Part Six — The Idylls of Africa
XXVI When a Negro Goes Native
In the Senegalese Bar in Marseilles I was figuring out the ways and means of a holiday somewhere in Africa. Said a Senegalese: “If I had money to go any place, I’d go straight to Paris, where one can amuse himself.” I said I didn’t feel attracted to Paris, but to Africa. As I wasn’t big and white enough to go on a big game hunt, I might go on a little one-man search party.
A Martinique sailor, whose boat had just arrived from Casablanca, said that Africa was all right and Morocco was the best place. He said he had visited every big port in Africa, and he preferred Morocco. He lived there. He said: “If you’re going to Africa, come to Morocco.”
“What are the harems like?” I asked.
“I’ve got a harem; I’ll show you when you come,” he laughed. The Martiniquan spoke Arab and Senegalese, French, Spanish and some English words. He had been a sailor since he was fourteen and had sailed all the seas. He was settled in Casablanca, where, he said, he had two wives. He was illiterate, but full of all kinds of practical knowledge. He looked like a friendly gorilla.
However, instead of Morocco, I went to Barcelona with my friend the Senegalese boxer, who had a bout there. Barcelona took my sight and feelings so entirely that it was impossible for me to leave when the boxer was returning to Marseilles. The magnificent spectacle of the sporting spirit of the Spaniards captured my senses and made me an aficionado of Spain. I had never been among any white people who gave such a splendid impression of sporting impartiality, and with such grand gestures. Whether it was boxing between a white and a black or a duel between man and beast in the arena, or a football match between a Spanish and a foreign team, the Spaniards’ main interest lay in the technical excellencies of the sport and the best opponent winning. I pursued the Spanish sporting spirit into the popular theaters, where the flamenco is seen and the Andalusian melodies are heard. In no other country have I seen a people’s audience so exigent in demanding the best an artist can give, so ruthless in turning thumbs down on a bad artist, and so generous in applauding an excellent performance.
The three days I had intended to spend in Barcelona were increased to over three months in Spain. Then one night, when I was doing the amusement spots of the amazing Barrio Chino in company with a Moslem Negro who claimed to be a Prince of Zanzibar, I met the Martinique sailor again. His boat had brought a cargo from Morocco to Barcelona. He urged me to pay him that visit.
I had lingered long enough in Spain to become aware of the strong African streak in its character. Therefore the second invitation to Morocco was even more interesting. The Prince from Zanzibar wanted to explore more of Europe and Europeans, and so we parted company.
At last I arrived in Casablanca. On the afternoon when the Martiniquan took me to his house in a native quarter, some Guinea sorcerors (or Gueanoua, as they are called in Morocco) were performing a magic rite. The first shock I registered was the realization that they looked and acted exactly like certain peasants of Jamaica who give themselves up to the celebrating of a religious sing-dance orgy which is known as Myalism. The only difference was in their clothing.
The Gueanoua were exorcising a sick woman and they danced and whirled like devils. In the Moorish yard men and boys squatted in a wide circle around them, and women and girls covered up in white haiks sat looking down from the low flat roofs of the dilapidated cabins. The music was made by a single lute and a big bass drum and sounded like muffled thunder in the belly of the earth. I watched them dance a kind of primitive rhumba, beat their heads against posts, and throw off their clothing in their excitement. But I did not see the end, when the devils would be driven forth, because a dancing woman frightened me by throwing herself in a frenzy upon me. They said I was a strange spirit and a hindrance to the magic working. So I had to get out.
The members of the Gueanoua are all pure black. They are the only group of pure Negroes in Morocco. Men and women marry black, and it is the only religious order that has women members. If one is not a pure black he cannot belong to the Gueanoua. They say the strict keeping of this rule makes the Gueanoua magic powerful. The fetish rites are West African and are transmitted from generation to generation. They have a special place in the social life of Morocco. The wealthiest as well as the poorest families have them in to exorcise devils. Often they are protected by powerful sherifian families, and sultans have consulted them.
The harem of the Martiniquan was not such a hot spot, as I saw when I peeped behind the curtain. Just a long spacious room curtained in two, and two women, one old enough to be his mother and one young, brown and buxom. We all had tea together, because, said the Martiniquan, he did not believe in hiding his women from men. However, the male friends that he admitted into his harem were French West Indian soldiers and Senegalese, but not Moors. He was the only person in that quarter who could afford two women. This was because, as a French citizen, he was rated as a European worker and received between forty and fifty francs a day—about six times what the native doing the same work got. Thus the black sailor was really living “white” in Africa.
I enjoyed the Martiniquan Moroccan hospitality for awhile. Then, feeling the overwhelming European atmosphere of Casablanca, I departed for Rabat.
Rabat-Salé was delightfully different. Here the native life was the big tree with solid roots and spreading branches, and the European city was like an imported garden, lovely and carefully tended. At Shellah I visited the tomb of the Black Sultan, who, according to the native legend, was the greatest ruler of Morocco, having united all of North Africa under his rule, conquered Spain, built the great monuments of the Giralda at Seville, the Koutabia at Marrakesh, and the Hassan Tower at Rabat.
I stopped long enough in Rabat to finish Banjo. Some Moroccan students had said to me: “In Fez you will find the heart of Morocco. It is our capital city. You haven’t seen Morocco until you see Fez.”
Fez was indeed the heart of Morocco and even more to me. In Moscow they had published a cartoon of me sailing upon a magic carpet over the African jungles to see the miracle of the Soviet. In Fez I felt that I was walking all the time on a magic carpet. The maze of souks and bazaars with unfamiliar patterns of wares was like an oriental fantasy. In Fez I got into the inside of Morocco. Hitherto I had been merely a spectator. But the Fassis literally took me in. There I had my first native meal of cous-cous in a native house, and the first invitation was the prelude to many.
I was invited to princely marriage feasts, to eat cous-cous from a common dish with stately old “turbans,” to drink thé à la menthe in cool gardens, to the intimate flamenco dancing of fatmas in the garçonnières of fondouks and to the profane paradise of Moulay Abdallah.
Moulay Abdallah is the unique recreation quarter of the young Fassis. It is a separate little walled town with its own shops and police and musicians. Arrayed in richly flowered and loose robes held in place by enormously broad embroidered belts and squatting with the dignity of queens, the young females who take up residence there charmingly dispense mint tea and witty conversation to circles of eager young men. I thought that that antique African city was the unaware keeper of the cup of Eros containing a little of the perfume of the flower of the passion of ancient Greece.
I liked the Moroccan mosaic, which is beautiful and bright everywhere like a symbol of the prismatic native mind. And nowhere is it so lavish and arresting as in Fez. The Spanish mosaics were interesting, but they did not appear as warm and inevitable and illuminating as the Moroccan.
The mosaics of Morocco went to my head like rare wine. Excited and intoxicated and fascinated by the Fassis and their winning and welcome ways, I went completely native. I was initiated into the practice of living native and cheaply. I moved from my expensive hotel and parked my things in a cheaper one. But I hardly lived in it. For my days were fully occupied in sampling the treasures of the city and its environments; in picking up the trails of the peasants bringing their gifts to the town; following the Afro-Oriental bargaining; feeling the color of the accent of the story-tellers in the market places. And in the evening there was always divertissement: a marriage ceremony and feast, an invitation to a fondouk, where a young man would permit the pretty fatmah of his profane love-making to dance; and Moulay Abdallah. And I was never tired of listening to the native musicians playing African variations of the oriental melodies in the Moroccan cafés.
For the first time in my life I felt myself singularly free of color-consciousness. I experienced a feeling that must be akin to the physical well-being of a dumb animal among kindred animals, who lives instinctively and by sensations only, without thinking. But suddenly I found myself right up against European intervention and proscription.
A chaoush (native doorman and messenger) from the British Consulate had accosted me in a souk one day and asked whether I was American. I said I was born in the West Indies and lived in the United States and that I was an American, even though I was a British subject, but I preferred to think of myself as an internationalist. The chaoush said he didn’t understand what was an internationalist. I laughed and said that an internationalist was a bad nationalist. He replied gravely: “All the Moors call you an American, and if you are British, you should come and register at the Consulate.” I was amused at his gravity, reinforced by that African dignity which is so impressive in Morocco, especially as I had said I was an internationalist just by way of a joke without thinking of its radical implications. But I wasn’t aware then of how everybody in Morocco (European and native) was looking for hidden meanings in the simplest phrases. The natives imagine (and rightly enough) that all Europeans are agents of their respective countries with designs upon their own, and the European colonists are suspicious and censorious of visitors who become too sympathetic and friendly with the natives. I saw a local French newspaper which had turned all the batteries of ridicule on a European when he started to wear a fez. I myself had gravitated instinctively to the native element because physically and psychically I felt more affinity with it. I did not go to register at the Consulate. I thought that it was enough that my passport was in perfect order. While scrupulously complying with official regulations regarding passports, identity cards and visas, etc., in all my traveling in strange places, I have always relied on my own personality as the best passport. Not that I was always such a circumspect and model traveler! I got into little difficulties all right. But without claiming special privileges or asking assistance as a foreigner, I submitted to the local authority and always came out on top.
For nearly a week I had not been in my hotel. One morning, after an all-night session of lute-playing and dancing with Andalusian melody makers in a native house, I went to my hotel for a change of clothes. There I found a French police inspector waiting for me. He had been there before. He asked me to show him my passport and other papers. I did. He looked through them and said I must accompany him to the British Consulate. I wondered what I could possibly have done. I had been passing such a jolly time, with no shadow of any trouble. The only thing I could think of was that I had obtained some wine for native friends, because they were not allowed openly to purchase. Then I thought of the chaoush’s warning and wondered if my failure to register had anything to do with it. I asked the French inspector if he had any charges against me. He said I would hear everything at the British Consulate.
So I went along to the lion’s den. As I entered, the Consul greeted me with a triumphant, “I knew you were here!” As if I had been hiding from anything or anybody in Morocco. The charge against me was that I had left my hotel and was sleeping in native houses. I said I hadn’t imagined that it was necessary to ask special permission to stay among people who had voluntarily invited me; that I thought it my right to sleep where I was inclined, since I was not a minor. And, standing there (he did not have even the formal courtesy to offer me a chair), I laughed over the Consul’s repulsive pink bald head that was like a white buzzard’s. His pink-streaked face turned red, and it was amusing also to watch the mean expression of irritation on the cat face of the little French official. He said: “Let us expel him.” I said that I would willingly submit to expulsion on a specific charge, but that, since they said that it was a native affair, they should get a native to make the charge. The petty bureaucrats exchanged embarrassed glances. The Consul said that it was hinted that I was a radical propagandist. I said they could search my effects, and that no one could stand up and accuse me of making any verbal propaganda. The Consul said the colonial people were being actively propagandized by Bolshevik agents since the Russian Revolution. I said that I was not a Bolshevik agent. Finally I was permitted to leave.
The personal unpleasantness opened my eyes a little to the undercurrent of social unrest and the mistakes of mixed authority in Morocco. I’d been so absorbed in the picturesque and exotic side of the native life that I was unaware until authority stepped on my sore toe. I discovered that although the French have established a protectorate over Morocco, many of the natives are also protected by other European powers, mainly Great Britain, Spain and Italy. The British possess unique privileges under a system of capitulations. British subjects, whether they are born British, naturalized or protected, are not liable to local arrest and trial in the French and native courts. If a British subject has committed any offense he must be taken before a British consul.
The privilege of immunity is sometimes abused by morons, and obviously the French local authority is irritated by the idea of a divided authority. Therefore the local atmosphere is infested with petty intrigues.
The specially-protected natives have certain privileges that the subjects of the Sultan, who are protected by the French, cannot enjoy. For example, the specially-protected ones can buy and drink liquor with impunity. But because of a traditional law the subjects of the Sultan cannot. Therefore they drink surreptitiously, and contemptible European bootleggers secretly sell them the vilest stuff imaginable. The young Moroccans generally are afflicted with a pathetic malaise. They’re always whining: “I wish I were American or specially protected.” And when you ask why, they say: “So that we could have the freedom of men to drink in a bar like the Europeans and the Algerians.” The malaise is similar to the prohibition pestilence which plagued the spirit of the youth of America.
That incident spoiled my native holiday. I thought back to Europe, of that most miserable of years I spent in London. I remembered my difficulties, when I was studying at the British Museum, to get lodgings in that quarter. The signs were shouting: “Rooms for rent,” but when I inquired I was invariably informed that all rooms were rented. Yet when I passed that way again the signs were still there. I became suspicious. I asked English friends from the International Club to make inquiries. They found that the rooms were for rent. But when they took me along and declared the rooms were for me, we were told that Negroes were not desired as guests. When I left my London hotel I found rooms with an Italian family, and later, a German. And the nearest I got to living quarters close to the British Museum was when I found lodgings with a French family in Great Portland Street.
I felt helpless and wobbly about that black boycott in London. For England is not like America, where one can take refuge from prejudice in a Black Belt. I had to realize that London is a cold white city where English culture is great and formidable like an iceberg. It is a city created for English needs, and admirable, no doubt, for the English people. It was not built to accommodate Negroes. I was very happy when I could get out of it to go back to the Negro pale of America.
And now even in Africa I was confronted by the specter, the white terror always pursuing the black. There was no escape anywhere from the white hound of Civilization.
When I finally left Fez I proceeded to Marrakesh in the far south, the hot city of the plains, vast and wild. The Senegalese in Marseilles often mentioned Marrakesh as the former great caravansérai for the traders traveling between West Africa and North Africa, and so I had to see that monumental city, which was founded by a Senegalese conqueror. Marrakesh moved me. It was like a big West Indian picnic, with flags waving and a multitude of barefoot black children dancing to the flourish of drum, fiddle and fife.
When I was going to Morocco, some Europeans on the boat had remarked facetiously that Morocco was not a Negro country. Themselves divided into jealous cutthroat groups, the Europeans have used their science to make such fine distinctions among people that it is hard to ascertain what white is a true white and when a Negro is really a Negro. I found more than three-quarters of Marrakesh Negroid. There were unimaginably strange contrasts. The city is like an immense cradle of experiment in the marriage of civilized life and primitive life. Here the sun-baked ebony Sudanese and the rude brown Berbers of the Atlas meet and mingle with the refined, learned and skilled city Moors of the north. Marrakesh appeared to be the happiest city of the French Protectorate. The people seemed more contented than in Fez, although they were generally poorer. But poverty in a torrid climate is not anything like poverty in a cold climate. I might say, without poetic license, that in Marrakesh the sun, blazing without being murderous, seemed to consume a lot of the wretchedness and ugliness of poverty.