The drums of Ashura

In my bedroom on the terrace of the ryad, small drums give rhythm to the evening and seem to come from everywhere around. The sun is down, the birds don't sing anymore, and the sounds of the city reach the roof. But the shouts of the merchants, donkey drivers, roars of bikes hardly passing through the narrow streets are covered by the laughs of the children preparing Ashura.

The day of Ashura, the tenth (ashura) of the month of Muharram has very diverse meanings and connotations through the Muslim world. Day of grief and sorrow for the Shiites who revive every year the martyr of Hussein and his family, Muhammad's grandson killed by the ommeyades in the struggle for the power, it becomes much less important in the Sunni world, where it is nothing more than one of the two days of fast that became optional after the institution of Ramadan.

It can also be associated to the deads, and the visit to the cemetery where candles will be burned, like in Tunisia. At the same time, and specially in north Africa, it is linked with the very old and pre-islamic rites of resurrection, and, again like in Tunisia, bonfires are made, and children jump over them singing, like in our Saint-Jean.

In Morocco, Ashura is, above anything, the celebration of the children and family. Like any celebration, it is a day of charity, and also repentance, which comes from the very first signification of Ashura (taken by Muhammad from the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur, the Great Forgiveness), remain linked to the religious fast.
But for children, there is nothing but fun and feast, a strange mix of Carnival and Saint Nicolas. They receive new clothes, small toys, music instruments, and stroll in the streets, asking a few dirham to the people passing by, and preparing themselves for the great day of the morrow, "Zem-Zem".

"Zem-Zem" is the name of a well in Mecca. In Morocco, Zem-Zem is the day of watering. Every child (normally under 12) has a complete freedom to water the grown-ups, and they run around the fountains to take some water with them and go back spraying friends and neighbors.

In the countryside, other rites near to Carnival also exist. Men disguise themselves into women and pass from one house to the other singing...

In our south, in Tazzarine, a man is going to dress in a somehow frightening way, and put on his head some burning palms, like horns. Followed by all the children of the village, laughing and singing, he goes from one house to the other, knocking at each door to ask for Gaddid (meat of the mutton of the Aïd El Kebir, spiced and dried, which can be held for a whole year). He insists and stays in front of the door as long as he has not received his part. He always wins over the avaricious, and finishes his day, with all the children, in a remote part of the ksour, sharing generously his gaddid with them in a happy and delicious meal.

This year, Ashura will take place on the 29th of January. One week before, the whole city is preparing itself. In the narrow streets of the medina I see many small kids sitting in front of a large plate full of candies, at each corner a small shop sells drums... these very same drums that play in the beginning of my night.

Between tradition and modernity

This sentence "between tradition and modernity" is a motto one hears and reads everywhere all the time in Morocco, in the news, reportages, about anything...

Modern riads used as unofficial guest houses are "between tradition and modernity", traditionnal craftmanship in modern fabrics shipped from China also, and also the young managers applying to "Challenger", a tv show based on the same idea as "Super Star", but the competition is based around ideas to create a company, the youngs are judged by managers, finance and business people, and the winners get helps and financing. Everything is between modernity and tradition (which could also mean "being late, or being out", like in some administrations...), you can't stay a week in Morocco without having the sentence in your head.

Driving back from Agadir to Marrakesh, it took a new meaning.

The driving reglementation was changed a few weeks ago, with a new "improved" way of paying fines.

Before, it was easy. Police was giving you a "procès" (ticket) which was sent to the court of the city you lived, and you paid it, or you managed to have it cancelled. Sometimes, (oftentimes), you could convince the policeman before he wrote the xxx, and gave him, very discreetly, a small banknote.

This kind of light corruption is everywhere in Morocco. Without judging, you have to know a few figures to understand.

A policeman earns around 3.000 dirhams per month, and is lodged by the state, which means he earns overall the equivalent of 3.500-3.700 dirhams / month. That's less than twice the minimal wage (or smic) which is around 1.900 dirhams / month. ANd when you earn that, you're really poor. You can survive, that's all.

On these 3.500 dirhams, the policeman must feed his family, including taking part with his brothers in helping his parents (the introduction of the pension system is quite recent, and less than 20% of the population can benefit from it by now), and also spare for the future. The only pension he'll get will be around 2.000 dirhams per month, without any state lodging.

That's not a lot.
A kilo meat costs around 70 dirhams, the bread for a family meal amounts to 10 dirhams. Fuel is around 11 dirhams / litre, welfare state nearly not existing (long and heavy diseases are supported, not the small problems...)

Ticket for driving to fast is of 400 dirhams. For the fined driver, who often does not earn a lot more than the policeman, this is a high amount. Even for 10 kilometres/hour of over speed, you have to pay 400 dirhams (very high excesses like 30-50 kilometres over the limit are not possible here, considering the state of the roads...)

And one discusses, and tries to convince the policeman to be kind. Sometimes it works, sometimes 50 or 100 dirhams are necessary, and everyone wins, but the the state.


Hence, State decides to change all that, and to close the opportunity to stop the ticket before the court, by making people pay quicker, directly on the spot.

New rules are simple : you pay directly the 400 dirhams, against a receipt, or you leave your driving licence to the policeman. You get a provisory authorization to drive, valid for three days only, and during these three days, you have to get back your driving licence, in the court of the place where you get fined.

Worse even than paying the 400 dirhams for people travelling a lot for their work, like guides, tourists drivers, or lorry drivers who are transporting goods, fruits and vegetables from Agadir to Tanger for example.

So, the driver prefers to pay on the spot, that's what the state had in mind.

But... something the state did not think about.

Because you can pay on the road, it is now normal, legal, to give money to a policeman. That was not the case before, corruption had to be cautious, discreet, unnoticed. Now, who can say, from a few meters away, if the money banknotes given where the 400 dirhams to pay the fine, or the 50 or 100 dirhams which will add meat in the tajine of the evening ?

Between tradition and modernity, the new driving regulation, which was supposed to diminish corruption, actually made the door wide open to it.

That was very obvious on the road between Agadir and Marrakech. It is a difficult road, not in a very good state (but far better than many others in Morocco), with many mountains, hard slopes, many turns, and also many trucks dispatching the vegetables and fruits of the Souss area everywhere in Morocco and outside.

A real nightmare for the small car behind a large truck.
A real nightmaer for a large truck behind a heavy loaded old lorry that cannot go quicker than 30 kilometres / hour when climbing, and also a financial risk if it is too late to deliver.

So everyone passes over, paying attention to other cars but not to the permanent white line, and when it is possible, every one drives as quick as possible, over the limit.

Usuall, on this road, there is 2 or 3 police controls.
This time, they were 7.

Because one can pay the fine on the spot .

And arriving in Marrakech, we saw, along the road, wonderful automated radars. They cannot receive money, data will be transmitted fully automatically, electronically. No arrangement, no corruption.
But they are not yet in function.

PS: between tradition and modernity, I post this item from the pavement of a coffee in marrakech, which offers fruit juices, mint tea and unlimited and free wifi connection !

My dunes are not yours

A man died in the sand dunes yesterday evening. Dunes we walked through a few days ago, wondering about the vivacity of the small green sprouts surging everywhere after the rain.
The desert was green. A very relative idea of green, of course, nothing to see with the Wales or Yorkshire, more a simple shade, like a muslin veil thrown over the erg, hard to distinguish as soon as you come nearer, but undoubtedly there.

Plants are fixing the desert. Sand progresses, in Morocco like in Mauritania, like everywhere. In a few months it can passes over the wall of our Oasis, and after a sand storm, large roads like the one between Erfoud and Rissani looks like a Saharan track. Lines of reeds are planted, tightly, to fix the dunes and stop their progression.



One day is enough for the Dakar to destroy that.

Of course, the Dakar is also (a little bit) profitable for local people. For two or three days, a large number of tourists land in a city, support teams, journalists, real and false V.I.P., people offered a small trip by their company, people following the Dakar, people making photos, people feeling important, adventurous, etc. Ouarzazate was traffic-jammed yesterday, a very unusual view of Mohammed V avenue, once littered with cars. You even had to walk a few meters away to park your car ! Not a rental car available anymore, not a free hotel room anymore.
For hotel, for car renters, for some restaurants, Dakar is a good opportunity, bringing several hundreds of customers at a high price, and off-season. But for the others ? Dakar brings its own infrastructure, a large part of the support (food, mechanics, even fuel) is brought directly from Europe… Hotel managers in Ouarzazate are not the Aït Haddidou nomads whose grazing areas are partially destroyed by the race, neither the inhabitants of Tazarine who see, some years, a flock of a new kind of locusts fly in for a day, leaving the tracks damaged, if not utterly destroyed.

Dakar is a killer. Was there a year without a death ? Participant, organizer, or worse even, a child looking at the cars passing by and not jumping aside quick enough.
Is the game worth it ? Surely for those who take part in it. Any death is deeply unfair and sad, but to die instantly, in the middle of a race, at a time one realizes his dream, seems not so sad, not so unfair as the fate of a child being killed by a machine appearing out of a sand cloud, the modern humming mowing-machine, as hard to understand for these kids of the remote doyars as could be the first trains for the peasant of the last century (actually the next to last century, I have a tendency to forget we are now in the 21st century!).

Dakar has been a real adventure, it has been the opportunity for a beautiful race, opened to amateurs like professionals, it has been the immersion in splendid, difficult and awesome landscapes. It has also lost all of that, becoming a huge organisation, a machine to make money. But it has never ever been the discovery of the desert.

Desert is loneliness, endless repetition of the same empty landscape, to and over the horizon, time passing by without anything moving, anything else than the feet of the nomad walking along his camel. Desert is abrasion by time and nothing, sun burning, salt burning, cold at night, dried lips and eyes tired by reflections over the black stones. It is silence, when one starts to perceive the small moves of insects, the far away echo, feeble as the dream of music in the oasis, the sudden fall of some sand under a bird.

How can you discover the desert when you cover in one day the distance nomads made in more than a week ? How can you actually see the landscapes, amidst the sand clouds of cars and trucks ? How can you feel desert's heat when you're sweating in you protective clothes and helmet ? How can you hear the furtive gliding snake going to meet the Little Prince among the roaring motors ?

The most accurate about the Dakar is its name. Dakar is a raid, a quick incursion into one's territory to rob him and leave him poorer than before. The small news clip showing Elmer Symons laying dead along his bike, with pieces of it scattered around was shown and shown again. Dakar does not even respect those who are part of it.

Good places in Ouarzazate

A wonderful adress for a good meal, traditional tajine, pizza or even kefta sandwich (with grilled meat) "La Halte" has a large sunny terrace where you can seat quietly in the newly renovated pedestrian area of Ouarzazate near avenue Mohammed V.



A few meters away from avenue Mohammed V and the shops of "The Prince" you can have a pleasant lunch after (or before) your last shopping and the endless negotiations with carpet sellers.

As starters, morrocan salads, tuna plates, "salades variées", for 15 dirhams, then omelettes, sandwiches (25 dirhams, a moroccan sandwich is a real meal), tajines, couscous, and a large choice of delicious pizzas, between 25 and 35 dirhams.
And of course, all of that with the kindness and smile of Saïd and his team !

For a dessert, you can have oranges with cinnamon, a wonderful feast for 12 dirhams. These oranges are really juicy and tasty, coming directly from the fruit gardens of the Souss and the area of Agadir, where they are harvested ripe, and directly sent to the market. Those for the european market are taken between 3 and 6 weeks before term, and finish to "ripe" in refrigerated rooms !
Or my preferred dessert, a home-made yoghourt with a few drops of roses water just before serving... that's really wonderful !

Saïd also offers menus, salad + tajine + moroccan pastry for 60 dirhams, and a breakfast in the sun, hot drink, fresh oranges juice, bread, jam and the small honey pancake which is called msamem, for 25 dirhams.

Restaurant Pizzeria La Halte
Chez Essamlali

Moroccan and international Cooking

Place Al Mouahidine
45000 Ouarzazate

Phone : 024.89.03.28
Mobile : 062.13.41.17

All these Arabic words...

The old chap was quietly enjoying the evening on his terrace. After the heat of the afternoon, the air was cooling, and his enjoyed his pull-over over his cotton shirt, while the sun was disappearing over the horizon into an amber magnificence, the zenith was already dark crimson. It was time to have dinner !
Yesterday, he's gone fishing with a friend of him, and he had received his part in several pounds of tuna, which was too much for him. He has distributed it to his neighbours, and kept some for his salad, tonight. Mixed with rice, spread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and cumin, it was fresh and delicious. He thought also cooking in with saffron and cabbage, a recipe he enjoyed a lot, but that would have been too long. A bottle of soda and a fruit salad with apple, apricot, pear and banana completed his dinner, before the ritual of the heavy sugared cup of coffee in the night.
He did not drink any alcohol anymore. It was his enemy, drinking too much broke his career, when he was a young marine dreaming of becoming a big boss, a pasha ruling a huge crusader. But he could not stand wine nor beer, and was expelled. Termination of a dream starting as a young boy, reading in old almanacs the adventures of admiral Nelson, Jonathan Livingstone and others… He tried to work in an office, but was not good enough at writing, others could not easy decipher his work, and after some other unsuccessful attempts, he fall on the wrong side and joined the local organization. The times of the prohibition were far away, Al Capone was long gone out of Alcatraz, diminished and fool, but crime in Chicago was still paying well. Instead of ruling the seas, he specialised in racket and drugs and showed more than genius in the area of gambling and games. Hazard or treachery ? He was caught by the police, and, because was just a robber and no assassin, benefited of a relatively mild sentence, of ten years only.
But he was already feeling an old man when he was freed. Time was over for such activities, and he enjoyed nothing more than his small retreat.

cotton is one of the many words of trade, introduced in Europe through the long caravans that were going so far away as China, and brought back precious goods like amber (or more precisely, ambergris, which comes from animal, and is totally different from the fossil amber), dyes like crimson, food like tuna, apricot, rice or coffee and sugar.

Balm, and hence balsam and balsamic come from the arabic "balma", when the spice saffron takes its name from the word meaning "yellow" in Arabic (no wonder why!). It gave its name to Saffron walden city, where a large production centre existed formerly.

Alcohol simply means essence, and is he same word as the khôl or kohl used in the eyes make-up.

Pasha is a high dignitary, when the admiral is the ruler of the Seas.

An almanac was a book listing days and times, used for astrology, as was called astronomy in these times. Many words of astronomy come from Arabic, like the zenith, a direction in the sky. Another science where Arabs gave us a lot of words is mathematics, with the "sifr" giving the zero and the action of cipher.

Fatalists as they are (Mektoub, it's written), Arabs also gave us the hazard, from yasara, play dices.

Racket come from raha.. the palm of the hand, where you lay the requested money !

Alcatraz is a word directly taken from Spanish, which means fortress, indeed.

And assassin comes from the name of the Sect of the Hashishin, who were well known to drug themselves with hash before going to fight and kill theur ennemies !

Marie-Aude, Pierre-Olivier and Herbert