3 - ‘Just as Uncivilised as We are’: Affinity, National Fragility, and Socialist and Fascist Narratives of Colonialism in La ruta and Notas marruecas de un soldado

Summary

Why do we have to be the ones to wage war against the Moors? Who are we to civilise them? We who are from Castile, Andalusia, who don't even know how to read or write […] who is going to civilise us?

Arturo Barea, La ruta

In his chronicle of the Moroccan campaigns of 1909, the war correspondent Manuel del Corral Caballé narrates an occasion where Spanish troops found a Valencian man within a group of Moroccan prisoners of war. The man heard the soldiers speaking Valencian and tried to speak to them but could only utter a few words because he had lived so long among the tribes of the Rif that he hard forgotten his mother tongue almost completely. The reader is later informed that the man was in fact a fugitive who deserted the French foreign legion during the Algerian war of 1870 and sought refuge among the tribes of Guelaya in northern Morocco, where he converted to Islam and embraced tribal customs. Sensational accounts like this one of Spaniards being found living among Moroccans are frequent during the colonial campaigns. For example, El Telegrama del Rif claimed there was a ‘Spanish’ kabile in the Rif founded by a fugitive from Tarifa, and the Africanist journalist Isaac Ruiz Albéniz asserted that it was common in the 1920s to encounter Spaniards who had ‘crossed over to the Moors’ (‘que se habían pasado al moro’) among the tribes in the province of Guelaya. The lack of scholarship on this phenomenon casts doubt on the truth of these accounts, although, according to María Rosa de Madariaga, at the beginning of the twentieth century there were a small number of Spanish fugitives living in Riffian communities in Mazuza, Beni Sicar, and Beni Bu Ifrur. These were mostly convicts who had escaped from the prisons in Melilla or army deserters who had settled in the Rif, where they converted to Islam, married local women, and assimilated into the population.

Accounts of Europeans ‘going native’ abound in colonialist literature and travelogues; in fact one of the first of such narratives occurs in another Spanish colonial context: Álvaro Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios (1542) narrates a would-be conquistador's eight-year journey through North America living among various indigenous groups and is often referred to as an example of transculturation or cultural miscegenation stemming from a colonial encounter.