When Sandy and I returned to Fez at the beginning of the following May his excitement was palpable. Mine was more subdued. I was apprehensive about what might have happened in our absence. What if the carpenter had removed the decoration on the big doors to the salons? Or messed with the wonderful massreiya ceiling?
We arrived to find the inevitable dust, along with workmen’s tools and boxes of garbage strewn about, but it was still good to be back. The courtyard was filled with sunlight, there were oranges hanging out of reach on one of the trees, and a couple of baby sparrows were hopping around. Someone had put a grubby teddy bear on the fountain spout, adding a surreal touch.
The carpenter had done part of his job. The salon doors had been repaired, decoration intact, as had a couple of others, and upstairs there was a new set of shutters and two new doors. But some of the work looked slapdash. The bathroom door frame, which needed a section of rotting wood replaced, had had a blob of cement slapped onto it. There was a new window in the kitchen that I hadn’t asked for, while the three I had listed remained undone. The smell of fresh cedar permeated the air, but it looked as if Sarah hadn’t been here in weeks. There was off milk in the fridge, and the mattresses were stacked against the upstairs walls. When I got round to ringing Sarah later she said that the carpentry work had forced her to move out.
We’d barely deposited our luggage when there was a bang on the door. It was a young girl from across the alley with welcoming cups of tea. She pointed out her door as the one I knew as Khadija’s. I had never seen the girl before and asked where Khadija was, but couldn’t make myself understood. No matter, I thought, Khadija would be over the minute she heard I’d returned. In the meantime we busied ourselves with making the riad habitable.
Twenty-four hours after we arrived, there was still no sign of Khadija. I missed seeing cute little Ayoub playing in the street, and having Khadija pop her head out the door whenever I went out. Even though at times I found her exasperating, she had been part of the fabric of my life here and I’d been looking forward to seeing her. I’d bought her a new set of sheets, a painting set for Ayoub, and printed up a photo of them both. Eventually I asked another neighbor, who told me that Khadija and her family had moved to a small town in the countryside. I was surprised by how disappointed I felt on hearing this, and not only because she’d helped me so much.
Sandy and I were to be in Fez for seven months on this trip, and there was much to be done. We arranged to meet Hamza to discuss the next stage. As only half of the carpentry work had been completed, and that of variable quality, we were apprehensive about him overseeing the rest of the work.
He arrived late, well into the afternoon, with his Irish accountant in tow, and was his usual charismatic self, exuding a bonhomie and confidence that were belied by the endless cigarettes he smoked. He had fallen out with the carpenter who had given the original quote, he told us, and the replacement was more expensive. Hamza would return with the new carpenter to address the shod-dily done work, and assess what more he could do for the money we had paid. Fair enough, I thought.
With the accountant he then had another look around the riad, muttering about the huge amount of work to be done. There were a couple of “pregnant bellies,” as Hamza put it, where moisture had entered the ceiling beams, forcing pressure downward and making the walls bulge—what the engineer had called the flambement. We were a bit shocked when he said that the beautiful old zellij in the courtyard needed ripping up and relaying, as it was uneven. We thought the uneven patches, caused by tree roots, was part of its appeal.
We moved on to the issue of money. Hamza wanted forty percent of the cost of the work up front, with each stage paid for in advance. It made sense from his point of view; he had been left holding the baby on one job and ended up bankrolling it out of his own pocket.
But forty percent up front was a commitment we didn’t feel comfortable making. What if a few weeks down the track the arrangement wasn’t working? But our choice was limited—there were few people in Fez capable of supervising the work—and we parted saying we would get back to him in a couple of days.
Regardless of who oversaw the restoration, we wanted to get started as soon as possible. As there would be strangers working all through the house, we needed a place to store our valuables, so in time-honored fashion we decided to buy a wooden chest. We found one we liked in an antique shop near the tanneries. It was embossed with brass shields and had a lock with a movable pin mechanism that dropped in and out of place as the key was turned. Similar locks have been in found in Egyptian tombs dating back four thousand years, and are the forerunner of modern pin tumbler locks.
“It was made by the Tuareg people from the Sahara,” the shopkeeper said, oozing sincerity. But the price tag was far beyond what we’d planned on spending.
“I make you a special deal,” he whispered, as if afraid his regular tourist clientele would overhear, and more than halved the price. But it was still way above what we thought it was worth.
“Two thousand dirhams is what we can afford to spend,” I said. We stuck to that, and miraculously ended up buying it. A porter appeared and threw the heavy chest onto his back as though it were made of balsawood. He moved so fast through the crowded streets we were forced to trot to keep up with him. Jogging along in his wake, I noticed that the finish of the wood was uneven and there was a small chip showing blond wood beneath. The chest had probably been knocked up in Fez the previous week. I felt stupid for being diddled in the dimness of the shop. I did like the chest, but it was certainly only worth as much as we’d paid, if that. Expert traders, the Fassis had had hundreds of years of honing their skills on gullible foreigners like us.
The day before, I had gone to the souk to buy herbs. “How much?” I asked an old man holding up two bunches of oregano.
“Ten dirhams.”
Huge bunches of mint, parsley, or coriander were usually sold for a half a dirham, but I was too tired to argue. I took half of what he held out and gave him five dirhams. As I walked away, he said something to the men nearby and they burst out laughing. I was sure it concerned my ignorance, but how could I blame him for trying to get the maximum from someone who could obviously afford it?
Despite such experiences, I tried to rid myself of the attitude that all Moroccans were out to cheat us. David had told us of an English woman who was buying a house in Fez, using a Fassi friend of his as a facilitator. She spent a lot of money engaging a London solicitor to organize power of attorney for him, and then discovered that this could only be done through the Moroccan consulate. David’s friend should have known that, she maintained in a long letter of complaint to him. Moroccans needed to understand the standards Westerners expect, she had written, threatening to cancel her checks and call the whole deal off.
If she was this upset at such an early stage in the process, we wondered how she’d go when she ran into real problems. She and Fez were clearly not meant for one another, Sandy observed.
We heard other stories about property-buying foreigners from David, and he introduced us to an Englishman who’d flown to Fez on a four-day visit. Although it was his first trip to Morocco, he’d bought a house that morning and was talking about quitting his job as maître d’ in a trendy London bistro and moving to Fez full time. I wondered if he had any conception of what life would be like here. He might think he needed a break from the pubs and clubs of London, but living in the alcohol-free Medina, with few options for eating out, surrounded by conservative and curious Moroccans, might rapidly lose its luster if he didn’t have a genuine interest in the culture. We got the impression that at this stage it was all just color and movement to him.
The Englishman told us that programs about buying houses in other countries were a national obsession in Britain. “It’s the British way of recolonizing the world,” he said.
How true, I thought. Many houses in the Marrakesh Medina are now foreign-owned. A lot of the fly-in, fly-out expats limit their interaction with Moroccans to servants and shopkeepers—a replication of the colonial experience, and hardly the way to maintain a vibrant and cohesive community. Sandy and I were determined that, despite the cultural and linguistic barriers, we would not isolate ourselves within the expat community.
Right now that community was troubled by the fact that local authorities were cracking down on illegal guesthouses. The criteria for obtaining a licence were so strict—stipulating rooms of a certain size, ensuite bathrooms, televisions and refrigerators, air-conditioning, a salon, and a minimum of five rentable rooms— that without purpose-built facilities it was difficult to fulfill them.
A number of foreigners had bought property in the Medina with the intention of staying and making a living letting rooms to tourists. Now, having done up their houses, they were jumping through hoops trying to meet the regulatory requirements. One woman had a beautifully restored house with five bedrooms, but because it was considered too small and the bathrooms were not ensuites, she was refused a license.
Dozens of illegal guesthouses had recently been closed down in Marrakesh. The introduction of cheap flights to that city had led to an explosion in the number of foreigners renting out rooms. Not all travelers were looking for a five-star hotel with equivalent prices, and because guesthouse regulations were so strict, some people ignored them and let rooms anyway. This meant they did not pay tax and their profits were sent out of the country. As cheap flights to Fez were about to start, the authorities here were determined not to let the same problem develop.
Frida and Hamza had been trying for months to get a license for their magnificent dar, which had taken twenty people two years to restore. It seemed that there were three ways of getting any sort of authorization in Morocco. You either conformed to the letter of the law, knew someone powerful, or gave “presents” to officials. Out of desperation, with loans to service, Frida and Hamza had taken in a few paying guests regardless. The next thing they knew, the district official turned up in the company of their neighbor, who had made a complaint about them. They were handed a document ordering them to cease and desist, and had to arrange for their guests to go to hotels. Naturally they were very upset.
Frida and Hamza’s neighbor was convinced that part of their courtyard belonged to him. Running through it was an easement allowing access to his carpet shop’s rear door, which hadn’t been opened for years. Now that Hamza and Frida had beautified the courtyard, he said he wanted to use the door again. Closing down the guesthouse appeared to be part of his strategy to make Frida and Hamza purchase his easement rights.
Hamza’s response was to say that opening the door was a terrific idea: the neighbor’s carpet clients would be able to see what a lovely place their dar was to stay in, and in turn Frida and Hamza could direct their clients to his shop. The downside of this proposal was that when the neighbor’s back door was open, it revealed a scenic view of his toilets.
We finally received the deed to our house. Sandy and I met the scribe in a café, where he handed over a single sheet of paper in Arabic, to be joined to the two-meter scroll already in our possession. The only words we could discern on the scroll were our names, but with the help of someone who read Arabic I learned that the scroll dated back to the beginning of the French protectorate in 1912, when a new system for property registration had come in. The house had been sold in 1932 by a group of people whose names took an entire page—probably an extended family who’d inherited it.
Since then, the riad had changed hands half a dozen times, with the longest period of ownership being the thirty years to 1977, when it was purchased by the couple from whom we’d bought it. The long list of names was a reminder that the concept of owning an ancient house is an illusion—we were all just passing through.
Sandy and I were still mulling over our decision about Hamza. From what we could gather, he was expensive and overcommitted. We knew an expat called Amanda whose restoration had been done by Hamza’s team. Her house had been gutted and rebuilt, and while she was pleased with the work, we were horrified to hear she had so far spent more than three times the purchase price. And her house was tiny compared with ours. There was no way we could afford that kind of expense. Amanda had had moments when she wished she could get out of the arrangement, but she was already past the point of no return.
Warning lights were flashing in my head, but if we didn’t engage Hamza, who else was there? I did know of a building contractor, but he was subcontracted to Hamza.
As luck would have it, we met a young English couple, Jon and Jenny, who had restored a dar in the Medina. It was medium-sized, of a much later period than our riad, but it was exquisite. There were multiple rooms with blue and white zellij, lots of detailed plasterwork, and the wooden shutters were in excellent condition. The work had been done on a reasonable budget by a team of workers they’d organized themselves.
An idea started to form. Why couldn’t Sandy and I manage the restoration ourselves and hire the help we needed? We could engage Jon and Jenny to help us find tradespeople and for general advice. Although they’d only been in Fez a year, they had good contacts and spoke a smattering of Darija. True, they weren’t nearly as experienced as Hamza, but he appeared to be so thinly stretched we doubted we’d be getting the full benefit of his experience. Managing the project would be a lot more work than we’d planned on, but I had a clear idea about what should be done.
The more we discussed it, the more possible it seemed. Sandy and I worked well as a team. Since I spoke the better French and had design skills, it made sense that I be the one to set each stage up and source the materials. Sandy, being empathetic, humorous, and possessed of vast reserves of patience, is an excellent people manager. His role would be to micro-manage the building work with the help of a translator. “You can dream the dream and I’ll manage the nightmare,” Sandy said.
And so it began. The first thing we had to do was get a building permit. This was called a roqsa, and, as we discovered, was the most important document we had to acquire. Without this three-month permit, nothing could happen. But getting a roqsa was no easy task and some people waited months to receive one.
I headed off to the baladiya, or local council office, where I found four women sitting at desks piled high with files. One was cleaning her nails, another was asleep. It didn’t look as though the granting of permits was occupying their every waking moment. An obliging man who spoke English helped me fill out the necessary form in Arabic. I let him tick the boxes and then I signed it. I could have been agreeing to deed the house to him, for all I knew, but I trusted him. No doubt these have been famous last words on numerous sorry occasions, but he seemed like a nice chap.
I hadn’t brought a photocopy of my passport with me and had to walk back to get one. When I returned I lined up at another window to have the form authorized. Half a dozen Fassis were jostling for various permits: there were schoolgirls wanting authorization for some unknown activity, a middle-aged woman whose identity card listed her profession as embroiderer, a man in a djellaba who looked old enough to have lived through the French occupation and retreat. When it was my turn the woman behind the counter took a break from serving me to help several other people. At last it was done. I lodged the forms with the nice chap, who told me an inspector would arrive the following day.
True to his word, there was a knock on the door after break -fast the next morning. A dapper man with a gray mustache introduced himself in excellent French as the chief inspector. I ushered him in and he proceeded to check out every room in great detail. When I showed him the massreiya he shook his head and tut-tutted about the state of the beams. Up on the terrace, he gazed out over the city, seeming to forget he was doing something as mundane as a house inspection.
“This area is one of the oldest in Fez,” he said. “The émigrés from Tunis settled here in the ninth century.” Sensing my interest, he continued. “When the refugees came from Spain, they settled on the opposite bank of the Oued Fez, over there.” He swept his hand across the Andalusian quarter on the other side of R’Cif. “During the eight hundred years we held Al-Andalous, the Moorish artisans developed their building skills to a high degree. That is why we have so many marvelous buildings.”
I’d heard this several times before. What I really wanted to know was why the artisans’ skills had become so highly developed. Later, I found out. When Berber and Arab forces had taken over the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the eighth century, they kept going up the European continent until they were stopped at Tours. They then turned their attention to consolidating their rule in Al-Andalous.
The Moors were unusual rulers in that they allowed the Christians and Jews to practice their own religions, which led to an increasingly complex society. Such tolerance was necessary, as there were several thousand Moors ruling over millions of Christians, and wholesale conversion to Islam would have been impossible. Instead the Moors imposed additional taxes and restrictions on non -Muslims, making it necessary to convert to Islam if you wanted to get ahead. By the eleventh century, Muslims outnumbered Christians in Al-Andalous.
The Muslim rulers faced a problem common to conquerers throughout the ages. Taking over a country was the easy part. Staying in power and running the place was extremely hard. Over the centuries, Al-Andalous broke down into more than twenty principalities, whose rulers competed to be the richest and most architecturally and culturally impressive. Each fought to recruit the most skilled artisans, poets, and scholars, leading to an extraordinary flourishing of the arts and sciences, which had a stimulating effect to a moribund medieval Europe. The most famous Moorish legacy is Granada’s beautiful Alhambra Palace.
Meanwhile the Christian rulers in the north gained in strength and picked off the principalities one by one. As each was overrun, waves of refugees fled to Morocco, among them leading artisans, who became the catalyst for a flurry of new building. Their rich artistic legacy can be seen in the exquisite plasterwork, carpentry, and zellij of buildings like the Attarine and Sahrij medersas—the most beautiful of the ancient theological colleges in the Medina—as well as many riads and dars built by wealthy merchants, including our own.
The inspector grilled me about changes we intended to make to the riad, then declared that a second, specialist inspector would have to look the place over. And we’d also be needing a supervising architect. Another layer of bureaucracy and expense.
Getting a roqsa might have been complex, but arranging a telephone and internet connection proved no easier. Actually, it seemed remarkable that such a thing was even possible, given that many people in the Medina could not afford water in their homes, but had to go daily to the public fountains.
At least when I arrived at the Maroc Telecom office the doors were open and there were no other customers. Then it registered that there was no one behind the counters. A security guard waddled up and told me to return on Monday. I was nonplussed. The opening hours were given as Monday to Thursday, eight-thirty to four-thirty, with a two-hour break for lunch. It was nine-thirty on a Thursday. What was going on?
Puzzling over this, I walked down to the Café Firdous, where I found David having his morning coffee.
“Well, it’s Thursday,” he said when I told him what happened. “Maybe they’re getting ready for Friday.”
His phone rang. “My next-door neighbor’s builder is removing all the old medluk from their outside wall,” he told me after the call ended, looking distressed.
Particular to Fez, medluk is a mix of sand and lime used as an exterior finish.
“I said I’d pay for it to be restored,” David continued. “I thought we’d agreed, but the builder is taking it all off and replacing it with cement. He says if I want to pay for medluk, that’s my business. The cement can be removed later and new medluk put on.”
I wondered whether the builder was hoping to be paid twice for the same job.
Salim, the engineer who’d inspected our house, was sitting at a nearby table. David called him over and Salim agreed to go and see if he could stop the work. According to David, there were issues like this every day. Old surfaces of buildings were removed, and replaced with new and inappropriate materials. It didn’t help that contractors engaged by the government were paid by the meter, so it was in their interest to remove and replace as much as possible. In a strange way, the increasing wealth of the city was becoming a threat to the survival of the very aspects that made it unique, and therefore historically priceless.
I wished David luck and returned home to meet with a prospective cleaner, someone to mop the floors once or twice a week and perhaps do some laundry. While not averse to doing a bit of the old spit and polish ourselves, Sandy and I needed to concentrate on our building and writing projects.
I had asked around for a reliable and trustworthy person and was put in touch with a teenager called Damia, who brought along her English-speaking boyfriend to translate. As I gave them the guided tour, I stressed that I needed the floor washed with very little or no water, pointing out the bulge in the kitchen ceiling caused by water being liberally strewn across the floor above.
We sat at the table and a vigorous discussion ensued between Damia and her boyfriend, who finally said, “Damia thinks it’s a lot of work and she needs someone to help her.”
I was surprised at this. Khadija had never had any problems on her own. “If she doesn’t want to do the job, that’s all right,” I said, and reluctantly Damia agreed to do it alone.
When she turned up the next morning I explained again the need to minimize water on the upstairs floor, pointing once more at the kitchen wall and ceiling. She disappeared upstairs, and moments later I heard the sound of water being sloshed over the floor. I rushed up and she looked at me in bemusement while I ran around in circles trying unsuccessfully to stop the water getting through the crack in the floor that led to the ceiling. When the flood had been stemmed I took the mop and mimed squeezing it out, saying shrilly, “Petit l’eau.”
Back downstairs, I resumed writing, then was amazed to hear the slosh of water once more. I raced up the stairs two at a time, to see a large puddle disappearing through the crack. Perhaps my previous reaction had been so amusing she wanted a replay. I obliged, struggling to get rid of the water while she stood and watched me. Then I took her back to the kitchen and pointed yet again to where the ceiling was about to collapse. “Pas avec l’eau!” I yelled.
Finally she seemed to get it, and the rest of the cleaning passed without incident—in fact she did an exceptionally thorough job. The only cause for concern was the sound of breaking glass. When I went up to look later, I couldn’t find what had caused it. No doubt the offending object had been whipped out of sight.
The following week, I had a call from the guesthouse owner who’d recommended Damia. She wanted to know if I was happy with her and I said I was, with the exception of the water incident. It transpired that this woman had just lost a large sum of money. She’d been packing to go away and had momentarily left her money belt on her bed. Damia and her boyfriend were there at the time, along with her cook. Several hundred dirhams were gone, along with some foreign currency.
The latter had turned up in an unexpected way the following day. “I’m sure you must have made a mistake and the money is here somewhere,” Damia’s boyfriend said and proceeded straight to a guidebook, inside which, lo and behold, were the foreign notes. He denied there’d been any theft.
“It’s as though the culprit felt guilty and wanted to return some of what they took,” said my friend, who’d decided not to go to the police but was weighing up whether to sack all three. “I doubt
Damia’s boyfriend is the thief, but he’s probably trying to cover for whoever is.”
I decided that until the situation was sorted out I wouldn’t be employing Damia anymore. The telephone conversation shifted to how difficult it was to get good help, and I hung up with the ghost of Somerset Maugham whispering in my ear: “I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.” Was I, despite my best intentions, succumbing to a colonial way of life after all?
It was now the middle of May. Spring had well and truly arrived and the air was redolent with the scent of roses: you could buy kilos of petals at the souk, from which many people distilled their own rosewater for use in cooking and ceremonies. We were asked to dinner by an American couple we’d met. They had spent all day having a cooking lesson from a Berber chef, going around the souks and selecting the best and freshest produce, then being galley slaves while he created the magnificent meal we were invited to share.
The first course was fresh goat’s cheese with herbs, presented with a radiating sun of roasted red capsicum, followed by an eggplant and chili salad, then a mouth-wateringly fresh chicken dish with prunes, roasted almonds, and potatoes. A melon and mint dessert followed.
I sat next to a young Fassi woman of unusual beauty called Ayisha. She wore a dark-red Saudi Arabian tunic and trousers, and had such perfect sculptural arches over her eyes that I had a pang of eyebrow envy. Her English was excellent—she was studying it at university—although she had an American accent from watching soap operas.
Ayisha was twenty-three and from a desperately poor family. She was longing to break free of her confined existence.
“But I don’t want to marry a Moroccan man,” she told me. “They don’t treat women like equals.”
A couple of years previously she had been affianced, as she put it, to a fellow who’d asked her father for her hand. To her father this meant she could forget about studying, so she rebelled against the proposal and insisted on her right to go to university. Her father was unimpressed and their relationship was now strained.
Despite thumbing her nose at her father and pursuing an education, there was one area where Ayisha wasn’t prepared to break with tradition. She was a virgin, she told me, and would remain so until she married. I enjoyed her lively mind as we ranged over everything from the role of women to religion and vegetarianism. Ayisha did not eat meat, as she “empathized with animals acutely,” a considerable attitude shift in a culture that valued animals largely for their utilitarian purposes.
In lots of ways Ayisha typified the young Moroccan women who were causing a seismic upheaval in their extremely traditional culture. This had resulted in thirty-five women being elected to the Moroccan parliament in 2003. And in 2006, fifty women had graduated as religious leaders, the first contemporary female group to be officially trained as such in the Arab world. They could do everything the male imams could, except lead Friday prayers in a mosque. This was an unheard-of prospect just a few short years before.
Morocco is now a leader in the Muslim world for female rights and freedoms. The year 2003 also saw the introduction of a new family law code, known as the Mudwana, a historic piece of legislation that allows women to press charges against their husbands for domestic violence. Before that, a wife needed a witness to such acts before she could lay charges—an impossible situation. Under the Mudwana, women also have equal property rights and custody rights, and no longer have a legal requirement to obey their husbands. Forced marriages are illegal, and polygamy is permitted only if a judge can be convinced that both wives will receive equal treatment. Men cannot divorce their wives just by ritually saying “I divorce thee” three times, as they could before 2003, and they also now have a legal responsibility for any children born outside marriage.
When the Mudwana was introduced thousands marched in support, but tens of thousands of fundamentalists protested, seeing increased freedom for women as a challenge to Koranic teachings, and a slide toward the immorality perceived in Western societies. The king and the government admirably maintained their resolve to ratify the law, although its passage did not change everything overnight: many Moroccan women are illiterate and don’t know their rights, or are afraid to use them.
The simultaneous introduction of women into parliament will hopefully ensure that these reforms are not eroded, but the increasing power of the fundamentalist Wahhabists across the Middle East and other parts of Africa is an ever-present threat. This movement generally believes that women should be submissive and ought not have a role in public life.
“I think we’re going to be great friends,” Ayisha said at the end of the evening, squeezing my hand. I hoped so too, and indeed, a few days later she came to visit at Riad Zany.
I showed her around, and when we entered the tiny room off the stairs from the catwalk I wondered aloud whether it had been a place for prayers.
“It’s too small for prayers,” Ayisha said. “You couldn’t stand to do prostrations. Of course, in the old days there would have been slaves in this house. This was probably where they slept.”
I’d never thought about slaves living in our house, but it made sense. Looking around the room, I saw that it would fit two sleeping people. A third could have slept on the narrow, tiled mezza-nine, which I’d assumed was for storage—but it was long enough for someone to lie on, with a niche on one side to hold a candle and a few clothes.
I looked up at the intricately painted ceiling running along the length of the passageway, illuminated by a couple of arched windows onto the courtyard. Its repeating geometric pattern would have taken ages to create. Had talented slaves done it in their spare time to make their situation more bearable? Or had a kindly owner paid for it to be done, to beautify an otherwise utilitarian space? It would have to remain one of the many mysteries of the house.
Ayisha told me that until the early 1940s every self-respecting Fassi family owned a slave. They bought and sold them on the market like sheep.
“My great-grandparents had a slave,” she said. “My great -grandmother told me that in the old days children were frequently snatched off the streets and sold. One young girl from the power -ful Alouite family was out playing in the street when she was kidnapped.” Ayisha made a snatching gesture, her eyes wide.
“The girl’s father loved her so much, he spent years searching for her. He even dressed up as a beggar and knocked on the doors of houses all over the city to find her. Finally a young woman answered who had an unusually shaped birthmark on the side of her face. He looked into her eyes and realized he had found his daughter.”
I wondered if the father had told his daughter who he was immediately, and whether she believed him, but I didn’t want to interrupt Ayisha’s story.
“Then the father went to King Mohammed V, “ she continued. Mohammed V had ruled during the 1930s and 1940s. “He told the king that one of his family had been stolen and sold into slavery, and the king said, ‘That is enough. From this day I am going to make sure this barbaric practice is outlawed. ‘ “
My interest piqued, I did some research on the subject, then engaged a local guide to take me to the sites of a couple of old slave markets. One of them was hidden away down back alleys near the medieval Muslim college of the Attarine Medersa. Following the guide’s lead, I ducked through a doorway and found myself in a large square surrounded by high walls. There was a smaller adjoining square, enclosed by a raised platform and pillars and resembling a Roman forum. It seemed likely this would have been where the slaves were shackled for display.
I’d read that the majority of Moroccan slaves came from West Africa, brought over the Sahara by traders. On their hellish trek through the desert, they were made to walk on the outside of the caravan to protect the goods within from attack by nomads. Anyone holding up progress was killed. The mortality rate was staggering—up to eighty percent of those taken died on the way.
I was astounded to learn that in addition to the slaves from West Africa more than a million Europeans were taken. These were captured by Corsair pirates between 1530 and 1780, in numerous raids that depopulated coastal towns from Cornwall to Sicily. In the summer of 1625 alone, more than a thousand unfortunates were taken from the west coast of England. Corsair pirates were renegade groups of Moors who’d been expelled by the Spanish. They sold their captives to work as laborers, galley slaves, and concubines.
Imagine going about your business as a Celtic villager and suddenly being whisked off to a completely alien society, unable to communicate with anyone. Given the knowledge of the day, it would have been the modern equivalent of being captured by extraterrestrials.
“Slavery in Morocco was not like elsewhere,” said my guide. “Slaves were treated as part of the family.” Seeing my skeptical expression, he added, “They had a good life. Why would you mis-treat someone who could take it out on your children?”
I raised my eyebrows. If it was such a good life they were going to, why was it necessary to take them by force? On the contrary, I imagined the slave market was an extremely sad affair, with friends and family who had survived the dreadful trek together being forcibly split up. As far as I could see, the only positive thing to come out of slavery in Morocco was the rich legacy of gnawa music, a fusion of African and Arab influences.
The slave markets were still operating at the time of the French occupation in 1912, when they were officially outlawed but in reality only driven underground. The French turned a blind eye to the practice among powerful families and some of their own countrymen, and in the meantime supply dwindled due to the tightening of national borders.
Now the small square was filled with a cheerful jostle of women bartering secondhand clothes, everything from baby boo-ties to elaborately embroidered evening dresses. There was a great deal of chatter and laughter, and it was as much a social occasion as a market, a far cry from the atmosphere the place would have had when slaves were sold here. In the afternoons it was the men’s turn, and they came to buy and sell leather hides.
I was perturbed to learn during later conversations with Moroccans and expats that a form of domestic slavery still exists in Morocco. Some wealthy families “obtain” a young girl from the mountains, who is brought to the house as a domestic help and must do everything from cooking and cleaning to childminding. Human Rights Watch reports that “girls as young as five work 100 or more hours per week, without rest breaks or days off, for as little as six and a half Moroccan dirhams (about 70 U.S. cents) a day.” It’s a difficult thing to police because the girls often have no identity card and so officially don’t exist. If the head of the family where she works is questioned he simply claims the girl is a niece. Some cases of physical and psychological abuse have become public, resulting in an outcry.
In early 2007, the government launched a program called Inqad, meaning “rescue” in Darija, as part of its ten-year National Action Plan for Childhood. The program aims to eradicate the market that deprives little girls of any semblance of education or opportunity. Whether they can achieve this remains to be seen, but it’s a move in the right direction.
The Moroccan government is also attempting to combat the trafficking of men, women, and children to Europe and the Middle East for forced labor and sexual exploitation. While many of those trafficked are Moroccan, others from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia transit through Morocco, and some end up staying in cities like Tangier and Casablanca.
These problems are by no means unique to Morocco. On the other side of the equation, some crimes we take for granted in the West, such as those related to hard drugs, are relatively rare here. The loneliness and alienation that is often the reason for people in wealthy countries turning to drugs does not appear to be as much of a problem in Morocco; people are too busy coping day to day. And the fabric of community is as intricately interlocked as the houses themselves; everyone knows what’s going on with everyone else. There are no instances of people dying and not being discovered for months, or sometimes years, as happens in Western countries. When I was in Fez by myself the neighbors would regularly bang on the door to check that I was all right. It was a bizarre notion to them that I might want to be alone.
Shortly after my visit to the old slave market, I asked a neighbor if he knew anything about the history of our house.
“Oh yes,” he smiled. “When my mother was a child a man called Bennis was the owner. He belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Fez and was a silk trader who often traveled to India. He had three wives.”
My neighbor held up his fingers, nodding at my quizzical expression. “Yes, three. He used to live in a very rich house in another area with the first and second wives. There was a beautiful young woman, a slave from Sudan, working in that house. Bennis paid for her with camels and coral. He decided to make her his third wife, although he was getting old by then and she was very young. To set her up, he bought your house and gave it to her. Neither of the other wives knew about the third wife.”
So Bennis’s third wife had gone from being a Sudanese village girl to a slave, to mistress of her own house—our riad. Quite a transition in one lifetime. I wondered how Bennis had explained his repeated absences to his other wives. Or maybe he was away on business so often it wasn’t a big deal. But surely someone had seen him coming and going. Fez wasn’t that large, and like I said, everyone knew everyone else’s business.
“Did they have any children?” I asked.
“Two daughters. But Bennis disappeared when they were young. He went to India when he was seventy and didn’t come back. Some people said he found another wife there, others said he died of an illness. And there were those who said his ship sank.”
I imagined the beautiful Sudanese woman bringing up her two daughters and waiting and wondering why her husband didn’t come home, until one day she realized he wasn’t going to.
“So what happened to her after he disappeared?”
“My mother said she stayed for a while, living quietly, and then one day she was gone. She and her daughters moved to Casablanca to make a new life for themselves.”
Thereafter, as I went about my daily chores in the riad, I thought about that former slave girl. I wished I could bring her across the passage of time for a short while, to show her what we were doing to preserve her beautiful house. I had the feeling she would approve.
Some time later, I found out the real reason Ayisha disliked her father. When she was a child, she told me, she witnessed him beating her mother.
“And he and my brothers also beat my older sister,” she said. “To escape, she accepted the first offer of marriage that came along. That was a big mistake. Now she lives in the mountains with her husband’s family and they treat her very badly. She must wear a full veil and is virtually a prisoner there.”
There’d also been a couple of attempts by the husband’s family to poison her sister, Ayisha told me. This reminded me of India, where they burn brides, usually because the husband or mother -in- law thinks the girl’s family hasn’t provided a sufficient dowry, or they have fallen behind with their dowry payments. Burning her can be disguised as a domestic accident and the husband can marry again without dishonoring himself.
“I was determined not to be weak like my mother,” Ayisha continued. “I told my brothers and my father that if they laid one hand on me I would go to the police, and so they are wary of me.”
It took a particular determination to resist the weight of tradition working against Ayisha. And being some years younger than her sister, she had grown up with access to mobile phones and email, things that make a significant difference to the lives of Moroccan girls. While many are forbidden to have relationships with men before marriage, they can now communicate without their fathers’ or brothers’ knowing.
Ayisha confessed to a long-distance relationship she’d been having with an Englishman she met the previous summer. She had only spent a few days with him but he had asked her to marry him. She was thrilled about this, seeing it as a means of escape from her limited life and prospects.
My antenna went up, and I told her the story of an American friend of ours who had been working in London and on holiday in Morocco when he met a beautiful young woman on a beach. They had only a few words of French in common but that didn’t stop them becoming madly infatuated with each other. A few months later, they married in a traditional ceremony with white horses, silver thrones, and the blood-spotted sheet to prove her virginity.
After the honeymoon, our friend took his bride back to London. I could imagine her arriving in the strange city full of hope for her new life with her kind and intelligent husband. The following year, she had a son. Whereas in Morocco she would have had the support of the women in her family, here she had no one. Her husband’s family were in Los Angeles and he worked long hours, leaving her alone with the baby all day in a small flat in an unfriendly city. She went slowly crazy.
Eventually she hooked up with a local junkie and abandoned her husband. For two years he fought through the courts for custody of his son. Then one morning his wife arrived on the doorstep and handed him the child. Her boyfriend did not want him and she was unable to care for him any longer.
Our friend moved back to Los Angeles with his son. When he
remarried a couple of years later, his new wife and the boy did not get on, and in his early teens the boy ran away from home, joined a gang, and roamed the streets, constantly in trouble with the law.
Ayisha was intrigued by this story but could not see how it might apply to her. “My English is good,” she said. “And I know how to make friends.”
I tried to get across to her that England was not all light, color, and warmth like Morocco, quite the opposite. It could be cold, gray, and expensive, and social acceptance was often difficult for immigrants. Because of their skittishness about terrorism, many English tended to view Muslims with suspicion. Ayisha was dreaming of a London that existed only in her head.