Oases in North Africa have undergone significant change over the past 30 years, contributing to the emergence of new issues and practices. Irrigated farms are increasingly developing outside of historical oases, in lands previously reserved for extensive livestock. This article is a contribution to the knowledge of these issues in the Toudgha Valley in south-eastern Morocco. Its objective is to analyse the heterogeneity of these expanding farms without limiting the issues to a model of land grabbing by large investors. Based on a qualitative survey of 49 farms, our results show that there are three types of farms. The first is a small farms where people move to look for housing and new work opportunities at other farms. The second is a medium farms where farmers seek to reproduce three-layered crop production and have more land than in historical oases. The last type is a large farms where investors settle and intensify their production. This typology, far from being fixed, allows us to reflect on the dynamics of these extensions.
The 20th century witnessed the emergence of individual women as political actors, women as a category of political and social actors, and women (or “the woman question”) as a theme for political action across North Africa. This history is both intertwined with, and for a long time has been overshadowed by, that of colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonial state-building. Without being linear or homogeneous, the stages and processes of making women visible and extending women’s rights have been similar across Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria: increasing access to education, the emergence of pioneering female “models,” the mobilization of women as a group in the anti-colonial struggle, postcolonial state feminism and then a shift towards women speaking, writing and organizing themselves as women. Specificities of Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan history have also given rise to distinctive features in the history of women and the writing of the history of women in each country. These include the long history of male feminist thought expressed in Arabic in Tunisia, the mass participation of women in armed struggle in Algeria, and the reformist feminism, based on women reinterpreting religious sources and history, which originated in Morocco.
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