Avuncular American

January in Black & White

Our just-concluded January series of four films, every Monday evening, on the theme of race relations, ended with a record turnout for "Prince Among Slaves," the award-winning PBS documentary about the African prince who, thanks to his Muslim faith and literacy in Arabic, was taken for a "Moorish" prince.

The case of mistaken identity led to his eventual freedom, because "his emancipation would greatly please the Emperor of Morocco."  It's a story we love to tell, because it involves Morocco, the United States, and the Tangier American Legation.

Earlier this month, we also showed feature films "Goodbye Bafana" (a worthy but perhaps factually flawed film about Nelson Mandela and his white jailer) and "The Defiant Ones," a 1958 Oscar-winner with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, chain-gang escapees in racist America.

And we couldn't let Martin Luther King's birthday pass without another showing of "Freedom Riders," always moving, about the struggle to integrate interstate buses in the American South in 1961.

We got an early start with African American History Month, in large part due to travel in February.  And we're glad that the Tangier public was more interested in content than in timing.

Gerald Loftus

Play It Again, In Casablanca

As we (we, as in Dar America and Villa des Arts) did with Patton, the "Morocco In Hollywood" series continued with a showing of Casablanca, the classic 1942 film that counts among many people's top-rated films of all time.  How to present Casablanca to Casawis?

One way is to tell them that the film should have been called "Tangier..."  No, I didn't actually say that, but did tell them about the real-life "Dean's Bar" and the wartime reality of Tangier as a haven for refugees from war torn Europe.

So after enjoying the film for the nth time (I never tire of it), we settled down to a discussion of the context of Casablanca.  For many in the audience, Moroccan Casawis (inhabitants of Casablanca) in the majority, it was their first time seeing the film; for others, the first time seeing it in the original English with French subtitles.

Our little trivia contest didn't disappoint.  Q: Which cast member was the subject of a Gestapo assasination plot?  A: Conrad Veidt, eminent actor and exile from Nazi Germany, who, ironically, plays German villain Major Heinrich Strasser in the film.

People are still astounded that Casablanca was shot entirely in a Hollywood studio, and that today's "re-creation" of Rick's Café Américain in Casa is as fictitious - and as seductively beautiful - as the original.  The film has given its namesake city its brand - just Google "Casablanca" and the film trumps the city by far - and "Rick's Cafés" are found in places as widespread as Capetown South Africa and Starkville Missisippi.

Casawis are vaguely aware of this, and sometimes have to ward off wondrous comments from foreign acquaintances who imagine them rubbing elbows with the likes of Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.  No, they answer, we just live in a sprawling crazy metropolis of 4 (or is it 13?) million people suffocating from automobile and other pollution.  But they are happy with the reflected romanticism from this 71 year old film.

Gerald Loftus at Villa des Arts, Casablanca. Photo by Vanessa Paloma

Another major disconnect in film vs. reality was in the context between the United States and France between 1940 and 1944.  For four long years, official US policy was to maintain relations with the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain or, after those relations were severed by the American landings in North Africa, with Vichy successors in place in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.  Until late 1944, well after the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris, US policy could be summed up as "ABDG" - Anybody But de Gaulle."  And anything to keep the French fleet from falling into the hands of Germany.

But this wouldn't have been apparent to the huge (upwards of 90 million tickets per week) American movie-going public of 1942-43.  Premiering only three weeks after the November 8, 1942 Operation Torch landings, Casablanca is unabashedly anti-Vichy, to the point where Pétain's portrait smiles down on a Free French agent being gunned down by Vichy police in the street, and where - in case you didn't get it - a bottle of "Vichy water" is unceremoniously thrown into the trash bin at the end of the film.

Very rousing, and you'd have to be a hard-hearted stoic not to get a lump in your throat at the jousting "Watch On the Rhine" sung by Nazis vs. "La Marseillaise" belted out by the Rick's crowd - the latter winning out in volume and passion.  But as Richard Raskin, writing in Film History, noted:

At the time Casablanca was playing in movie theatres across the U.S., men like Victor Laszlo were hunted down by the police of Darlan and Giraud, the French High Commissioners kept in power by Roosevelt.

"Casablanca and United States Foreign Policy," Dr. Richard Raskin, Aarhus University Denmark, Film History, Volume 4, 1990.

Despite OWI's (the US propaganda arm, Office of War Information) enthusiasm for the film ("presents an excellent picture of the spirit of the underground movement..."), the Free French found a less welcoming stance on the ground in North Africa, where OWI - perhaps worried about that bottle of Vichy water - didn't want Casablanca to be screened.

70-plus years later, we can sweep away the details of history, perhaps, and lull ourselves into thinking that Rick and Capitaine Renault do go off to battle Nazis together, that "beginning of a beautiful friendship."

General de Gaulle - who liked the film too, and ordered a copy for his Free French HQ in London - would have to wait until October 1944 to finally achieve US recognition.  But don't let that get in the way of your enjoying what still may be the perfect film of all time.

Gerald Loftus

Patton Interpretation: Crash Course

"Morocco in Hollywood," the American Consulate General and Dar America's mini-series of World War II-themed films shot in or depicting Morocco, got a start Saturday evening - with a showing of Franklin Schaffner's award-winning "Patton" - at Casablanca's beautiful Villa des Arts.  To reach a wider audience, we sought out a French-subtitled version of the film, with commentary before and after in French.  This also required a crash course in Patton-ology, thanks to a selective reading of Carlo D'Este's Patton: A Genius for War and other works.

Anyone familiar with the film - and George C. Scott's Oscar-winning performance - will know that his portrayal of Patton was true to life, and that Patton the man and the general was a bundle of contradictions.  Both profane and pious, volcanic and poetic, adjectives to describe Patton include some, like enfant terrible and turbulent, which work nicely in both languages.

Another one is perfectionnist: Patton, who honed his French as America's first tank commander amidst the trenches of World War I France, had a look at the phrase booklet prepared for US troops while crossing the Atlantic en route to the November 1942 Operation Torch landings in North Africa.  He was so infuriated by French spelling and grammar mistakes that he personally oversaw the corrections to the pamphlet.  All while leading the first large-scale amphibious landing that the US attempted in the European theatre of the war.

The complex character of Patton was a natural focus of a group of students in psychology.  Unfortunately, while the students remained respectfully mum in front of their teacher, their prof let loose a diatribe of anti-American shrink-speak, something having to do with torture by US medical doctors in 2005 Iraq.  We firmly led a flanking manouver, getting the audience back to 1945 and Patton.

Patton & Morocco: the scene in the film is quite positive, even the line where Patton tells the Sultan that he sees Morocco as a cross between "Hollywood and the Bible."  Patton is decorated with the Order of Ouissam Alaouite, and the citation reads:

"Les Lions dans leurs tanières tremblent en le voyant approcher" (The lions in their dens tremble at his approach).  From a contemporary Time Magazine article.

Patton wrote - prophetically, and very much in character - to his wife of his encounter with the Sultan: "It was the most colorful thing I have ever seen and would be worth a million in Hollywood."

Offscreen, Patton was not so upbeat on the Maghreb, with disparaging views of "the Arabs" expressed as he traversed Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.  And, despite his knowledge of France from his WW I days, he was not above entertaining ideas of "buying off" senior French officials.  J. Rives Childs, who as Chargé d'Affaires at the Legation in Tangier was the senior US diplomat dealing with Morocco, was appalled: "I don't think I have ever met anyone more repellent... His one obsession was war."

Well, Patton would have to agree with the latter; he was, as Eisenhower said of him, "a born soldier."  And destined to be buried as one: despite his postwar, accidental death, Patton is buried among his soldiers, at the ABMC military cemetery in Luxembourg, scene of much Battle of the Bulge fighting.

Next up: "Morocco in Hollywood," Part Deux.  A showing of Casablanca in Casablanca.  What can I say that they haven't already heard about this legendary film?  Maybe I'll tell them about Dean's Bar in Tangier.

Gerald Loftus

Al-Halqa: In the Storyteller's Circle

Please don't call Al-Halqa, as one audience member tried to during the Q&A with film maker Thomas Ladenburger, part of Morocco's "begging" scene.  No, as Simon-Pierre Hamelin, writer and manager of Tangier's Librairie des Colonnes bookstore responded, it is an art form that predates the written word by thousands of years, and is a respectable - if dying - occupation.  The film showing at Tangier's Cinémathèque was sponsored by the Fondation Jardin Majorelle.

As depicted in this award-winning documentary, storyteller Abderahim would be highly offended to be called a beggar.  His efforts to coach his son in the art and business of Al-Halqa make clear that he applies the same care and preparation to his work as any standup comedian or one-man-show artist.  Timing, cadence, choice of "script," audience - it all goes into making this an occupation that puts food on the table for his photogenic family of six.

Working the crowd at the famous Marrakesh square of Jamaa Al-Fna, Abderahim is in competition with snake charmers, fire-eaters, Gnaoua musicians, and, in a first for this film viewer, a man who gulps down boiling water directly from a kettle.  These people, though they pass around the hat, are no more beggars than me, when I plead for donations to our museum "poor box."  You gotta pay for culture, right?

The problem with Al-Halqa artists is that the competition is not just the other shows of the public square, but all the other distractions of modern life.  Telling stories that date back centuries - as colorful as the setting might be, will a 17 year old take his eyes off his damn tablet?

And despite being anointed with UNESCO Intangible Heritage status, Morocco's Halqa street performers are not above being swept away to make room for other, noisier or more "picturesque" acts.

Thomas Ladenburger has provided us a loving portrait of these people who guard an ancient tradition, despite the challenges of modern life.  Watch Al-Halqa: In the Storyteller's Circle for a glimpse at a Morocco that few tourists can penetrate, and which may soon go the way of other lost treasures of the intangible kind.

Gerald Loftus

They Were Promised the Sea

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) film fest screening in New Orleans of Kathy Wazana's beautiful documentary "They Were Promised the Sea" was my chance to see the film I had missed when it was shown at Tangier's 2012 Moroccan National Film Festival.  There, it was shown under its French title, "Pour Une Nouvelle Séville," which gives an excellent indication of the story line.

The Seville of the French title is that of Moorish Spain, when Muslim al-Andalus was the "Ornament of the World," and home to coexisting communities of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  This convivencia ended when Jews and Muslims were expelled starting in the late 15th century.  For many Jews, Morocco provided refuge for centuries, and it is from this transplanted population that filmmaker Kathy Wazana hails, growing up in Casablanca and moving to Canada as a little girl.

Filmed in Morocco and Israel, Wazana interviews Jews and Muslims about their respective memories of each other.  We are used to imagining urban Jews from Casablanca and Tangier finding new homes from Tel Aviv to Toronto, but They Were Promised the Sea takes us to places like isolated, mountainous Illigh, whose mellah or deserted Jewish quarter is now in ruins.

From the wilds of the Atlas mountains to... the borderlands of Israel.  The sea that Moroccan Jews were promised was the Mediterranean, perhaps a new home in Haifa.  Instead, many were shunted off to communities exposed to hostile fire from neighboring Arab countries.

Many of the Moroccan Muslims interviewed express regret at the loss of their former neighbors.  The numbers are astounding: Morocco lost upwards of 300,000 of its people to Israel, France, Canada, Venezuela and a number of other destinations in the space of a few years.  Essaouira lost half of its population.

Some of the Moroccan Israelis talk about their departure in terms of "everybody is going," often prompted by the Jewish Agency's enticements.  These are not the sophisticated urban "palace Jews" that Ralph Toledano writes about in his recent novel "Un Prince à Casablanca," but people who provided Morocco with a range of skilled trades and occupations across the entire country.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the film is the commitment of some of Israel's second and third generation Moroccan Jews to maintain links with their parents' and grandparents' homeland.  Moroccan cuisine and music have a home in Israel, and many of these young Israelis embrace their roots.  A visit to a windswept Jewish cemetery in Tetouan provides one of the most touching images, a young Israeli woman conversing with the Moroccan custodian whose care for his charges is evident.

The same young woman gets a political tongue-lashing from the late Simon Levy, then director of the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca.  Perhaps the only jarring moment in an otherwise elegiac film, Levy takes strong issue with Zionism, and includes the earnest young non-Zionist in with all Israelis in what he sees as the ending of what had been Jews' home for centuries.

Fortunately, the films closes with another great image, and with some lovely music featuring a Moroccan Andalusian orchestra - with a rabbi providing vocals.  Echoes of convivencia. 

The MESA screening, with filmmaker Kathy Wazana present, was sponsored by AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, of which TALIM is the research center in Morocco.

Gerald Loftus

Colloque à Tanger: Francophones Cut Up the Town

Tangier, since last Thursday, has been the haunt of people haunted by the spirits of The Beats, in particular Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, artists and writers who made Tangier their temporary home in the 1950s, fleeing an America - especially true for Burroughs - that was definitely not quite ready for their iconoclastic lifestyle.

 

Moussem à Sidi Ali Harazem, Brion Gysin, 1968, Tangier American Legation museum (loaned to the Galerie Delacroix Brion Gysin expo through 4 May 2013)

Organized by the Marseille Centre International de Poésie (CIPM), the colloque brought together poets, translators, scholars, and performance artists.  The latter included Americans Patti Smith and Anne Waldman, both connected with Beat artists and writers.  Anne Waldman makes a career of it at Naropa University's "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics." 

Obviously, these are people whose idea of the written, spoken, or sung word is not bound by things like punctuation - Kerouac's famous scroll manuscript for On The Road was written without such frills as "chapters" or even "pages."  Several of the sessions were devoted to the "Cut up" school of poetry of Brion Gysin fame, and it was fun to hear (though the Académie Française would cringe) such Frenchifications as the infinitive "cutupiser" - perhaps découpage is too American, too artsy-craftsy ("how to decoupage," for example).  Cut up appears to be to poetry - a random collage of words - what monkeys-with-darts is to investing in Wall Street.

Speaking of On the Road, Walter Salles' film was shown with the Cinémathèque's new Sony 4K digital cinema projector - wow.  The timing - on the eve of the Colloque - helped us learn a bit more about Beat lore, and especially William Burroughs' back story: Viggo Mortensen's enigmatic portrayal of the oddball character who represents Burroughs gives an eerie premonition of WB's "William Tell" shooting of his wife Joan.  Then again, as Burroughs tells it, had he not shot his wife, he wouldn't have started writing, and thanks to his writing, we now have the term Interzone, not only the title of a book but the best one-word summary of how to describe Tangier in its wild years as the International Zone bolt-hole for Beats.

Organizers felt it necessary to bring forth, for the n^th time, Tangier Beats/Bowles perennial Mohamed Mrabet, whose stories were told in translation, with the storyteller referring to himself in the third person - "Mrabet then said...".  Putting it kindly, it is not clear whether his meaning is lost in translation, or whether there is no there, there.  Like Chauncey Gardener in Being There, as Roger Ebert put it: "simplicity is mistaken for profundity." Mrabet continues to tell the same "stories" to polite applause, even though much of the audience - including those who share Mrabet's native Moroccan Arabic - is left utterly puzzled as to what he has just uttered.

But I digress.  The Colloque à Tanger was a worthy effort by people who wanted to recreate what Burroughs and Gysin did in their 1975 Colloque de Tanger, which was actually held in Geneva.  Books were published, concerts were held (we were happy to "discover" Patti Smith, a dynamo performer with a poet's sensibility), and works were read.

The Colloque provided us an impetus to mount a Gysin - Burroughs exhibit of art works and photos that we already had, scattered around TALIM's museum and library.  And like the little - just published for the Colloque - Khbar Bladna book of Gysin works, photos, and memorabilia, we leave you with Ira Cohen's photo of the artist in a mask, reproduced for the book from a photo at TALIM's museum.

Colloque Facebook page.

Gerald Loftus

Kidnap Scrapbook: Letters on the Perdicaris Affair

 

Ellen Perdicarisby Ion Perdicaris, n.d., featured in Enchantment: Pictures from the Tangier American Legation Museum

Thanks to an alert reader, we've been made aware of a rare book on sale: "Archive of letters sent to his wife during the period of his capture: Ion Perdicaris."  Only $5,802 to the right bidder.  "Approximately 300 items, most autograph letters, mounted or inlaid in an album, folio (457 × 324 mm). Original full dark green roan, green watered silk doublures and endpapers, turn-ins with decorative roll all around in blind, all edges gilt. Hinges weak, spine rather worn. Very good.  Bookseller Inventory # 30719."

 

The notes accompanying the book advertisement provide a very nice summary of the Perdicaris Affair:

A contemporary assemblage of more than 300 letters of sympathy and eventually congratulation, addressed to Ellen (formerly Varley, née Rouse), wife of the Greek-born hostage Ion Hanford Perdicaris (1840–1925), the central figure in a notable kidnapping known as the Perdicaris incident. Perdicaris's Greek father had emigrated from Athens to the United States, becoming a US citizen and making a fortune as one of the organizers of the Trenton Gas Company in New Jersey. Ion lived the easy life of a playboy until the American Civil War, when the family's property in South Carolina was threatened with confiscation by the government of the Confederate States of America. In order to forestall any confiscation, Ion Perdicaris travelled to Greece to renounce his United States citizenship and acquire Greek nationality. He subsequently moved to Tangier, and fell in love with an Englishwoman, Ellen Varley, wife of the eminent telegraph engineer C. F. Varley. The Varleys divorced in 1873 and Ellen and her four children settled with Perdicaris in Tangier, in a house full of exotic animals. Fascinated by Moroccan culture, Perdicaris wrote several books on the country and became the unofficial head of Tangier's foreign community.

On 18 May 1904, Perdicaris and Ellen's elder son Cromwell were kidnapped from their home by bandits under the control of Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, an outlaw considered by many to be the rightful heir to the throne of Morocco. Several of Perdicaris's servants were injured by Raisuli's men, and Ellen was left behind alone. Shortly after leaving Tangier, Perdicaris broke his leg in a horse fall. Raisuli demanded of Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco $70,000 ransom, safe conduct, and control of two of Morocco's wealthiest districts. During his captivity Perdicaris came to admire and befriend Raisuli, an early example of what has since become known as Stockholm syndrome. US president Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the presidency upon the assassination of William McKinley, responded to the apparent kidnap of a US citizen with a classic display of gunboat diplomacy. He quickly dispatched several warships and Marine companies, though with little idea of what US forces could achieve on such hostile foreign soil.

Secretly advised that Perdicaris had relinquished American citizenship 40 years earlier, Roosevelt brushed that aside, pointing out that Raisuli had believed Perdicaris to be a US citizen when he kidnapped him. Roosevelt succeeded in getting Britain and France to put pressure on the sultan to accept Raisuli's demands, which he agreed to do on 21 June 1904. Roosevelt's "big stick" diplomacy and his reported demand for "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead" helped him secure the presidency in his own right in a landslide victory in the election of November that year. Perdicaris and his family moved to England shortly after the incident, eventually settling in Tunbridge Wells. He died in London in 1925. The story was loosely adapted to film in the 1975 motion picture The Wind and the Lion, with Sean Connery in the role of Raisuli.

Here's a recent film (12 min. by Abdelkader Salah Haddouch) showing Raisuli's palace in  Tazrout, near Chefchaouen, where Perdicaris was held hostage.  We are fond of telling the Perdicaris story to visitors, and the Library of Congress deems the Perdicaris Affair important enough to dedicate a Chronicling America page to it.  Plenty of links to period news stories, where we learn that

The English housekeeper [phoned] the operator to inform the American Consulate... and Consul General Gummere, accompanied by guards, hastened to the scene.  Long before they arrived, the band had fled, carrying their prisoners into the mountain region...

That gives us another perspective on Mr. Gummere, galloping off to save an Amcit.

Now, does anyone want to get us this book?

Gerald Loftus

Madrid 10, Tangier 0: Victory for All

If skydiving in a hijab presents no problems to certain intrepid Muslim women, then why should kicking a football around while wearing a headscarf make some European referees lose their cool?

These were not, however, the concerns behind the organizers of Saturday's friendly match between the women's teams of Atletico Madrid (10) and (0, ouch!)Tangier's Gazelles du Detroit.  No, the whole point - the gool, as the Spanish would say - was to serve as the backdrop for a film on Tangier's soccer madness - for Spanish football, that is.  Just try to rouse anyone away from the TV screens of Tangier's cafes when Barca and Madrid are facing off.

Spanish film maker Juan Gautier is making Tanger Gool, and what better star to choose than Tangier's own Soufia Issami, who made such an impression in the 2011 On the Edge (Sur la Planche), also shot in Tangier.

Bravo to Spain's Cervantes Institute for (a) organizing Gautier's film and the women's match and (b), for mounting a great digital photography course, which went on a Saturday field trip to cover the match.  The Legation's budding photojournalist Mohammed Jadidi (below, in a great picture by photography teacher Paco Rodriguez) was part of the scene.

Gerald Loftus

Horsemen of an Apocalypse: les Chevaux de Dieu

 

Poster: Cinebel.be

BBC News, May 16 2003:

At least 41 people have been killed and about 100 injured in suicide bomb attacks in Morocco's largest city, Casablanca, local officials say.

Ten years ago, the news of Morocco's first taste of post 9/11 terror hit the country hard, and exposed the dangers of religious extremism grafted on to extreme poverty.

Nabil Ayouch, in his film Les Chevaux de Dieu (Horses of God, official trilingual site) which had its Moroccan debut this week at Tangier's 14th annual National Film Festival, provides a searing portrait of some of the young suicide bombers and their trajectory from street urchin to urban shahid.

One of the strengths of this remarkable film is the way we come to know the group of kids who start out on the mean streets (no, mud alleys) of Sidi Moumen.

Terrorists, you will please note, were once kids, and not necessarily from those spooky madrassas in Pakistan or Afghanistan where they spend all day reciting scripture.  No, kids who play pickup football (okay, soccer).  Whose parents come from a variety of low-or-no-income situations (single mother prostitute, senile father, soldier brother, just to name a few).

Some future terrorists, through luck and/or skill, can wind up kicking the ball with Bayern Munich, and maybe avoid terrorism altogether.  Others, not quite so lucky, can get picked up by the brothers, whether in the prison recruiting grounds or when the bros "help" them get out of trouble with the police.  But this social work sometimes has a deadly mission, as in the case of the Casablanca Fourteen.  Maybe they will have to repay the favor someday with their lives.

Nabil Ayouch opened the film premiere by saying that he wanted to give a non-Hollywoodian treatment to the suicide bombers: instead of anonymous, dehumanized robots, he "provides a human face" to people who have to be counted among the victims.  Their jihadist masterminds send these poor lost souls off to their deaths with a smile, having built up their self-esteem for the one - first and last - time of their lives.

A clue to the sensibility that informs this film is the book on which it is based, Mahi BineBine's "Les etoiles de Sidi Moumen."

"In Sidi Moumen, I discovered a Morocco that I did not know, which shocked me, a sort of Calcutta,'' said the writer, who took five years ''of pain and difficult writing to put an urban nightmare into black and white." (Reading Morocco, April 25 2010).

Mahi BineBine has given the highest praise to Nabil Ayouch for his film, which doesn't reproduce the book but transforms its spirit to film.

Tahir Shah, who lives amidst another bidonville or shantytown on the fringes of Casablanca, writes of urban redevelopment plans to raze the ramshackle neighborhoods:

For six months the engineers have been toiling, building a series of plush apartment blocks... homes for the wealthy that will — soon — overlook our lives. It’s not the high rise apartments for a new wave of Casa Trash [nouveau riche] that worry me, so much as what’s going to happen to the hundreds of ordinary people who live in the bidonville.
Our maid Zenab just told me that a man with a clipboard came round and asked her questions…. how much she earns, how many people in her family have jobs, and whether she has relatives elsewhere in town. She came to work this morning and broke down sobbing, damping her eyes with the corner of her headscarf.  ’They said we will have to leave in a few months,’ she said. ‘But where will we go?’

That's a question best answered by talents such as Nabil Ayouch and Mahi BineBine.

Gerald Loftus

Free at Last

We got an early start in marking Martin Luther King day this year.  There was great interest in our 2011 screening of Freedom Riders, so we decided that an encore was due for those who missed Stanley Nelson's award-winning documentary.

Our monthly "Movie Night" had an added come-on: distribution of the excellent State Department publication "Free at Last," along with its Arabic and French translations.

We would have wanted more young Moroccans to show up, but as it was, we had an appreciative audience, some of whom said that this should become an annual event.  That's fine with us.

There is great interest in Morocco in this chapter of American history, and some participants noted that Morocco has far to go in its treatment of, for example, sub-Saharan Africans who wind up in Morocco in their attempt to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.

We plan to carry other stories that touch on the African American experience, especially as it concerns Morocco.  The Prince Among Slaves continues to fascinate, and we will soon post a piece about black American soldiers in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa in 1942.  And of course, maybe America's first African American President might be persuaded to head the US delegation to Tangier in 2021 for the bicentennial of the Legation!  We'll keep trying to plant the idea...

Gerald Loftus