Article: The Business of Survival

Amidst all the supposedly-studying, I wrote the following article for my university's newspaper. This was inspired first by my trip to Maroc, and then by the insights of my dear friend Yee Hung on his own trip to North Africa.

Please share your thoughts, as I share mine through the article.

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The Business of Survival
by Nicholas Foo, April 2009



“Konnichiwa!” was not the first greeting I expected when I arrived in Morocco, but it was.

After getting off the plane at Tangier Airport, I made my way to the edge of the ancient walled city, the medina. Alone, backpack on, jungle hat on, and my Nikon SLR slung across my chest, I climbed the cobbled path towards one of the entrances of this 600-year-old medina. Donkeys caring loads; man selling sticks of cigarettes on a crate; woman haggling for a better price on oranges…

“Konnichiwa! Maroc welcomes you!”, said a toothless grin which popped up on my left. I smiled back and bonjour-ed. The wrinkled face that belonged to this grin went on to tell me how wonderful the medina was and all the tourist sights within it. He was a faux guide, or false guide, wanting to offer his services as a guide through the labyrinthine medina. I kept repeating “non, merci” to his persistent advances on telling me the many sights. Losing patience, he left but not without a scowl.


Moroccan knaves?
That was the first of many Japanese “konnichiwa” greetings I got on my 10-day solo trip across Morocco. Once you look vaguely “oriental” (whatever that entails), you get a Japanese greeting, even if the last you heard of “konnichiwa” was across a television screen. If you are not Japanese, you surely have to be Korean, and lately, possibly from China, so these Moroccan faux guides and touts assume.

Ask anyone who has visited Morocco, and it will be likely they would tell you how persistent, and irritating, some of these touts can be. They offer to take you to restaurants, shops selling “cheap” souveniors, or simple guide services. Yet even when you brush them away, they persistently follow you through the streets of the medina (in my case, for a good half an hour) and assail you with sales-speak of the local tourist attractions. Some might euphemistically put this down to enthusiasm, some more harshly consider them pests, as a friend did.

You think you can side-step the touts by pretending not to speak English; they will surprise you with their Arab, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. When you brush them off too curtly, they get aggressive in public, and you might give to avoid a public scene. There seems no escaping them.

The faux guides and touts were not just in Tangier, but also in the medinas of Fes and Marrakech, the Moroccan imperial cities. The medinas are the ideal places for touts and guides to ply their trade; Fes’ medina contains 12,000 streets, with more than half being dead-end ones, and littered with more than 120,000 shops. This reality often presents visitors perplexing issues of navigation and local knowledge, giving rise for the opportunity for the touts and guides to sell their services.

Pesky, pest-like, but how evil are they? They offer to take you to a place, some even going to the extent of promising you (perhaps crossing their fingers behind their back) they would not ask you for money. They arrive at your destination, and you thank them. But that is not it. They actually rescind on their promise and ask for money, which makes you really think they did cross their fingers earlier. You give them some spare change reluctantly, but they demand for all the money in your pocket in one of the 6,000-ish isolated dead-ends; that was what happened to me. This is just one instance of the cunning, and possibly, evil Moroccan touts and guides. Others may possibly charge you a price of mint tea twice as much as the price on the menu, and pretend not to speak English when you demand an explanation.

These stories of evil treachery can go on. Friends can relate similar stories in various permutations. Ultimately, “at the very end, (they) want money”, to quote a reductionist analysis a friend used.

True, the guides and touts are nearly all Moroccan men of different ages. However, you would not be blamed to think that this mad-lust for money pervades the entirety of Moroccan demography. Children extorted money from me for “guiding” me to places I needed no guide; an old lady demanded money from me for taking a photograph of her sorting mint leaves. So it did seem that all of Morocco was like that; money-grabbing knaves. At least after the first 2 days there, it definitely seemed the case to me.


The business of survival
Is this “evilness” due to greed? Are these multi-lingual, intelligent yet cunning Moroccans greedy con-men? Some friends certainly think so, and I would have nearly concluded the same if not for some enlightenment I got from local acquaintances I met along the way.

No, the money the guides and touts coerce from tourists hardly go to debaucheries, especially not alcohol since Moroccans tend to be staunchly Muslim. Rather, the money goes to surviving.

Maroc is not the easiest place to survive in: World’s 137th poorest country, drought-prone, GDP per capita 9 times lesser than the United Kingdom, unemployment at 10%. Only recently gaining independence in 1956, it is a young country fighting hard to play catch-up in the harsh global financial milieu of today; 45% of the population are still employed in agriculture. Natural geography does not do the nation any favours with only 18% arable land. Graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed then a non-graduate.

What makes Maroc even more difficult to survive in is the uncertainty of life. Having a semi-arid climate, there is no assurance of good rainfall and thus affects agricultural harvest, which affects at least 1 in 2 Moroccans. Essentially, Maroc’s GDP varies with the weather.

Many visitors, myself included, marvel at the rustic time-stood-still beauty of Maroc; camel rides into the desert sunset, bustling souks of ornamental rainbows. Many often escape to Maroc to escape from the crushing speed of globalising urban life. Yet we forget that with this romanticised view of Maroc, it is itself being left behind.

In patriarchal Maroc, boys are born into their trade; if your father was a leather craftsman, you too will be one starting from a boyhood apprenticeship. You become an established craftsman, sell your leather slippers to the locals in the medina, and you buy bread from the baker who, too, took over from his father. All is well in a nearly-butter trade economy in the medina. Globalisation comes along, introduces Nike trainers, people prefer Nikes over leather, and the craftsman finds himself with less income, then buys less from the baker; this effect ripples across the medina.

Amidst all this, there are families to feed and dealing with the uncertainty of the family garden-harvest. It is then that many men seek alternative sources of income like being faux guides and touts. So it is not out of greed, but necessity for survival that pushes these ‘evil’ Moroccans to hustle us visitors to Maroc.

Funny how we desire the rustic and quaintness of Maroc but not the reality of the Moroccan need to survive that comes with this antiquated beauty.



True Maroc hospitality
Even after my local Fes guide told me all this, I still needed convincing that Moroccans were not intrinsically money-grabbing ‘fiends’. My hesitation to dispel this ‘evil Moroccan’ label was soon abated after my journey into South Maroc, the journey into the heart of true Maroc hospitality.

I travelled south past the Atlas Mountains and the Dry Mountains with my new-found Moroccan friend M’hammed and his girlfriend. As the scorching African sun took its toll, we took stops in the small oases in the arid mountains. Each time we did, local men would greet us respectfully, and offer us shaay (mint tea). This time, I was greeted not with “Konnichiwa” but with the proper Arab greeting of “Salaam 'Alaykum” (“peace be upon you”); I was no longer the Asian tourist, but a welcomed guest.

This hospitality of being offered tea by complete strangers, mind you with no charge, and having polite conversations in French was experienced throughout the rest of my travel in the South. Once, wanting just shaay as we battered through 90km of gravel road in the mountains, we stopped in a small village. Invited into the family dining hall for tea, we were also offered bread and vegetable tajine (a local cuisine) without charge.

I later learnt from M’hammed that Moroccan families often prepare an extra portion of tajine daily, just in case of unexpected guests. Tell me, at this point can you still continue to believe that the Moroccans are fundamentally conniving knaves?

I cannot.

Kindness, even to strangers, is ingrained in the Islamic Maroc culture. No doubt, the history of the nation was built on invasions and colonisation. "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should be hospitable with his or her guests," says the Great Prophet in Islam. I witnessed a female street beggar being invited to sit with a couple to have breakfast in Fes. I was invited to M’hammed’s house in the Dades Valley, and other than being treated to a feast of home-made pastries, I also departed with home-made gifts.

Moroccan history also affirms this intrinsic hospitality and kindness. Desert nomads were, and still are, allowed to build caves on private land for shelter. These caves are free to use by any traveller, so long as the traveller digs to extend the cave a little before leaving. Desert caravans from the Sahara were also guided on safe paths by Maroc Kasbahs (Islamic fortresses) acting as ‘lighthouses’ as they passed through Maroc land.


Traveller or tourist?
True, some of the touts could be sincerely evil nasty knaves. But would it not be unfair to claim that all Moroccans are ‘evil’ and ‘cut-throat’. as some I know have? Neither are all Moroccans angels. But this article wishes to offer two take-aways.

First, whenever we travel, we should seek to understand the possible cultural and economical contexts in which we judge local observations. If we did not understand the economic struggles of urbanite Moroccans, we might easily assume that the unscrupulous touting boils down to an intrinsic evil in the local culture. But upon learning of the trying economic conditions in Maroc, we are more sympathetic.

Second, be more of a traveller than a tourist. If we behave like tourists, we would be treated like tourists. Be a traveller by better understanding local culture. I had shaay in the Fes medina with only local customers. I was approached by a guide who offered “cheapest deal” for desert camel rides. I politely declined in Arabic, explaining I was not headed that way, and offered him some bread I was having. Instead of turning aggressive, he accepted my ‘peace offering’ and wished me well on my journey. If I gave him a touristic “no, go away”, I probably would have gotten equally hostile a response.

Tourists have transactions with locals. Travellers, being guests to a country, have relationships. I believe this holds regardless of our destination. I learnt that if I enjoyed the quaintness Maroc offered, I, too, had to accept the fight for survival and the corollary touting. But being better acquainted to the culture, it made me accept this as part of Maroc’s way of life. The only way I would accept this is being a traveller, not a tourist.


So the next time you go on a trip, this summer perhaps: be a traveller, not just a tourist.



Uncle T