Before moving to discuss the late 1990s and onward digression of narratives about al-Glaoui from the post-colonial nationalist discourse described in the previous chapter, I shall make a pause to elaborate on the issue of Amazighness (Amazighité), which is one of the sociopolitical processes which is exceedingly relevant to the current state of stories about the Pasha. The identity politics of Amazighs, the indigenous population of North Africa, and the awakening of Amazighness in the last decades has had a major bearing on the twenty-first-century telling, and a parallel phenomenon of ‘non-telling’, of al-Glaoui. In order to fully analyse this process, I will first present a very brief overview of the history of Amazigh activism in Morocco, then connect this to al-Glaoui and the ways in which he is told today.

A focal landmark in the discussion of Amazighness in Morocco was the French Protectorate’s so-called ‘Berber Dahir’ of 1930 which launched various new legal procedures to be implemented in Amazigh regions (discussed in detail in Chapter 3). From its publication onwards, nationalist Moroccan historiography viewed this Dahir as the most blatant French attempt at dividing Moroccan society, and as a turning point in the practice of Moroccan nationalism and its subsequent broad reception (Azaoui 2018).

One of the greatest storytellers of al-Glaoui’s tale was Gavin Maxwell. His book about the Pasha became a must-read for generations of anglophone readers and travellers who came to visit Morocco, and its wide distribution affected later narrations of al-Glaoui. This chapter analyses the book as well as its inter-textualities with earlier tales, with sociopolitical processes, and with Maxwell’s biography.

Gavin Maxwell was born in 1914, at Elrig, a large estate house built by his parents next to their family’s residence in Monreith, Scotland. His father, Colonel Aymer Maxwell, heir presumptive of the Baron of Monreith, fought in the Boer War, planted rubber plantations in Malaya, and raised short-legged Labrador dogs in Scotland. His mother, Lady Mary Percy was the fifth daughter of the seventh Duke of Northumberland, her family accustomed to travelling between their palaces accompanied by the pomp and pageantry of a servants’ entourage (Botting 2000).

A decade before Maxwell’s birth, Britain was a prosperous nation, heart of the largest empire that the world had ever known (More 2014: 2). But many sectors of British society were seething with discontent. From the late 1880s on, a series of strikes swept across the country, indicators of a dramatic change in the sociopolitical power balance of the country. This change was clear by 1906, when the left-wing Liberal David Lloyd George was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, setting the stage for a transition of power from the hereditary aristocrats to the middle class (McCord and Purdue 2007: 406–38).

This chapter situates this book’s conceptual and theoretical approach with respect to earlier work on ethnicity and region in African countries and beyond. Earlier work has looked away from regional economic inequality as a political force in Africa, defaulting to theories centered on ethnicity, understood as a force orthogonal to programmatic policy interests and devoid of economic ideology. This work inverts these arguments, showing that regional economic inequalities and differentiation give rise to political cleavage and divergent policy interests. In Africa, the sources of subnational (regional) economic difference and inequality lie in unevenness of natural endowment, regionally specific patterns of state intervention in the economy that date to the colonial period, spatial–sectoral differentiation, and administrative structure. This chapter follows Lipset and Rokkan (1967) in theorizing the sources and nature of regional cleavages that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. It identifies institutions that contribute to the “regionalization” of national economies and politics in African countries. Section 2.5 of this chapter lays out the main elements of an approach to the analysis of regionalism that is fit for African contexts.

This theory of regional cleavages in African politics embeds the behavioral assumptions of microlevel, ethnicity-focused models in a broader spatial, institutional, and temporal frame. A theoretically grounded framework built on economic geography, economic inequalities, and institutions produces general findings about national-level political dynamics in African countries that are close to what classical and mainstream treatments in the comparative politics and comparative political economy literatures would lead us to expect. Leveraging this perspective, this chapter reconsiders questions of economic cleavage, urban–rural politics, institutions, class politics, policy interests, opposition and regional parties, and ethnic identities in African politics. The challenges of territorial politics in regionally divided countries that confront most African countries today are increasingly prominent in non-African, postindustrial countries. This makes research on the politics of spatial inequality in African countries relevant to general understandings of how economic and spatial inequalities may heighten the challenges of national politics. For policy and politics, the analysis lends weight to calls for place-based economic development strategies that are designed to support national cohesion.

Regional interests and tensions are manifest in regional bloc voting in multiparty elections (1990s–2010s). We present an electoral geography analysis of constituency-level voting in presidential elections in twelve countries from 1990 to 2015 (44 elections). We describe the economic attributes of the electoral blocs using forty rounds of DHS surveys for geocoded education and ethnicity data, nighttime luminosity, historical maps of producer regions, and raster data for population densities and contemporary crop production profiles. Most electoral blocs arise in rural regions that are wealthier, better educated, more densely populated, and more deeply incorporated into the national economy than other rural areas. Most are specialized in high-value export crops (or traded food crops.) Some have nonagricultural production profiles as labor-exporting or mining regions. Most coalesce within provincial-level administrative units. Almost all are multiethnic. The evidence is consistent with the argument that state institutions work to channel politics arising from uneven economic development into the national political arena. Microlevel mechanisms contributing to this outcome are related to interests, organizations, ideology, and actions of political agents and coalition-builders.

This chapter considers the structure of territorial cleavage from a national perspective. It focuses on patterns of polarization between regional electoral blocs, or “territorial oppositions,” in national politics. Axes of territorial cleavage arising between predominantly rural regions tend to take canonical forms associated with core–periphery politics in countries that are undergoing national economic integration and the growth of the central state. Stable axes of sectional competition, whereby leading regions square off against each other or against those on the periphery, are visible in the electoral data and in persistent policy cleavages in countries in this study. In broad outlines, these conform to models of territorial opposition in national politics advanced by earlier scholars (Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Gourevitch 1979; Bayart 2013). The analysis is built around four countries – Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda – that serve as archetypes of different patterns of territorial opposition and core–periphery politics. Tanzania is a shadow case.