The fearless charge of Morocco’s horsewomen

When Zahia Aboulait was a young girl, she loved nothing more than tagging along with her father to the rural Moroccan festivals called moussems, watching him perform with his tbourida troupe. Tbourida, a centuries-old equestrian tradition, is a spectator sport that finds teams of riders making a faux cavalry charge across a dirt track, leading their horses with taut, synchronized precision. The cavalcade ends when the riders—acting in unison, their horses at a gallop—raise a set of antique-style rifles and together fire a single thundering volley. The practice takes its name from the Arabic word for “gunpowder,” and although it’s performed elsewhere in North Africa, it is particularly beloved in Morocco. Aboulait’s father was a farmer who rode in a troupe as a hobby, and Aboulait, who rarely missed a moussem, loved every part of it: the smell of the horses, the crack of the muskets, the flowing and finely embroidered robes of the men.

Back then, tbourida riders were almost exclusively men. But one day in 1999, a rider in her father’s troupe didn’t show up, and Aboulait, then 14 years old, asked to take his place. She’d been riding horses since she was six, and watching and learning tbourida about as long. Her father, who encouraged his daughter’s passion, didn’t see a problem letting her ride. He lent her one of his long traditional robes, called a djellaba, and she wore it over her sweatpants and sneakers. When she pushed her luck further and asked for a gun, he gave her one and showed her how to load the black powder (no bullets). What Aboulait remembers about riding that day is how people in the crowd, who’d likely never seen a female rider, took photos of her by 
the hundreds.

In the 27 years since, women have gained a foothold in tbourida. These days, Aboulait is one of her country’s best known female riders, the leader of her own all-women troupe—one of no more than a dozen found across Morocco out of perhaps a thousand total troupes—and part of a small circle of veteran women who’ve helped change minds about what the tradition can look like. Now, even as tbourida videos surge on social media, putting the sport in front of new global audiences, Aboulait finds herself transitioning from a pioneer to a mentor, training the next generation of young women to carry on a custom with deep historical roots.

Tbourida has been practiced in Morocco since at least the 16th century, evolving from a military exercise into a sport that blends the equestrian customs of the country’s Arab and Indigenous Amazigh populations. Recognized by UNESCO as a vital piece of intangible cultural heritage, it’s sometimes known as fantasia, an exoticizing nickname bestowed by the 19th-century French and largely derided in Morocco. Participants, both human and equine, typically don elaborate traditional garb, and riders carry slender, muzzle-loading rifles that evoke an earlier era. Any given performance lasts only a few seconds, a barrage of hoofbeats and anticipation building toward that one perfect salvo. When the synchronicity of horses, riders, and rifles is perfect, the crowd erupts. Troupes are judged on their precision, pageantry, and horsemanship.

For centuries, says Rutgers University sociologist Zakia Salime, tbourida was considered “a masculine performance,” an exhibition of warrior skills from which women were traditionally excluded. The first women’s tbourida troupes, Salime says, began forming in the mid-2000s. The shift was what she calls “a quiet revolution,” not the result of protest or agitation. Nor was it precipitated by any one change to rules or policy, says University of Nebraska-Lincoln anthropologist Gwyneth Talley, a National Geographic Explorer who has studied and produced a short film on women’s tbourida troupes. The emergence of women riders did coincide, Talley points out, with a campaign by the first female president of Morocco’s national equestrian foundation, a member of the country’s royal family, to champion women’s participation in equestrian sports.

Aboulait kept riding with her father’s troupe, called a sorba, until she was in her 20s. But she was still a teenager when she founded a sorba of her own, made up of women riders (troupes with both men and women remain rare). They encountered little outright resistance, Aboulait says, and though the occasional male rider can be hostile, many are supportive and courteous, offering to lend rifles or allow her sorba to ride first.

Today Aboulait lives in Casablanca, where she works in business administration and raises three children. But in the summers, she travels the moussem circuit, leading a group of younger women whom she has personally picked and trained to be tbourida riders. As troupe leader, or muqadema, she is in charge of far more than riding at the front of the line. She’s responsible for matching her riders with suitable borrowed horses when they don’t have their own. She tends to the group’s wardrobe and finances. She leads training and warm-up sessions, ensuring her riders learn to maneuver their horses and rifles in perfect sync.

Tbourida, Aboulait stresses, is all about discipline—and the payoff for her sorba’s rigor comes in its consistently high scores. “We have a very good reputation,” Aboulait says. “We must protect it.”

For 26-year-old Ghita Jhiate, who’s been riding alongside Aboulait for two years, the muqadema is more than just a role model—she is something like a legend. Growing up in urban Marrakech, Jhiate got to ride horses while visiting family in the countryside, but her father refused to let her take lessons when she was a teenager. That didn’t stop her fascination with tbourida, which Jhiate marveled at when her family went to moussems outside the city. And although Jhiate had never seen her ride, she’d heard stories about Zahia Aboulait, the region’s first female muqadema. “And I would say, ‘I want to become Zahia,’ ” Jhiate remembers.

In her 20s, Jhiate bought her own tbourida rifle, called a moukahla. She finally took riding lessons, then saved enough to buy her own horse, which she boarded outside Marrakech. She named him Zher, which means “luck.”

An online acquaintance shared Aboulait’s phone number, but Jhiate never worked up the courage to call. Then one day her phone buzzed, and when she looked down, she froze—it was the muqadema calling. Aboulait had heard about Jhiate through a rider they both knew. Would the young equestrian ride with Aboulait’s sorba at one of Morocco’s largest and most prominent festivals?

Five days later, in the middle of the night, Jhiate arrived with Zher at the Moussem Moulay Abdellah Amghar, an annual week-long event where more than a hundred tbourida teams compete before crowds of thousands. She found Aboulait waiting outside a tent she shared with the troupe. They exchanged a few words, then Jhiate went to sleep beside a group of strangers. The next day, she rode for the first time alongside her hero—and the women she now considers sisters.

Aboulait, Jhiate says, has taught her “what it means to be a rider.” She admires how her muqadema balances family, career, and an infectious devotion to the sport. “When we turn around and we find Zahia happy,” Jhiate says, “when we find her laughing, we are happier than her.”

Aboulait has purposely kept her troupe small. Some sorbas have over two dozen riders; hers currently has fewer than a dozen. These days, she says, she meets young people whose interest in the sport seems driven by the prospect of posting pictures and videos to social media, where the short, colorful spectacle of tbourida plays well. Aboulait says she prefers troupe members who are in it for the work. Her sorba does take videos of its performances—not necessarily to post but to watch afterward, like game tape, studying what the members could improve.

Before each ride, the group washes together, the Muslim ritual cleansing called wudu. Then the women say a dua, or prayer, asking for a safe ride. It’s important, Aboulait says, that they get on their horses with peaceful minds and with harmony among the riders. They wear sunscreen but not makeup, which Aboulait says would shift attention to individuals rather than the group. She mourns some of what she sees as modern erosions of the tbourida tradition. For example, she says, boys used to have to learn much more before being allowed to ride. Leaders of sorbas were expected to be ceremonious hosts in their moussem tents, providing guests with food. It’s not so much that Aboulait is nostalgic, she says, as that she is simply protective of standards.

And after all these years, she doesn’t think of herself as being particularly revolutionary for having helped bring women into the sport. One of the beautiful things about tbourida, Aboulait says, is that it erases differences among its participants. At moussems, a roster of a hundred troupes might include only a couple composed of women, but she feels a kinship with all of her fellow riders. Tbourida brought her and her father together. These days it is cementing bonds between her and her young protégées. “Age, social, cultural,” she says. “Everybody speaks the same language.”