The blog page for the prolific song writer, musician and social chronicler of the human spirit.

The DWARFS OF The atlas Mountains.

4/16/2017

Well the reasons to go just keep on growing! Further to my last blog on Gavin Maxwell, not only does my forthcoming trek take me into the heartlands of the Glauoa - the tribe of the Lords of the Atlas who in the early 20th Century with the active connivance of the French subdued and destroyed a Berber culture and people remarkable for their independence and sense of freedom, replacing it with a regime of ferocious brutality and flamboyance - it now appears I may doing some accidental anthropological research! I may be searching for a lost tribe of dwarfs.

There were serious arguments at the end of the 19th Century put forward by a Canadian lawyer Robert Halliburton for the existence, on the Southern side of the Atlas Mountains, of a tribe of curly haired red-skinned dwarfs. Not surprisingly this was a somewhat controversial assertion ,with vigorous debates in various academic bodies. The region itself was almost unvisited by westerners - indeed the reason the French armed the Gluoua with modern weapons was to keep this remote under some sort of control.

. Halliburton continued to insist that he had more than enough evidence to prove this true until the day he died. After which the controversy seems to have died away. My old pal, Robert Twigger mentioned them in passing years ago - just one in a flow of esoteric comments that makes time with him so enjoyable. A search of the internet - this is when the internet is truly magnificent - revealed a series of archive documents indicating the dwarfs in the remote region around the D’raa valley through which I will be rambling. More to follow..

One of the goals of this trek is to raise money for Education for All Morocco - raising money to fund the education of Berber girls in the High Atlas. If you would like to find out more click here

4 Comments

Chris McHugo link

4/17/2017 06:24:10 pm

Happy Trails when does all this actually start

Steve

4/17/2017 09:59:24 pm

Thanks Chris - All kicks off in the 29th April I've got just over three weeks to do it .

Liz

4/20/2017 08:27:06 am

Hi Steve, just found this in my spamfilter! I felt i had to reply, as it's unlikely that they would be dwarves , as this is a medical condition whereby "Dwarf" refers to a person with one of several varieties of a specific genetic condition called dwarfism. A dwarf has disproportion of body parts. This is generally caused by a genetic or nutritional disability. Midgets might be another term, or short people! That is, unless they are the mythical dwarves such as in Tolkien stories!

steve

4/20/2017 06:49:49 pm

Well Liz - this is all true and I am using the term dwarf in a less medical sense. However the existence of a separate human-type species is not impossible - see http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1027_041027_homo_floresiensis.html

Also of course - if they existed at all they could be part of a distinct ethnic group like Pygmies - www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pygmy

Whatever species or ethnic group it would be amazing to find out :)

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Wide brimmed hat. Long dark coat. Guitar slung on back. 21 years on the road. A 100,000 miles and half a thousand hotel rooms. From the Berlin Wall to Atlas Mountains, from Sahara Desert to the streets of Hong Kong: a memory brewed in the long simmering soup of people and place. A man who has learned to watch and to listen, to walk and talk in the ebb and flow of meeting and parting. He is a chronicler of the human spirit in words and music.