The Decolonization of the Dead: Exhumation and Repatriation after the 1960 Agadir Earthquake

When the 1960 earthquake struck Agadir, the Moroccan city was still in the midst of a process of decolonization (four years after independence).   The demographics of the city were shifting, as French colonists “repatriated” to metropolitan France and to Algeria, even as American consumer goods and European tourism played ever greater roles in the economy of the city.  The earthquake, leaving 15-20,000 dead, was a cataclysmic environmental intervention in this process of decolonization.  The disaster precipitated a fresh exodus of the French population, but the enormous numbers of the dead posed particular problems.  Decolonization had already swelled the migration of exhumed colonists and imperial soldiers from the post-colony, a process further accelerated by preparations for the evacuation of France’s military bases, which sheltered many of the fallen French.   After the earthquake, the treatment and disposal of the festering dead—in mass graves, with bulldozers, with quicklime, amidst rumors of napalm and atom bombs— was intimately tied to controversies over power and boundaries in the post-colonial city.  Even after the immediate disposal of corpses, French attempts to seek the repatriation of remains created new points of friction as the meanings of these burials and exhumations were created and negotiated.   This paper uses archival sources to explore the entanglements and disentanglements of corpses, identities, and meanings in this post-colonial, post-catastrophe society.