Postcard from Marrakech

 

Having recently lost my livelihood and career for standing up to Woke – a story I hope to relate at some point – I needed a quick break abroad before embarking on the next stage of life – whatever on earth that might be. So I decided to go to Marrakech in Morocco. 

As regular readers will know, my policy is to visit at least one country a year new to me, and this would be number 42 (previous countries: the EU 27, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, USA, Mexico, Malaysia, UAE, Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Serbia, Montenegro, Turkey). It would be my first sojourn into Africa. 

I’d booked four nights at what looked like the best riad in Marrakech, one on the edge of the walled old town. I arrived late on Saturday night and was driven there from the airport by a man with excellent English who I liked and gave me tips and advice, such as be careful in the old town, where youths would offer to guide you out of its mazey streets and aggressively demand money for doing so at the end. 

The riad (a house built around a central courtyard and converted into a hotel) was indeed delightful, as was its food I was served on arriving there. Only the next day did I start to hate Marrakech. First, I walked into the old town. Most of the passageways are extremely narrow yet locals on mopeds and scooters constantly buzz past you. You can’t see around because the walls of the buildings are very high. It quickly becomes disorienting, and unsettling, oppressive even. Youths called out to me: “The medina is closed,” or more likely “The medina is close,” indicating that they will guide you. I politely declined. 

I didn’t go too far into the old town and just about managed to retrace my steps back to my riad. Then I wandered into the city, the ‘new town’. The traffic is horrible, in every sense. Scores of cars, scooters, mopeds, bikes, even horse-drawn carts. You can tell a lot about a country from the way its people drive. Here everyone is out for themselves. They swerve in and out of lanes to gain small distances, overtaking and undertaking. Horns being sounded are the punctuation of the road, commas of the commute. I didn’t see any accidents, but they must occur all the time. 

Pavements are broken and irregular. On them sit locals in dirty clothes with their ‘shops’ laid out in front of them like a bad car boot sale, well-worn bits and pieces that even if they sell must make them no more than a pittance. 

Cats and, even more heartbreakingly, dogs run wild, although the dogs in particular look so listless and bedraggled they just lie there in whatever shade from the hot sun they can find. They are unloved. Some plots of land just off the road are dumping grounds for all the filth you can imagine (including tons of plastic). The stench is sometimes unbearable. 

 

Many women are clad in their Islamic garments of oppression, some in the full niqab, their entire view of the world garnered from a tiny slit in front of their eyes, the rest blackness. Imagine your peripheral vision extinguished, how frightening and bleak that must be. 

Westerners there were few, indicating that I’d come to a part of Morocco that is largely avoided in preference for perhaps the all-inclusive resorts where you could be blissfully unaware of reality. I missed them, I missed people like me. I’m by no means saying all locals are bad people – the hotel staff, for example, were all very nice – but it’s the culture of the country that is the problem. The wise will know what I mean, the less wise may not. 

I wanted to buy some sun cream, but I couldn’t find any. There was a Shell garage near my riad – ah good, I thought, an internationally recognised symbol, and surely a place which would sell the Sunday Sport, charcoal briquettes and car screenwash (I’m joking) and maybe sun cream, but when I got there, there was just one old bloke sat outside with a petrol pump in his hand. No shop. 

Back at the riad I tried to relax a little before deciding on my next move. Sitting by the rooftop pool I was plagued by flies and the wail of the calls to prayer, which happened several times a day, as early as 6am. They can sound unearthly and odd, like a drunk Dutchman yodelling out of a cow’s bottom. I never saw anyone actually praying but I certainly heard the request to do so. 

I decided to take another walk, entering the old town from a different entrance. It was still smelly, chaotic and poverty-stricken. I eyed the only ATM I’d seen but decided not to use the dusty and decrepit looking machine. Then I made my mistake. I started trying to retrace my steps out of the old town but possibly took a wrong turn. I was confused. I showed weakness – a voice called out: “Hey, not that way!” A teenage boy told me in broken English the way out wasn’t that way, it was this way. He beckoned me and I followed. And then they’ve got you in their web, because they can now take you further away from the exit but eventually lead you to another one some distance away. Which is exactly what happened. 

After following him for just a short time, you are more lost than you were and you feel like you can’t then take the chance to go it alone. The suffocating, high-walled, perplexing old town almost seems to have been expressly designed to strand and persecute outsiders. “One minute” till we were out, he assured me. Two minutes later it was “three minutes” away. If I’d been sensible I would have ditched him, went into something resembling a shop and asked them directions (as my taxi driver had advised me to do). Why didn’t I? I don’t know, some notion that I didn’t want to be rude to this kind, helpful boy, some notion that if I’d tried to evade him after he’d shown me some of the way he would have become aggressive and possibly violent, calling on his fellow, lurking street urchins? Some deep-seated notion of giving money to the poor?

After about five minutes we finally arrived at an old town exit, one a long way from the one I’d been aiming to use. I wearily asked, “How much?” He demanded 400 Dirham (over £30!); I gave him 100, which was too much as it was. I should have given him no more than 20 – well, I should have given him nothing at all, I shouldn’t have interacted with him, but I foolishly did. When you’re a stranger in a strange land you cleave towards those who promise security. 

The incident shook me, and that evening I made a decision: for the rest of the holiday I would barely leave my riad. There was nothing more to see, there was nothing pleasing to encounter. So on the Monday I only had an hour’s walk sticking rigidly to the polluted main road; on Tuesday I stayed in my well-appointed prison all day; and on Wednesday I got a taxi to the airport six hours before my flight was due to leave. (I’d been promised by the riad that the fare would be 100 Dirham, but the driver informed me it would be 150.) The airport is modern, plush, wildly overstaffed and seems to have more European travellers than Heathrow Terminal 4 did the last time I was there. How pleasant it was to again see women choosing to dress as they wanted, as opposed to dressing as instructed by their patriarchal overlords. 

Brand me a soft, spoilt First Worlder if you like. Maybe I am. (“You’ve gone to a new continent and spent 99% of your time around your hotel pool? You lunatic” a friend messaged.) Maybe even a coward. But as I sat on my sun lounger I began to ruminate on matters: this is the Third World. Britain lets in thousands of people from areas like this every single month. Most of the Refugees Welcome types who protest anti-immigrant protesters know what they’re doing – they want to destroy the West – but there are also the less shouty types who believe that they are driven by kindness, and maybe they are. But they have no idea what they are doing, they have no idea of the damage they are doing to the future of civilisation. (“The mollycuddled West, all heart and no brain,” Jake Wallis Simons has written.) They need to come to Morocco. 

 

Douglas Murray was criticised for berating Dave Smith for never having visited Gaza yet pontificating on it, but he had a point. Unless you have personally witnessed the feel and culture of another land you can’t understand it, and you can’t compare it to your own. 

Wealthy actress Emma Thompson slated Britain as a “cake-filled misery-laden grey old island”; her worldview is askew. She, and many more Brits like her, take for granted the privileges and pleasures of her country that was unique in the history of the world as a haven of relative peace, tranquillity and contentment (note the ‘was’). Spend a week in downtown Marrakech and unless you have the belief that crossing the English Channel magically washes out all the behaviours, beliefs and traditions of the culture you are coming from, most British people would agree that we’d rather not import this sort of culture. 

Even atop my riad it wasn’t a complete escape, and I don’t mean because of the flies or smell. On my last day I heard an alarming altercation from below, a man and a woman yelling at each other for a much longer duration than you’d expect if, say, a scooter had collided with a person, as might have happened. Angry shouting tends to quickly burn out; not here, it went on for at least ten minutes. 

When I described my Marrakech experience to a friend she said it sounded ‘exactly what my stereotype of the region already is, which is one of the reasons I’ve never been tempted to go there’. That word ‘stereotype’ was interesting. People in the West have been ‘educated’ out of their common sense, have been told to ignore their instincts – even told that those instincts are evil. They’ve been robbed of their defence mechanisms. Extended over an entire nation, or the continent of Europe, the result has been the borders crisis you now see. 

Friends on the Right often inaccurately say Britain is practically a Third World country now – I’ve been guilty of saying so myself. Britain will never become Morocco. For one thing, despite what Ed Milliband might tell you, Britain will never get as hot, a likely, partial driver of behaviour and customs. And our history is too rich, our traditions too ingrained, our ways too embedded. But that’s not to say both geographical pockets of the country won’t be transformed (and have been) and democratic processes are warped (as has also happened). 

Visit Morocco and imbibe its real culture. You may not like it but it’ll serve as a reminder as to why strict immigration controls in Britain are a good idea.  

Further reflections: 

Morocco isn’t nearly as Islamic as the likes of Iran or Pakistan. I was personal witness to this, seeing a visibly Jewish man wandering round the airport, being offered bacon with my scrambled egg at breakfast, and being told by my taxi driver that alcohol was widely consumed by the population. All good. 

A cat was wandering round the courtyard of the riad – I petted him and asked a waiter what he was called. “Er… cat!” he replied. 

Of the advertisements I saw, I noticed that the folk on them tended to be of a lighter skin colour than most of the people in Morocco – whereas in Britain many of the folk on adverts tend to be of a darker skin colour than most people in Britain. Interesting. 

RIP Charlie Kirk, the bravest, wisest, most articulate young American of them all. Thoughts of his horrific murder made my sleep even more difficult on this holiday.