Avuncular American

Culture Diplomacy and Moussems

There should be a comma or two in the above title, adding an element of clarity to this post about the annual cultural Moussem of Assilah, an event which requires no invitation to attend, but just try to find out anything about it without traveling to Assilah.  No website (or rather, one that hopelessly jams up), and an impressively thick program that is glossily printed but contains no specific timing or venue information.  However, persistent conference-seekers will be rewarded by Moroccan hospitality - show up, and you will be fed!

Assilah is a northern Moroccan town on the Atlantic coast, its ancient Portuguese fortifications charmingly preserved for the mostly Moroccan and European tourists who come every summer. A few years ago, the New York Times had a nice piece on the town.

Thanks to native son Mohamed Benaissa, Morocco’s former Ambassador to the United States, Assilah has been attracting a more serious crowd every summer for the last 32 years.  Resurrecting the term moussem (traditional festival honoring a local "saint" or marabout) and applying it to a series of conferences, lectures, concerts, and art exhibitions – and hosting it in a town without the name recognition (or the climate) of a Davos or an Aspen – is no mean feat.  But Benaissa has been pulling it off, year after year.

It helps to have been Morocco’s Minister of Culture and Minister of Foreign Affairs.  Those connections showed in the recent colloquium on Diplomacy and Culture, which was chaired by Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac’s Prime Minister who, as France’s foreign minister, famously resisted George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  De Villepin, known for his eloquence in his native language, was born in Morocco when it was still a French protectorate.

Neither de Villepin nor the other panelists – serving Moroccan ministers, academics, former foreign ministers of Senegal and Mexico – were going to let the audience forget that moment of glory when people of conscience attempted to halt the march to war.  Eventually the subject did turn to the cultural aspects of diplomacy, but let’s say that former ambassador Cynthia Schneider’s role as the sole American on the panel was not without its challenges.

Schneider on the dais (and me on Moroccan radio) made the same point: the United States, though a major producer and exporter of “culture,” is not equipped to “do culture” in the way that, say, France is.  We have no Ministry of Culture.  Nor do we have a Ministry of Information, but that is a matter for other fora.

That said, there is no lack of private institutions, often aided by the State Department’s ECA, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which try to fill the gap at the cabinet level.  Maybe that’s just as well, for how many Americans could agree on what constitutes American culture, let alone how to represent it abroad?  After all, aren’t the Culture Wars still raging in the homeland?

In Assilah, Moussem impresario Benaissa contents himself with sketching the outlines of important questions, then magically pulling together A-teams of international experts who descend upon Tangier’s hotels for the 30-mile trek down to Assilah.  His dynamism and boosterism is augmented this year by financial assistance from the United Arab Emirates.

In Diplomacy and Culture, it is good to remember, money helps.

Gerald Loftus

When Tangier Was Seen From the Sea

That's a rather silly title, given that millions of car ferry passengers and cruise ship tourists see the city on the Strait of Gibraltar every year from their ships.

I guess what I meant is this: there was a time when three-masted sailing ships, men-of-war and of commerce, regularly moored off this ancient city on a hill.  That era was echoed last weekend, when the Italian Navy training vessel the Amerigo Vespucci (official site, in Italian, with heroic photos of the ship at sea) called in at Tangier's downtown port.

Given that my native country - the United States of America - is named after the 15th century Italian explorer, it was only natural that we visit the ship named in his honor.  She's a beauty: all rich, polished woods, shiny brass, and rigging meticulously bound in place.  Our guide was a young woman cadet, fresh from medical school in Belgium, who doubles as the ship's doctor when she's not climbing the mast like all the other plebes.

Italy gets double duty out of the ship too.  A great training vehicle, its primary function may very well be cultural diplomacy.  We visited on a Sunday morning, where the after-deck was set up for mass - no chance of shocking tolerant Tangerois, who grew up living next door to mosques, churches, and synagogues.

Italy is of course no longer the principal Mediterranean sea power - Roman galleys and Venetian galleons have long ago been supplanted by ships from countries far from the Med's shores.

The American Sixth Fleet, based in Naples, has lots of nice ships too, though the battleship gray of a destroyer doesn't have the same effect as a three-masted ship sailing into your harbor.  Despite the most peaceful of intentions, there are still lots of people who bristle at the sight of cannons - plugged though they may be - or surface to air missiles pointing towards their apartment building.

But the US does have a lovely, peaceful-looking sailing ship, the Coast Guard's Eagle, "America's Tall Ship."  How about a little North African cultural diplomacy for the US Coast Guard cadets?  After all, America's "brown water Navy" has been venturing further and further afield in recent years.  No point in leaving all the military cultural diplomacy glory to the Blue Water Boys of the US Navy.

Gerald Loftus

Gibraltar Shrouded in Fungus, or the Cat Who Ate the Legation

The Legation's door, that is.

This is a story of a fine building, the "Old American Legation" in Tangier, home to TALIM, the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies.  Our new home. A fine building that has seen better days - sometime between when it was given to the United States of America by the Sultan of Morocco in 1821, and its heyday as the home of American diplomatic representation in Morocco, through independence in 1956.  Since then, it's been a heroic rear-guard action, trying to stem the ravages of weather, neglect, and underfunding.

The building, like others in this city on the tip of Africa, is buffeted by the West wind off the Atlantic, when it's not being sanded by the Sharqi or East wind coming off the Sahara.  Then there's the Strait of Gibraltar, where ships to and from the Med and those taking millions of ferry passengers back and forth to Spain ply the waters daily.  With all this water, it's inevitable that it rains - a lot.  And that the ambient humidity is always at least 70%.

Okay, think of what does this do to roofs, walls, and windows.  Then, imagine what it does when those same roofs, walls, and windows leak, and the humidity just lingers month after month, year after year.  Here's an example - click on the image for a fungus closeup.

The print was part of a "Gibraltar Hall" of antique prints, maps, and other historic illustrations.  I say "was" because I removed all but six prints, seeing how the fungus was taking over under the glass.  I hope that expert advice, promised by the Legation's landlord, the State Department's office of Overseas Building Operations (OBO), will start to remedy the damage.  But for some works, it may already be too late.

Now consider the woodwork.  We have a lovely building, one of the legacies that longtime Legation diplomat Maxwell Blake built in the 1930s, known as the "Arab Pavilion."  It is done is Moorish "orientalist" style, with authentic materials from across the Maghrib.  The main double doors are sculpted from a beautiful but porous wood, one that suffers badly from the winter (and spring and fall) rains.

The resulting rot (affecting other doors in the building, including the one at left) makes them vulnerable to everything, including marauding cats.  Yours truly doused one insistent tomcat who had already succeeded in digging this cat-sized hole in the roof terrace door.

The hole has since been patched in our doughty in-house way, with a chunk of unpainted plywood applied to the hole.  Which the cat has chosen to ignore, simply going to the rest of the rotten door and clawing his way to those poor females in neighboring courtyards.

The Cavalry on the Way?

Today a man from OBO - remember, the USG is our landlord - is up here from the Embassy in Rabat.  To use his words, he's "crawling around the roofs" to gauge priority areas for rehabilitation.  It can't come too soon.  After this brief summer interlude of dry weather and pristine blue skies, with the return to the school year in the fall come the rains, and when driven by the wind, the rain finds a way to stream under windows.

I really don't want to re-deploy dirty rags under leaking windows, in what is America's only National Historic Landmark and a museum dedicated to the American diplomatic relationship with one of its first overseas partners.  This majestic but scruffy edifice deserves better treatment.

I hope to create links with professional museums - no disparagement of my predecessors, but we are anything but museum curators born - which can extend advice and hopefully hands-on help.  It would be too bad to allow a unique collection of valuable - irreplaceable, really - works succumb to the fungus.  And to the cats.

Gerald Loftus

Tangier Bids Farewell to the Kuniholm Era

When they arrived in Tangier to run the American Legation, Thor and Elizabeth Kuniholm knew they were embarking on an adventure.  It was 1991, when the world was about to witness the fall of the Soviet Union, and Francis Fukuyama was drafting the End of History.  In Tangier, history wasn't ending, it was just taking a new twist.

It's a story that began in 1821, when Morocco's Sultan Moulay Suleiman donated a building in the medina of Tangier to the new American Republic, one that became the American Legation, which conducted America's relations with Morocco through its independence in 1956.  At which point, diplomatic relations moved to the capital Rabat, and the Legation's future teetered on the brink.

"What led to the restoration was a birthday," writes Boston University historian Diana Wylie in her forthcoming book about the Legation, its history, and its art collection.  The birthday: America's Bicentennial in 1976.  The restoration and the preservation of the building was the work of a motivated group of American diplomats associated with Morocco and the Old Legation.

The ensuing years of consolidation then led to the Kuniholm Era, echoing the Maxwell Blake era of the first decades of the 20th century.  Blake had given the Legation the structures it has today; Thor Kuniholm gave TALIM its multifaceted programming, all done on a shoestring budget.

Thor and Elizabeth rolled up their sleeves and commenced what was to become a 19-year labor of love, one which ended today when they got on a plane to return to another adopted city of theirs, Philadelphia.  The very city that was the capital of the newly-independent United States when it sent its first diplomatic mission to Tangier.

The Legation was once saved by a special Fourth of July, and Thor and Elizabeth marked their July 4th 2010 with a farewell lunch on one of Tangier's loveliest sights, overlooking the blustery Atlantic.  Earlier, American Ambassador to Morocco Samuel Kaplan came to honor the Kuniholms for a special "America Day."

Lovers of art and good neighbors to the people of Tangier's crowded inner-city medina, the Kuniholms turned America's only National Historic Landmark abroad into a museum and a place where neighborhood women learn to become literate in their own language, Arabic.

In September 2001, when President George W. Bush asked rhetorically "Why do they hate us?" of the Muslim world, the Legation's director didn't stop his literacy programs to ask himself the question.  This kind of diplomacy of the deed is the Tangier American Legation's strongest suit.  And Thor Kuniholm is synonymous with the Legation.  He's The Man Who Makes Things Happen.

TAL expanded to TALIM in recent years - Institute for Moroccan Studies - a reflection of the Legation's association with the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, AIMS, a consortium of American universities with North Africa programs.  The Legation makes a unique venue for AIMS conferences, and scholars from the US, Europe, and across the Maghrib use its research library for their work.

I've had "hard acts to follow" often in my Foreign Service career, but this time it's going to be a while before this new guy in town gets name recognition anything like that of Thor Kuniholm.  All honor to Thor and Elizabeth, who served their country while earning the respect, admiration, and affection of their Moroccan neighbors.

Gerald Loftus

A Ghanaian's Black Friday On the Tip of Africa

"Ghana's Fairytale Ends..." was how the Reuters dispatch from Accra described the letdown ("the silence of the vuvuzelas") of Ghana's defeat last night at the hands of (or is it at the feet of?) Uruguay.  The Moroccan waiters at the Tangier restaurant were rooting for their fellow Africans, just like the Algerians were last week when Ghana eliminated the U.S. team.

But there was at least one Ghanaian in Tangier whose worries extended beyond his team's letdown.

Yesterday I was at one of many stops in the process of getting registered here as a resident, and it took me to the central police station's Office for Foreigners.  At some point, sitting on a bench, I realized that the man sitting next to me was a fellow Anglophone.  He was a Ghanaian, and he wasn't there to register to stay in Morocco.

It took me a few seconds to realize that he was in handcuffs, and through misty eyes, he told me that he had lost his passport, and here he was, a prisoner instead of getting assistance.  Well, it's hard to say if he was legit or not: thousands of sub-Saharan Africans trek across the desert to try their luck with the last 14 kilometers, the distance that separates this tip of Africa from the Promised Land - Spain and the European Union beyond.  Passports are often discarded to avoid identification, so that they can try and claim special hardship as asylum seekers from some war-torn country.  Spanish director Gerardo Olivares covered the subject with great humanity in his film 14 Kilómetros.

I'll never know what became of my bench mate.  In the film, Africans risk life, limb, and life's savings crisscrossing the closed Algerian-Moroccan land border, not to speak of the risks of Sahara and Mediterranean, both of which can and do end the journey for many in an anonymous grave, far from home.  With luck, the Ghanaian will simply be deported, to try his luck again.  Dedicated economic migrants rarely give up.

Gerald Loftus

Ghanaian Eliminated from European Dream

"Ghana's Fairytale Ends..." was how the Reuters dispatch from Accra described the letdown ("the silence of the vuvuzelas") of Ghana's defeat last night at the hands of (or is it at the feet of?) Uruguay.  The Moroccan waiters at the Tangier restaurant were rooting for their fellow Africans, just like the Algerians were last week when Ghana eliminated the U.S. team.

But there was at least one Ghanaian in Tangier whose worries extended beyond his team's letdown.

Yesterday I was at one of many stops in the process of getting registered here as a resident, and it took me to the central police station's Office for Foreigners.  At some point, sitting on a bench, I realized that the man sitting next to me was a fellow Anglophone.  He was a Ghanaian, and he wasn't there to register to stay in Morocco.

It took me a few seconds to realize that he was in handcuffs, and through misty eyes, he told me that he had lost his passport, and here he was, a prisoner instead of getting assistance.  Well, it's hard to say if he was legit or not: thousands of sub-Saharan Africans trek across the desert to try their luck with the last 14 kilometers, the distance that separates this tip of Africa from the Promised Land - Spain and the European Union beyond.  Passports are often discarded to avoid identification, so that they can try and claim special hardship as asylum seekers from some war-torn country.  Spanish director Gerardo Olivares covered the subject with great humanity in his film 14 Kilómetros.

I'll never know what became of my bench mate.  In the film, Africans risk life, limb, and life's savings crisscrossing the closed Algerian-Moroccan land border, not to speak of the risks of Sahara and Mediterranean, both of which can and do end the journey for many in an anonymous grave, far from home.  With luck, the Ghanaian will simply be deported, to try his luck again.  Dedicated economic migrants rarely give up.

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This post first appeared in TALIMblog.