A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (14 page)

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 mediaeval 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 per cent 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 labourers, 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 sceptical expression, he added, ‘They had a good life. Why would you mistreat 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 second-hand clothes, everything from baby bootees 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 US 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 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 labour 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 neighbours 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 neighbour 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 travelled to India. He had three wives.’

My neighbour 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 realised 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 dishonouring 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, colour and warmth like Morocco, quite the opposite. It could be cold, grey 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.

AT THE END
of May, we found a supervising architect, as required for the building permit. Rachid Haloui was one of the best architects in Morocco. Based in Fez, he designed projects all over the country, gave lectures on Islamic architecture in France, and had written a book on the coastal city of Essaouira. He cared deeply about the Medina and had been the founding president of the Fez Preservation Society.

When Rachid walked into our courtyard and looked up at the big wall dominating one side he muttered, ‘Interesting, interesting.’ He observed everything else in the riad with little comment until he came to the pillars in the
massreiya
, two of which bore elegant script. Rachid, with an eye for detail, was immediately taken with these but had trouble reading the ancient Kufic letters, lovingly created in
zellij
. He pulled out a camera and took a photo.