli Ur Tamu / an event without its poem is an event which never happened.^{^[2]}
Amazigh proverb

Tomatoes, among other produce, were in short supply in the United Kingdom earlier this year, making corporate supermarkets limit or ration the sales of certain fruit and vegetables. To British consumers, this appears as a food crisis—a collapse of agri-systems and supply chains. To Europeans and probably those further afield, this appears as the well-deserved decay of the British empire. The UK relies on food imports, mostly from Spain and North Africa, whose regions have been disrupted by the impact of changing climate conditions resulting in crises. This looks like unusually cold weather in Spain, while in Morocco, there is severe flooding, high fertilizer prices coupled with ongoing impacts of drought and the expanding Sahara, causing crops to fail and impacting transport infrastructure. In response, the Moroccan state has reportedly barred exports of tomatoes, onions, and potatoes as it seeks to secure food supplies for its populations. Similar actions have been taken by other Global South nation-states such as Turkey and the Philippines.

Before banning the exports of its low-supply produce to Europe and the UK, Morocco banned tomato and other vegetable exports to West Africa^{^[3]} in a bid, according to Morocco’s agricultural export authority, to reduce inflation (total capitalist nonsense), when really it needed to keep food in the country to feed its population (and rightly so). Here, I’m reminded of my uncle a few years ago telling me as we visited fruit and vegetable street markets in Morocco in search of the perfect pomegranate that the produce was of poor quality by design: ‘they send all the good food to Europe’.

Similarly, we cannot ignore the symbiotic relationship, however reluctant, between states and capitalism here. It was a relationship that was given room to breathe and amplified by globalisation after the beginning of the more obvious unravelling European presence in the Global South as it scrambles to maintain legitimacy in former colonies. Morocco is acting to secure capital within a global trading system that was expanded and developed by (although it did not start with) the Western Empires. Morocco is simultaneously placing itself in the global capital market and rekindling its imperial past. This should be seen as imperial continuation in its symbiotic relationship with Europe through Spain on one side and its exploitative, extractive, and imperial relationship with Black Africa through the Sahara on the other.

Decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo, whose work centres on the global implications of colonialism and imperialism,^{^[4]} argues that the Reconquista was a key moment in the formation of European colonialism and imperialism. This violent episode where the Christian (re)conquest of Andalucía culminated in the expulsion of the Muslim Empire (with its ‘unacceptable’ acceptance of Jews^{^[5]}) from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. This process and the simultaneous impacts of a continuing Inquisition^{^[6]} played a significant role in the formation of Spain as a Catholic nation-state, but equally importantly created, or perhaps gormlessly justified, a narrative of Christian superiority and Muslim and Jewish inferiority that was developed to rationalise and validate European colonialism and conquest of the Americas. What started as a national project in the establishment of the Spanish imperial state ended with religious and linguistic homogeneity and conquest. From this standpoint, we can see the creation of a homogenous Christian nation and the narrative of its European theological and embodied superiority as central to solidifying its power as it propels itself to the conquest of the Americas and the supposed civilising mission we see during European expansionism. This narrative was used to justify the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples, among other forms of violence and exploitation.^{^[7]}

In the context of Empire, the Reconquista—the start of European expansionism and the Arab/Moorish imperial decline—can be seen as part of a broader process of European expansion and colonialism that helped to solidify the power of Christian monarchs.^{^[8]} What followed was Spanish colonisation and exploitation of the Americas and other parts of the world through the establishment and development of systems of power and domination shaped by narratives and ideologies that support and justify them. This can be seen through a prism of collapse where social, political, and ecological systems and infrastructures were systematically destroyed. From this period onwards, the development of a complex system of structures, institutions, and ideologies that work together to maintain power and control is how we can understand Empire.

Columbian exchange, agricultural capitalism, and the tomato

In the Americas, the conquista^{^[9]} (‘the conquest’, the continuation of the same event that purified and politically ‘unified’ Spain) and the following colonisation period seems a ripe point to return to our friend, the tomato. Building on the exploitation and marginalisation of non-European peoples and cultures, the transfer of plants and animals, for example, was not a neutral or innocent process, but rather one that was shaped by and reinforced existing (and continuing) power dynamics. The introduction of European crops such as wheat and sugar to the Americas led to the displacement of Indigenous agricultural practices, and the introduction of European livestock such as cows and pigs led to the destruction of Indigenous ecosystems both in the ‘new’ world (Americas and Pacific) and in the ‘older’ but known world (Africa and Western Asia). On the flipside, affluent Europeans in the formative years of modernity were experiencing a new found love of tomato sauce and chocolate, absent the bitter anxiety of collapse.

The development of agricultural production and trading was refined in the following 500 years of pillage that came after 1492, tied heavily to extractivism. This development included indentured slavery (and its trading), extractivism, Indigenous genocide, industrialisation, and more recently for the Global South, an economic (continuation of) colonisation through debt, rigged trading deals, and neoliberal fiscal policies enacted through organisations like the IMF and the World Bank, which secure Global South dependency on aid.^{^[10]}

This has been the 500-year story of imposed crises and collapses. This time, the well-to-do are feeling it. Of course that’s scary, but let’s not pretend collapse is new; it just came home to roost.

In the early 20th century, the French colonial administration in Morocco introduced tomato cultivation to boost agricultural production, as it oriented its North African colonies to be financially beneficial. Promises of riches induced French capitalists to buy up ready-to-be exploited land. Part of this meant the destruction and expropriation of communities’ lands and ways of being. These dynamics are still at play today as the Moroccan state continues to expropriate Amazigh (non-Arab ‘Indigenous’ populations) tribal lands in order to make them economically viable. These exploitable lands (like communally owned tribal areas or small-scale subsistence farms) are often in the way of megaprojects, such as commercialising the Bouregreg Valley in the capital city of Rabat,^{^[11]} housing development, or resource extraction, such as in the Western Sahara.^{^[12]} That is to say, Amazigh ways of life are in the way of capitalist Empire expansion.

The Tesco Baby Plum tomatoes that you can click and collect from the UK retailer are advertised as ‘our’ ‘hand-picked vine ripened’ tomatoes even though the produce is sourced from UK, or Morocco, or Netherlands, or Spain. The high demand for cheap tomatoes in the UK has encouraged the exploitation of seasonal workers in the tomato farming industry. These industries in Europe rely on people with precarious migration/visa status for ‘unskilled labour’, same as here in so-called australia.^{^[13]} Across the European border in Morocco, tomato farmers and agricultural workers are often subject to low wages and poor working conditions. It is women who are disproportionately affected by the capitalist time pressures faced by the industry which supplies Europe’s and the UK’s out-of-season market. Further, these internally ‘economically’ displaced women faced with poor wages and social reproductive roles as carers can find it difficult to return to their community or tribal lands. These local mechanisms are designed in such a way to keep workers close to the centres of capitalism (and production). There have been countless Marxist takes on these historical and continuing processes in the West.^{^[14]} While these readings are brilliant, an analysis of imperial continuity would allow us to see these intertwined mechanisms in order to connect our struggles beyond capitalism, beyond the settler-colony, beyond ecological collapse, to build a transnational movement to challenge empire in its entirety. In other words, to form transnational hegemonic power, in the Gramscian sense.^{^[15]}

And while we’re on the topic of agri-systems, in phosphate-rich Western Sahara, another territory once labelled terra nullius, we can see imperial expansion at play as Morocco secures resources and routes to other parts of Africa. Further, in the fallout of the Ukraine war between Russia (an imperial power) and the West, the trade disruptions of phosphates have hit the agricultural markets quite heavily. Russia is the world’s largest exporter, and most of our industrial-scale food production relies on phosphorus (a natural chemical element). Morocco is the world’s second, mining from the largest concentration of phosphorus in the world, the Western Sahara. While industrial-scale farming has become reliant on phosphates, the mining and use of phosphorus has its own ecological concerns. Recent headlines have promoted the concept of ‘phosphoggedon’, first coined to explain the hazardous potential—particularly regarding emissions—from farming causing algal blooms (evaporating methane) and water degradation.^{^[16]} As drought, desertification and climate change accelerate, water resources in the country are being diverted from their natural flows to support expanding industries such as mining, the Noor solar plant (supplying ‘green energy’ to Europe) and agricultural monocultures (supplying food mainly to Europe).

Here we can see feedback loops whereby fossil fuel and fertiliser-heavy agriculture denudes the landscapes through extraction (where the fuel and fertiliser are mined) whilst degrading productive agricultural lands and threatening them with climate change induced catastrophe, of which Saharan expansion is one aspect. States and capital/Empire have adopted a framework of replacing current fossil fuel energies with so-called clean energies. Within this paradigm, the companies linked to Empire that profited off extraction of natural resources through coloniality can continue to expand their profit margins.

In this regard the UAE, the UK, and Morocco are in the starting phases of building ‘the world’s longest sea cable’ to ‘help meet future UK energy needs’ by exploiting Africa’s riches, Morocco’s natural sun and wind. Because apparently there is no wind in the UK. These neoliberal projects further collapse communities in countries like Morocco to assuage European anxieties about the future through capitalist-backed ‘green energy’. This form of neoimperialism coupled with fortification of border regimes, particularly the Mediterranean and the two land borders in the north of Morocco, entrap people within coloniality and incarcerate Africa to its designated zone/reserve at the whim of Europe. It’s a disaster for these rural communities in Morocco, but more broadly the whole continent as imperial power finds its ways to survive ecological crises and ensure white continuation.

The tomato crisis in the UK and the fears of collapsing ‘Empire/agri-systems’ in the wake of the Brexit fallout can be seen as the continuation of 1865—the loss of the North American colony for the British—coming home to roost. In the face of these threats to imperial stability, Empire is attempting to shore up its power and stability. The latest AUKUS deal is paradigmatic of this: a strong Anglo veneer^{^[17]} for Empire in decay.

Against imperial continuity

As Quandamooka professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson (among other First Nations thinkers globally^{^[18]}) argues, Empire is as much a system of domination, as it is also a system of knowledge production. This means that the ways we understand and think about the world are deeply shaped by imperial mechanisms, and we need to fundamentally challenge and rethink these ways of knowing if we want to create a changed world.

Empire is an ongoing reality that continues to shape our relations. For example, the need to work for Britain, as a Western imperial subject, is not some abject position of the past; we can see these mechanisms at play not only in the ongoing dispossession and disempowerment of Aboriginal peoples on this continent,^{^[19]} but also through pacts and deals among multinational corporations to extract from these lands and abroad (such as in Africa, Asia, the Pacific). These pacts and deals can happen in more insidious ways between the imperial periphery of australia and the imperial centre of Europe, such as the adoption of australia’s border policies in Europe and Britain. And they can also be glaringly obvious—just look at the as-expected AUKUS deal, with all its propaganda allure. Like the case of tomato and energy supply to Europe from Morocco, these examples frame the colony as a testing ground for later measures to be adopted by the big dogs of the north, once successfully refined at the periphery.

Writing in The White Possessive, Professor Moreton-Robinson talks about the centrality of Empire in the settler-colonial project. Empire is not a past project, somehow now decontextualised and replaced by the settler-colonial present—it is the settler-colonial present, it is the structure causing it. Whiteness is modernity, is Empire.

The non-Indigenous sense of belonging is inextricably tied to this original theft: through the fiction of terra nullius the migrant has been able to claim the right to live in our land. This right is one of the fundamental benefits white British migrants derived from dispossession.^{^[20]}

My point here is to say, collapse is never felt the same by everyone in the same place, let alone everywhere. Ecological collapse is affecting everybody, but it will not naturally or inevitably be the great equaliser. Like any crisis, it is also a power struggle, and the frameworks we use to analyse this are equally important.

Moreton-Robinson’s contributions emphasise critical Indigenous sovereignty—the importance of recognising and centring the agency and resistance of Indigenous peoples in the ongoing struggle against coloniality and empire. Indigenous sovereignty is not just a legal or political concept, but also encompasses the cultural, social, and spiritual dimensions of Indigenous ways of being and knowing. The settler discourse and legal regime underpinning the australian state is based on a western relationship to earth which stems from Christian and Enlightenment understanding “in which the body is theorised as being separate from the earth.”^{^[21]} And just like the centrality of Christian narratives of superiority in early European expansionism, the Enlightenment is but a continuation and development of this earlier thinking to solidify superiority^{^[22]}. This continues to shape the ways in which settler-colonial infrastructures operate: prove your ‘ownership of’ the land (through the written word) and not to the land (through the body). But as Gaagudju elder ‘Big Bill’ Neidjie says,

“Our story is in the land … it is written in those sacred places. My children will look after those places, that’s the law. Dreaming place … you can’t change it no matter who you are. No matter you rich man, no matter you King. You can’t change it … Rock stays, earth stays. I die and put my bones in cave or earth. Soon my bones become earth…all the same. My spirit has gone back to my country … my mother.”^{^[23]}

Linking, paralleling, and connecting our movements beyond the global north

In parallel to the above, Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi calls to look to the margins, the peripheries, in order to understand Morocco.^{^[24]} This, for me, is a call to look at our often hidden or denigrated tribal ways of being and knowing from the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara, rather than in the metropolis.

Aman iman: water is life/soul. You can hear these words throughout the western parts of the Sahara (divided into several countries since the European interference carried into the postcolonial period). These words also became a motto for the Amazigh community fighting Africa’s largest silver mine in Imider in the pre-Sahara (the liminal lands between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara). Through various modes of survival beyond central power structures, with a reliance on subsistence farming, an embodiment of the land and izlan [poetry],^{^[25]} the community has long resisted various forms of collapse from its autonomous self-reliant modes of being and knowing pre- and post- the colonial period to the recent mobilisations (which have continued since 1986 when the mine went into operation) and resistance against the state and corporate power. The mine has caused an increase in adverse health conditions and cancer, environmental destruction, draining of water resources, pollution, crop failure, and livestock deaths leading to food insecurity and large-scale disruption to local geological and political systems. Using agraw, a long-used form of non-hierarchical political organising through direct democracy, where all members (including children) congregate in a circle, the community staged the largest sit-in in recent Moroccan history on Mount Alebban, protesting the mine as well as the socio-economic conditions such as lack of basic infrastructure.^{^[26]} During this period from 2011 to 2019, there was a concerted effort to link up to other Indigenous and land-based movements around the world.

These protests, as with the words of late Gaagudju Elder Neidjie, are embedded within a movement tied to the land, but not its ownership. Although popularised by Standing Rock, Water is Life is a motto shared by Indigenous populations worldwide, including on this continent. The linking here is key, it recognises parallels and forges alliance, understanding the slightly different but connected struggles against Empire. Indigenous perspectives and experiences should not be seen merely as an egregious salvation-like response to climate catastrophe because of Empire’s destruction, but rather an ongoing struggle against it and a necessary anti-colonial framework for understanding the enduring impacts of Empire on Indigenous peoples and communities. Habitually, in leftist circles we’re entrapped by analysing political processes through the lenses of coloniality and/or capitalism as isolated analytical frames, but this misses something. An imperial analysis can point to how mechanisms of power operate, often with a reliance on historical processes, of how, for example, industrial capitalism came to be. Further, it may be a way to link our movements beyond fractured single-issue framings accelerated by fragmentation in the neoliberal era.^{^[27]}

As imperial logics and mechanisms continue to impose collapse, now being felt more strongly ‘back home’, our response shouldn’t be to follow the liberal urge to stabilise the centres of imperialism. Rather, we should delink from it and organise ourselves against the centre. For example, we can turn to the ideas of internationalism (we did in the 20th century), one that has already been formed, linked through and by the struggles of First Nations and other colonised peoples.^{^[28]}

This requires a fundamental rethinking of and delinking from the history and legacy of colonialism and the development of new ways of understanding and engaging with the world that are grounded in non-Western perspectives and experiences. Equally because of the power of global capitalist hegemony, we can use that very framework to build activist infrastructures as well as solidarity and coalition networks while identifying commonalities and connections between seemingly disparate struggles.

Maybe here I can return to the conversation with my beloved uncle in the streets of Kenitra’s food market. As we passed bountiful baskets of tomatoes, I pondered to him: ‘Why do all the good tomatoes go to Europe? Is it because of the simsar (middle-man)?’ Returning my gaze and laughing, he said “you have understood well.” I had but a month earlier learned all about simsars, which are called what they are rather than for example, a real-estate agent or a consultant. “It is not just the simsar though, c’est le systeme. Why would the simsar sell the tomatoes here when he can make Euros there?”

Unite me with [Mount] Alebban,

Where the children of benevolence stand

Relieve me with a sunrise

For you didn’t create us to give up

May you rise like the moon

Glorious among the stars

Oh misery! Has God made you my companion?

But the Divine is capable of all

Misery can’t be everlasting

Our sun will surely rise one day

I walked the road, and overlooked our village

The place of my dearest ones

Tears came down my face

We climbed this mountain

To see the work that awaits when a loved one is stolen
Poem chanted by women of Imider in Amussu, a documentary on the struggle against Africa’s largest silver mine in Morocco.

Amazigh means ‘free men(or people)’ in non-Arab ‘Indigenous’ dialects of North Africa. ↑
Tar Izli Ur Tamu is also the communication of collective action around North Africa and many collaborative projects like Amussu. See Movement On Road ‘96, Amussu: participatory art and cinema as a means of resistance published on Open Democracy, 2019. ↑
Eljechtimi, A, Morocco bans some vegetable exports to West Africa amid rising prices, 2023. ↑
Walter D. Mignolo, The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options, 2011. ↑
Although a discussion of antisemitism is relevant in this historical discussion and in the present, it is beyond the scope of the article. For a discussion on the Jewish other in relation to defining Christian kingdoms and superiority see Anthony W. Marx, Faith in nation: exclusionary origins of nationalism, 2005. ↑
Similarly, a discussion on the Inquisition, starting in 1478 in Spain and in the 12^th century in France and Italy, is beyond this text but it suffices to say it was about creating a homogenous Christian nation, elements of which were copied in other parts of Europe and the Conquista (conquest) of the new world. ↑
See for e.g. Wynter, S., 1492: A new world view. In Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view, 1995; and Wynter, S, Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument, 2003. ↑
Anthony W. Marx, Faith in nation: Exclusionary origins of nationalism, 2005 ↑
The conquest of the Americas, as opposed to the reconquista (the reconquest) of Spain. ↑
Eduardo Galeano, Open veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 1997. ↑
See Amarouche, M. and Bogaert, K, Reshaping space and time in Morocco: The agencification of urban government and its effects in the Bouregreg Valley (Rabat/Salé), 2019; Bogaert, K, Globalized authoritarianism: Megaprojects, slums, and class relations in urban Morocco, 2018. ↑
See the Western Sahara Resource Watch. ↑
‘australia’ intentionally not capitalised. ↑
See, for example, EP Thompson. ↑
Hegemonic in the Gramscian sense of the word as he theorised from prison on how to build effective movements to counter authoritarianism. For a recent take see: Williams, A. and Gilbert, J., Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back), 2022. ↑
Elser, J. and Haygarth, P., Phosphorus: Past and future, 2020. ↑
See Chris Dite, Right-Wing Provocateurs Are Trying to Drag Australia Into War With China, Jacobin, 2023. ↑
See for e.g. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance, 2017. ↑
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty, 2015. ↑
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society, 2020. ↑
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty, 2015. ↑
See footnote 6. ↑
Big Bill Neidjie, in Kakadu Man, as quoted in Moreton-Robinson, A., I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society, 2020. ↑
Fatima Mernissi, Les Aı̈t-Débrouille: ONG rurales du Haut-Atlas, 1997. ↑
See footnote 1 on Tar Izli Ur Tamu. ↑
Similar to the above-mentioned tomato worker, the mine workers and their children brought in from the urban areas, are the ones that benefit. see Alami, A, On Moroccan Hill, Villagers Make Stand Against a Mine, New York Times, 2014. ↑
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else), 2022. ↑
Such as Third Worldism and Black Power movements that gave rise to a certain unparalleled internationalism, 60s, and 70s in the post-colonial period. ↑

Living on unceded Wurundjeri lands and waterways, Scheherazade Bloul is in the final stages of her PhD which analyses the imperial and carceral dynamics of digital media in Morocco. She is also a lover of cats.