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, a place – or continent – I’d never visited before.
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 whom I liked. He gave me tips and advice, such as be careful in the old town, where youths will offer to guide you out of its mazy 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 the 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 wear 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.
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 recurring wail of the call to prayer, which begins as early as 6am. The Adhan 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 first 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? Or possibly, 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.)
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. Many of the ‘Refugees Welcome’ types 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 the 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 the 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. But 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.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World blog.
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Why bother to visit the Third World…? Stay at home…and it will come to you…
Forty years ago, we had family package holidays to Bizerta in Tunisia and Agadir in Morocco (chosen because they weren’t the ‘normal’ destinations – it was the same then, except the would-be tourist exploiting types had a certain naivety about their operations and it was all a sort of harmless game. What put us off further similar holidays though were the hordes of beggars who just wouldn’t go away, even after being given something. Consequently we never made it to Egypt and now with the rise of Islam as a spur to violence, that is something that will never happen and I really wish we had been there in he 1970s.
Well, the beggar problem is found right across the European continent, so that’s nothing new, and we have our own version of it here, where we can’t walk down a street in town, or local shopping area, without having our consciences attacked by one Charity or another, by people who are paid for their (I’d naively assumed until recently) voluntary work.
I’ve never felt the slightest temptation to visit/holiday in any of the Muslim countries. Not remotely. A friend of one of my nieces goes regularly, so I’ve just emailed the link to this thread for her to forward.
If the temptation were ever to arise in my now declining years, I’d fish out the above article and read it again. That would put an end to that particular temptation. Next up, chocolate – help!
Begging in North Africa wasn’t like begging in Southern Europe, the beggars worked in gangs and followed tourist coaches to the sights on mopeds. Begging in England wasn’t a thing surely until the late 70s?
Probably not – difficult to say. I can barely remember if I saw a beggar in town last week never mind back in the 70s!
I can’t comment for London and down south, but up north in the 60s, 70s and early 80s no one was ever asked for sixpence, or later ten pence, ‘for a cup of tea’. Sure we had a tramp or two, gypsies and swarthy foreigners selling stuff from suitcases door to door, but these weren’t drunk, off their head on drugs or menacing.
Nathaniel, are you kidding? Try looking at Don McCullin’s photographs of Bradford and the like in the 1960s. I’m not saying that ‘down south’ was any better, especially London, but ‘a tramp or two’ is playing it down rather.
I lived in East Yorkshire and if I’d seen people begging I’d have asked my Mother why (I didn’t or I’d have remembered it). Even shopping trips to Hull in those days didn’t encounter any beggars, unlike now.
My husband is American, and lived in Morocco for three years from when he was 22. (1980 – 83). He went as a member of The Peace Corps, and was tasked with teaching vocational skills to adolescent boys who had been thrown out of the educational system, such as it was, for violence or alcohol consumption, or other bad behaviour. Others taught English, dug water wells, built fish farms out in the desert, built childrens’ playgrounds, other stuff according to what was needed. Firstly, don’t get the idea that they were sheltered or protected in any way, once they got there they were on their own. It was an 8 hour bus ride to Rabat to get a prescription if (when) you got dysentery. They did 10 week’s training in the USA and 6 weeks in Marrakesh, learning basic Arabic, skills needed like welding, bricklaying etc, and above all having vital cross-cultural training, ie what it would really be like. The rules. What to be aware of, what to expect.
68 were chosen out of several hundred volunteers, and at the end of the three years in Morocco, 27 were left. So it wasn’t a picnic. But they knew what to expect to a certain degree, didn’t expect it to be like Eastbourne with sun, and didn’t look down on the Moroccan culture. They had to fit in and adhere to the rules. My husband says he learned more from his three years in Morocco than anything else in his life – including University and 35 years teaching both in the USA and the UK. I asked him about this today, and he said ‘in the Moroccan calendar it’s still 1450, and you have to expect it to be like that’. He says you have to look for the humour in things that unsettle you – and indeed, I have never EVER heard him whine and moan about how awful Morocco was, in over 30 years of marriage. He has told me numerous very funny stories – for instance, that 10 minute argument – in his time there, it would be more like a crowd of 50 gathering to see what was going on. It was dirty, it was noisy – people were begging, as they have since the beginning of time – partly because there is no welfare state. The thing you had to be most careful about was what you ate or drank, because dysentery would fell you in no time flat.
I would never go there – I know the heat and the food would certainly do for me – but it does bug me somewhat that the writer went to Morocco because it was somewhere ‘different’, hated it, then came home and moaned because it wasn’t like Britain, or the vision of what Britain use to be like. It would have been useful if he had spent some time on research first.
Certainly I am not advocating for accepting immigrants from other cultures absolutely wholesale, which appears to be what is happening. I really hate it, just as much as the next right thinking person. But if you hop over to an alien culture for a few days holiday, probably best to stay in your Riad and sunbathe, rather than go on about how horrid and different it is – which you should have known anyway.