Morocco

In the Labyrinth of Dreams and Bazaars

Walter M Weiss, Stefan Tobler, Stefan Tobler

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781909961326
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

While much of the Middle East is now engulfed in conflict and repression, Morocco remains a curious anomaly: peaceful and open to the West, it has provided refuge for artists and writers for generations, and it remains an exotic destination for many curious travelers. The country has been influenced by an incredible variety of peoples—Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Berbers, Muslims, Jews, and most of Europe's colonizers have played a role—and modern Moroccan society is no less rich and varied.In Morocco, Walter M. Weiss brings extensive knowledge of the region to bear as he travels the breadth and depth of the country's social and geographical contrasts. Berber villagers of the mountains are for the most part still illiterate and consider their king to be divinely chosen, while businessmen in Casablanca's towering offices dream of closer ties to the European Union. Weiss visits the settings of modern legends, such as Tangier, as well as the two medieval centres Fès and Meknès, and sees earthen kasbahs and Marrakech's bazaar. On the way, he meets acrobats, Sufi musicians, pilgrims, craftsmen, beatniks, rabbis, and Berber farmers—a kaleidoscope of variety and cultural influence.

In Hollywood’s holy land

From Agadir through the Anti-Atlas to Ouarzazate

For three days we’ve indulged in what every Northern visitor to Agadir does in late winter. We’ve walked along the miles and miles of beaches, we’ve sat in deck-chairs sunning ourselves, reading, refusing the hawkers in a friendly but firm manner, we’ve swum briefly in the Atlantic – it is only 17 degrees Celsius, and feasted on freshly caught fish every evening before strolling along the main street to the accompaniment of music from the clubs. We are happy to see clean streets and relatively tastefully built hotels and do our best to ignore the signs wooing tourists in all languages. On our fourth day there we are hit by the restlessness that such mass tourist resorts tend to cause. We take off, south-west into the mountains.

The first quarter of an hour dampens our spirits. We are stuck in a line of lorries and shared, inter-city taxis. The little stretch between Inezgane and Ait Melloul is the most congested in the country. It’s here that two trunk roads meet – one from the deep south, from Tiznit, Tan Tan and Laayoune, and the other which connects the coast with the interior between the Sahara and the High Atlas. It doesn’t help that the rows of soulless new blocks have made both towns heart-rendingly ugly. Not much later we turn off and are saved: our narrow, windy – and empty – road takes us up into an especially breathtaking landscape. It is a highland; it almost seems as wide as those in Scotland. It is bordered by high walls of rock, underneath which archaic villages nestle and imitate the reddish brown of the region. Even the steepest slopes have been terraced and planted with olive trees. Agadirs, this Berber region’s characteristic fortified granaries, crown many hilltops.

Tafraoute is the hub of this region. The town is in a hollow in the mountains, 4,000 feet above sea level. It doesn’t prove to be anything special – it has a nice but provincial bazaar, a souvenir shop and a fancy hilltop hotel that was designed to look like a fortress. The surroundings more than make up for it: there are absolutely bare granite summits reaching up to the sky that is never cloudy. Between them lie groves of palm, almond and olive trees. The area’s landmark is the Chapeau de Napoleon, a rock formation that is like a cross between Monument Valley and Meteora without its monasteries, and does actually bare a vague resemblance to the Corsican emperor’s tricorne. Looking west, the landscape is dotted with huge contorted boulders – woolsacks made of granite and polished by wind and weather – that look as though a giant has scattered them there. Following sandy tyre tracks off the road, we find a group of rocks behind a hillock. They’ve been painted bright pink and blue. In the early 1980s the Belgian artist Jean Vérame used 20 tonnes of natural paints to create his own personal take on land art. It may sound rather pretentious, but it is an impressive sight to see.

However, the most stirring scenery awaits us in the Valley of Ammeln. The villages of the Ammeln, a Shluh Berber tribe, hang on the sides of a towering mountain, Jebel Lekst. It is over 7,500 feet tall and its fissured sides glow different colours. Depending on the light that hits them, they change from a light ochre to red or violet. Below them are sprawling palm groves. Just before Oumesnat, the valley’s largest village, a hand-painted sign beside the road indicates the way to a maison berbère typique. Our curiosity gets the better of us. After a ten-minute walk through fields and up steep alleys, a blind old man welcomes us. He’s been waiting in the shady porch of a three-storey house for visitors, among them no doubt a good many coachloads from Agadir. The house’s walls are stone at their base, and above that pisé, a rammed mixture of earth and straw. Argan wood and palm fronds were used for the ceilings. The old man starts the tour, not attempting to hide the routine nature of it. The ground floor is both stables and work space. It contains three millstones, ‘Moulinex berbères’ he calls them with a smirk. There is one for corn, one for henna, spices and coffee, and one for extracting argan oil. We hear that women collect the indigestible argan stones from goat droppings. They need two and a half kilos of stones for a litre of oil. Each litre takes four days to produce, the price is 100 dirhams. Upstairs we are shown all sorts of old everyday objects: traps for porcupines, gazelles and foxes, wooden locks and keys, hand-embroidered babouches, adults’ sleeping mats woven from palm leaves, and the piles of straw that children sleep on. Confusing characters are written on a piece of paper on the wall. They are the letters of the Tifinagh alphabet, the Tuareg people’s alphabet. The Tuareg are the only Berbers who write their language in their own script. Many of the numerous Berber dialects are only oral, others use Arabic or Latin characters when they write. Today, our guide laments, only poor people live in traditional houses like this – 20 per cent of the villagers at most. Anyone who can afford to, builds a modern cement house on the edge of the village. Most young men have left for the cities anyway.

West of Tafraoute more phenomenal vistas open up. From the Col du Kerdous we can see the coastal plain spread out below us. Not long afterwards we take a left turn to the zaouia of the 16th century holy warrior and mystic Sidi Ahmed ou Moussa. A central figure in southern Morocco’s spiritual and political history, he is highly revered as a holy man. He resisted the Portuguese, who were pushing inland from the Atlantic, and worked with missionary zeal for a renewal of Sufism. He also established a brotherhood of archers and acrobats. As with other charismatic Moroccan leaders, his tomb is in the middle of a large cemetery. It is similar to the Idrisid tombs in Fès and Moulay Idris. It is quadrangular, with a glazed green roof, and crystal chandeliers hang above the sarcophagus that is draped in a green sheet. Pretty stucco and zellige decorate the room. Here there are also ostrich eggs swinging from a roof beam – an indication of the survival of some animistic beliefs. Even the outward appearance of the women on duty at the tomb suggests they are particularly pious. Their haiks, the cloth wraps that are normally brightly coloured, are black. They also wear black hijabs and they make a point of turning away when we look their way by chance. At the foot of the long flight of steps down from the zaouia are several market squares and any number of little bazaar areas. They are empty, all the shops are closed. Three times a year, we hear, moussems resembling enormous country fairs are held here in honour of the wise master. Southerners who are too poor to make the pilgrimage to Mecca instead attend the largest moussem, which is held at the end of each summer.

Near Tiznit, a town with rich mercantile and crafts traditions, we join the main coastal road again. If we fancied endless hours driving through a monotonous landscape of salt pans, sand dunes and loose stones, we could just carry straight on south for 350 miles to Laayoune, the capital of the province of Western Sahara. Indeed, if we transferred to a Land Rover that was ready for the desert, we could head down another 600 miles to the border with Mauretania at La Gouera, escorted by the military from Dakhla onwards. But we manage to resist temptation. Instead we choose to turn back to Agadir, where we can strike out east on the legendary ‘Kasbah Trail’.

The provincial capital of Ouarzazate is on a 4,000 foot high desert plateau. It is here that the west-east road from Agadir to Er Rachidia crosses the north-south road from Marrakech to Zagora. Our first spin around town doesn’t prove particularly edifying. Most of the town is new, and bland. All the administrative buildings, souvenir shops, supermarkets and petrol stations have been lined up along an overlarge avenue, which – like all of Morocco’s cities’ main streets – is called Mohammed V. Behind the shops the usual concrete blocks of housing spread out without any apparent design. Ouarzazate was founded 70 years ago by the French as a garrison town for their Foreign Legion. For a long time it struggled on as a miserable outpost. The late 1970s heralded the start of its boom years, when organised tourism arrived. Since those days it has been used by tour organisers as the starting point for tours into the desert and mountains. South-east of the so-called town centre, an extensive hotel district has been built from nothing. Its hotels are all four- or five-star and have a total of over 5,000 beds. Unfortunately, the planned nature of the district is all too obvious.

Over on the western edge of town, another sight rises above the bare plain, half-hidden behind tall wooden boards. It is a Far Eastern temple, complete with colourful roof tiles, a carved dragon’s head on the ridge of the roof and bright red beams. We want to solve this mystery. But at the gate to the site we are rudely shooed away. ‘No access!’ A short battle of words later and we know a little more: we have found film studios. The Chinese temple we saw is a left-over from the mid-1990s, when Martin Scorsese filmed Kundun here, the Dalai Lama’s story. After having heard this, we actually do start to find the majestically wide landscape and clear light rather Tibetan. In the lobby of the largest hotel in town, the Bel Air, we later find a faded sheet of paper with instructions for a film crew. We read that the scene ‘David reads the Psalms’ was planned that day for the film Davide. David and the extras – Uriah’s soldiers and the ‘crowd’ – were to be on set by 6:50 prompt. The receptionist tells us that an Italian team spent several years in the area, filming a series about the Old Testament for American television. Especially in the 1990s, Ouarzazate was the ‘Hollywood of the Maghrib’. The sheet has been left up as a souvenir.

Why this place? The local film-producer Jimmy Ahmed Abounoum tells us one evening over a glass of tea. ‘Directors and stage designers found here, and sometimes still find, the archaic buildings that they need for many films. That saves them the trouble and cost of building huge stage sets.’ In addition, there is an almost constant supply of good weather. It almost never rains. But the main attraction is the fantastic light. ‘The air,’ he raves, ‘is absolutely clear from sunrise to sunset. That gives the landscape such bright colours, this unique ochre in its infinite shades.’ A number of major projects in the 1980s brought rapid expansion to Ouarzazate: the James Bond film The Living Daylights, The Jewel of the Nile starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s film version of Paul Bowles’ book The Sheltering Sky were all filmed here. Jimmy remembers how one of his jobs on Kundun was to find Moroccans who looked like Tibetans. Morocco doesn’t yet have specialist agencies for that – apart from one that charges an arm and a leg. It had never been too difficult to find Semitic-looking extras for the usual biblical films. But Tibetans … ‘It wasn’t easy, but I worked it out. Around 1950, just before France pulled out of its protectorate in Indochina, many Moroccans were fighting there too. When Paris banished our Mohammed V to Madagascar, they deserted and fought for the Vietcong.’ Quite a few of them married Vietnamese women and returned home with their new families in 1972. Most of them opened Vietnamese restaurants. ‘Those were my people.’

The backdrop for many films’ biblical scenes is the Kasbah Taourirt, on the road out of town into the Dades Valley. It was the residence of one of the Glaoui chiefs. The Glaoui are a Berber clan who accumulated significant wealth and influence during the Protectorate era by collaborating with the French. Naturally, after independence in 1956 they fell into disgrace and lost their privileges. Taourirt is considered one of the largest and most beautiful of the Berber fortresses. Well over 1,000 people once lived in this highly defendable warren of streets, courtyards, interconnected housing units and common areas. In fact, it housed all the members of a tribe, as well as many Jews in their own quarter. Today no more than a fraction of the lavishly restored kasbah is occupied. The chief ’s residence, including his prayer room, harem and dining room, are now open to the public as a museum.

Another corner is occupied by the office of the Centre for the Maintenance and Restoration of Southern Morocco’s Architectural Heritage. ‘There are complex social reasons behind the dramatic decline of most kasbahs,’ we are told by the office’s director, the sociologist Ait el Kaid M’barek, himself a descendent from the Draa Valley of a kaid, a kind of provincial governor. ‘These constructions have, like medieval European castles, lost their original functions in many different ways. They no longer have a purpose as refuges and food stores, now that Morocco is a centrally controlled nation state and the settled tribes no longer have to defend themselves from attacks by hostile neighbouring tribes or the desert nomads. Nor are they as needed to provide accommodation for whole clans – every year the social fabric of these clans is coming more and more undone, people want to live in separate little houses.’ Added to that, the kasbahs are literally crumbling because many men have left to work in the cities. After the rare but torrential rainstorms, the women and elderly who are still at home cannot repair all the damage to the pisé walls. Recently Rabat has taken countermeasures, subsidising the renovation of at least some of the kasbahs.

The Kasbah Ait Benhaddou is, as a whole, an even more impressive example of this kind of archaic earth architecture, that outside southern Morocco can only be found in Yemen. A photographer’s dream, it was built on a steep mountain slope high above a river lined with palms, not far from the main road towards Tizi n Tichka and Marrakech. No fewer than six tighremts rise above its higgledy-piggledy cubed houses and rusty red walls. They are highly decorated granaries, each with four towers. They were impregnable, as they had almost no windows. No wonder that this location can also be seen in many films, for example in the 1961 film Sodom and Gomorrah by Robert Aldrich and Sergio Leone. Yet first impressions are deceptive in this case. Only a handful of families still live in Ait Benhaddou. Many roofs have caved in, ceilings are rotten, streets are full of rubble, and whole buildings have collapsed. Quite a while ago UNESCO added the whole complex to its list of world heritage sites in need of preservation, and it restored parts of it at the time. More extensive work is still needed if the site is to be saved.

52 days to Timbuktu

On the Kasbah Trail towards the Sahara

At Ouarzazate the Kasbah Trail forks. One road heads south-east along the upper reaches of the Draa river, towards the Sahara. The other fork follows the Dades river east, via Boumalne, Tinerhir and Goulmima, until it reaches Er Rachidia. Heeding the desert’s call first, we cross a cracked, plant-less pass before coasting down into an absolute dream of a setting. The Draa Valley is a perfect example of a river oasis. It winds for more than 100 miles through a wide canyon. The river is lined by fields, villages, kasbahs and shrines, as well as hundreds of thousands of date palms. It is only March now, but the air blasting in our faces is already as hot as if it were from a hair-dryer. In mid-summer the temperature can rise to almost 50 degrees Celsius.

The cultural highlight of this land that time forgot is Tamegroute, a town surrounded by mighty, embrasured walls. The founder of the Naciri brotherhood, one of the most highly regarded of southern Morocco, is buried here. A library adjoins his mausoleum. Among its 4,000 medieval manuscripts are texts on history, astronomy, medicine and mathematics, as well as Hadiths and Korans. The jewel of the colle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Gateway to Africa
• Coexistence in Morocco
• Paradise in this world and the next
• Hippy town and hotbed of resistance
• First interruption: ça va?
• Only look!
• From the hammam to a full stomach, via hell
• The healing powers of the dead
• Second interruption: travel as a political choice
• Trip to the edge of time
• Moulay Ismail’s legacy
• Inside the bastion of power
• Living and praying in the white house
• Seaside snapshots
• Among acrobats, storytellers and poets
• An oasis of luxury and fashions
• Barren lands and iron dogmas
• In Hollywood’s holy land
• 52 days to Timbuktu
• Glossary