Avuncular American

Coup anniversaries: Algeria 1992, US Capitol 2021

Soviet era BMP tank

Thirty years ago today, tanks filed past our window at the American consulate in Oran, Algeria's second city.  We'd put the kids to bed, said good night to our dinner guests, when I noticed that there was unusual traffic noise just below.  It was surreal: a tank was maneuvering to make a U-turn just in front of our venerable building.  Up and down the boulevard, a line of tanks and APCs.  Algeria's coup ousting its president, overturning an election, and jailing the winners was underway... triggering a bloody civil war that lasted a decade.  January 11, 1992: see LA Times report.

The January 6 anniversary of the Trump attempt to overturn the U.S. presidential election is barely over, but articles and interviews with scholars of authoritarianism, of democracy-ending regimes, and of civil wars continue to remind us that the danger has not passed.

Barbara Walter, a University of California San Diego political scientist who was part of a study commissioned by the CIA to identify precursors to political violence in other countries, has started to see some of the main signs in her own country.  Her podcast in the New Yorker makes sober listening.

I am not suggesting that the actual coup by the Algerian military, leading to a decade-long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands is akin to the attempted "constitutional" coup by defeated president Trump and his supporters culminating in the violence of January 6, 2021.  That embarrassing fiasco is being dealt with by the January 6 House Select Committee and by the Justice Department.  But Professors Walters' principal points - that civil wars are preceded by demonization of the opposing side and that the breakdown of democracy is a precursor to violence - make me very concerned about the Algerian "model" and its relevance to the US.

Contrary to the US, Algeria had no long history of democracy, and prior to the brief window of free elections in 1990 and 1991, it was always a foregone conclusion that the governing FLN party would win.  Until it didn't - twice losing to the Islamist party FIS in the country's first fair elections.  And it was the fear on the part of the privileged elite -- the army and oligarchs who'd been benefiting from Algeria's oil and gas riches -- that democracy would end their decades-long kleptocracy, which precipitated the coup.  After the ensuing bloodshed, they tried to rewrite history and made noises about the threat of "democratic terrorism" to justify their action.

In the US, we have a political party, the Republicans, which works to stoke fears of the end of privilege by a white, rural population on its way to becoming a demographic minority.  In state after state, laws are being put in place to cement minority rule through elections that will be tilted in their favor.  And political demonization has gotten literal, with Congressional and other prominent Republicans mouthing Q-Anon crazy talk about Democratic politicians.  Death threats against elected officials are in their thousands, and we've already seen in 2020 armed militias threaten state capitols.

"It could never happen here" is something that fewer Americans say with any certainty.  That's what I'm thinking about today, the anniversary of when I witnessed a "successful" coup.

R.I.P. Algeria's Idir: Two Shores, One Dream

Woke up to the news this morning that Algeria's famous Kabyle folk singer Idir had passed away.  Allah yirhamu.  Below is a post I wrote while still under the spell of his concert in Lyon in July 2008.  And for those who don't know the music of Idir, here's his trademark song A Vava Inouva, sung in tandem with Scottish vocalist Karen Matheson, whose haunting voice is the centerpiece of the Celtic folk group Capercaillie.  This beautifully illustrated video by Ismail Abdelfattah has the added advantage of providing the transcription of the original Kabyle Berber along with a French translation.

 

July 2008:  I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.

1992-2012, Algeria-Morocco: Political Islam(s)

 

On a January night 20 years ago this month, tanks were rolling down the Avenue de A.L.N in Oran.  At first I was simply concerned that they would knock down our venerable building by mistake when one of them stopped to make a U-turn in front of the American Consulate, where we lived.

Then I realized what was happening.  Democracy was in the process of suffering a severe U-turn in Algeria, and the consequences of the January 1992 overturning of the Islamist FIS-won parliamentary election would be far-reaching and violent.  The Algerian army's move led to a lost decade through the rest of the '90s, and endemic insecurity in some areas means that Algeria is still on many countries' travel advisory lists.

How ironic, then, exactly two decades later, that the Moroccan Islamist PJD Minister of Foreign Affairs, Saad Eddine Othmani, has just accomplished his first trip abroad since his party won the parliamentary elections of November 2011 and parliament approved the formation of the PJD-led government this week.  His trip was to Algeria - the first for a Moroccan foreign minister since 2003.

Back in Oran, I remember an FLN loyalist opining in the early Nineties, "the Moroccans have yet to have their revolution."  As a proud Algerian nationalist, he obviously felt that things were just fine in his country, thank you, and that Morocco was changeless.  This was before the Islamist electoral victories of June 1990 and December 1991 challenged his complacency.

Okay, so now change has happened, peacefully, in Morocco.  Morocco in 2012 has done what Algeria refused to do in 1992: accept the results of elections which gave victory to an Islamist party.

That said, some observers still reserve judgement on the Moroccan dalliance with political Islam.  The country's population pressures and high unemployment make for a volatile mixture in a region where sparks fly.  And yet, the contrast with Algeria, faced with an elected Islamist majority in January 1992, is striking: in Morocco, no one appears to fear an Army backlash, or voices the concern heard in Algeria twenty years ago.  Those concerns? That the FIS would be a "one man, one vote, one time" party.  The FIS never got a chance to disprove that supposition.

Moroccan Minister of Communication, government spokesman, and PJD political bureau member Mustapha El Khalfi spoke January 27 at the Tangier HEM - Haute Ecole de Management - "Université Citoyenne," HEM's series of lectures on a variety of hot topics.  El Khalfi, who spent 8 months as a Congressional intern in Washington and was at Johns Hopkins SAIS (he also attended, in his previous role as a jounalist, TALIM's 2010 April Seminar), was to talk about democracy and political Islam.  He did, but in reassuring terms, preferring to talk about "democratic Islam."

In his view, the difference between Algeria in 1992 and Morocco in 2012 is that two decades ago, the Islamists in Algeria threatened the existing order, and presented themselves as a radical alternative.  Certain sectors of Algerian society - especially the military - felt threatened.  Whereas the PJD is a businesslike player, as well as being part of a wave of moderate Islamist parties in the mold of Turkey's ruling AKP.

Some Moroccan news outlets have created unrealistic deadlines for the Benkirane government, demanding tangible success within the usual 100-day grace period or political honeymoon.  After Algeria's FIS won local and regional elections in June 1990, their subsequent 18-month record of municipal governance was the subject of criticism by those looking for them to fail - but Algerians again gave the FIS their vote in December 1991.  Until the Army stepped in, cancelling the second round.

100 days, 18 months... Morocco's many challenges will take years of concerted effort at the national, regional, and local levels, and in a variety of key sectors: health, education, environment, employment, to name a few.  At least the current consensus is that Morocco's first freely-elected government is a "player."  Businesslike is a good point of departure.

Gerald Loftus

"Goodbye Morocco" - Filming Tangier's American Steps

Maybe the Escalier Américain or drouj merican didn't need a thorough steam cleaning for the shooting of "Goodbye Morocco," Nadir Mokneche's forthcoming film.  Sometimes grungy is authentic, and if you don't have to paint on fake dirt, it's much cheaper.

The Legation's medina neighborhood was the site for some location shooting this week.  We've been after the police for ages - in vain - for roving patrols to destabilize the local criminals, so the relative clout of Legation vs. film land was evident.  Not only did the police post officers to keep stray pedestrians out of camera range, but the teeming traffic at this corner of the city was re-routed - a major feat of daring.

But we were happy to meet director Nadir Mokneche, whose films on contemporary Algeria are finely constructed parables on the no-man's-land of a country which hasn't found its way.  It will be interesting to see what Mokneche does with Goodbye Morocco, which he has chosen to shoot in Tangier.

After the American Steps, Mokneche was off doing takes in front of the venerable Cinema Rif, now the Cinémathèque.  The Cinémathèque has a great collection of film posters - going back to the Thirties - of movies shot in Tangier.  Great titles like "That Man From Tangier," and plenty of cloak and dagger intrigue from World War II and Cold War days.

Now, Nadir Mokneche will have to donate a poster of Goodbye Morocco for the collection.

Gerald Loftus

Shop Casa Barata! Don't Expect Receipts

Years ago, approaching the coast on a French car ferry on my way to a diplomatic posting in Algiers, I shared a table with a few other passengers.  One of them, a young man who may have assumed that I was already familiar with the term, told me that his profession was in trabendo.  He was a trabendiste, i.e., making a living from trading in contraband.  He probably would have liked me to hide some of his goods in my almost-empty station wagon.  ("Is this American crazy, coming to Algeria with an empty car?").

Those crafty Algerians, inventing great new words in Arabic from French or Spanish (maybe now even English) roots.  In Tangier, with its rich history of foreign influence from north of the Strait, sometimes people just say it in Spanish or French.  Like contrabando.

That is what they sell in Casa Barata, where the Legation shops.  Along with the rest of the population of Tangier in search of good prices, or things that you might have trouble finding in standard shops.  We were there yesterday, and the place is, as the French might call it, folklo.  One enterprising artist has even turned some pieces of Casa Barata detritus into works of art.

In her campaign to install new curtains throughout the Legation (if the place has some 45 rooms, how many windows - and pairs of curtains - does it have?), my wife has been a frequent visitor to the House of Cheap.  Actually, "house" doesn't begin to describe this sprawling warren of shanties and more substantial buildings, criss-crossed by alleys of dubious footing (don't go there when it's raining).

Wanting to Do The Right Thing, paying and then presenting a receipt for possible (if our teeny budget allows) reimbursement, my wife asked the man selling the curtain material for a receipt.  Receipt?  "Sorry, Madame, but we sell contraband.  We don't have receipts."  Oh well, this whole job is a labor of love, and maybe my wife's free labor in sewing curtains is just part of the Loftus legacy.  But we will have to recoup our money spent on curtain material, maybe with a notarized, sworn statement "No receipts are available in Casa Barata, because it all comes to Morocco semi-clandestinely through Ceuta, the tax-free paradise."

Economia, the very serious bi-monthly published by Morocco's CESEM, the think tank of the HEM graduate business school, devoted a recent issue to the informal economy, with an amazing portrait of the traffic - the word in all of its nuances - between the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and the Morocco which surrounds it.  One statistic stands out: the low-cost European supermarket chain Lidl in Ceuta, with its population of around 50,000, has the same sales turnover as the Lidl's of Barcelona - with its population of 5 million.

Maghrib Triangulation: Guelma-Tunis-Tangier

Three profs from orient did come.  West, to Tangier.  Our visitors: three Algerian professors from the University of Guelma.

Guelma, located in Algeria's Far East, is about as far from Tangier as you can get in Algeria.  The University's name - 08 Mai 1945 - is a giveaway to its location, near the town of Setif, which on VE Day 1945 saw a massacre of Algerian nationalists demanding rights from the France they had just fought to defend.  It was the spark that a decade later launched Algeria's war for independence.

It was thanks to a suggestion by a former director of our sister research center in Tunis that Professors Ladi Toulgui, Hamid Boudechiche, and Abdelhak Elaggoune, of the University's American Studies program, sought out TALIM.

Always on the lookout for networking opportunities, we set up an impromptu brainstorming session on inter-Maghrib exchanges and the use of TALIM's research facilities by Moroccan, Algerian, and other scholars.

Responding to the chance to interact with their Algerian colleagues was an impressive gathering of Moroccan and American academics, based in both Tangier and Tetouan.  Familiar as they are with the Legation's strengths and weaknesses, we wanted to hear from them where we could improve.  Provide more research materials in Arabic (one of our interlocutors, Dr. Mhammed Benabboud and his Asmir Association, has an entire library of cultural preservation titles).  Reach out more to Tetouan, the half of Tangier/Tetouan's Abdelmalek Essaadi University where there is more of a concentration of the disciplines - history, art, social sciences - that have resonance at TALIM.

For us, the stress on inter-Maghrib exchange was a chance to encourage more Moroccan applicants for the AIMS Maghribi Grant program, which tends to see Morocco as a favored destination for Algerian, Tunisian, and other Maghribi scholars, but which has traditionally seen a disproportionately low number of Moroccan applications.

In the case of the Algerian professors, it was the University of Guelma which sent them to Morocco, without the benefit of AIMS or other international grants.  Guelma to Tangier, via Tunis - not the most direct route, but certainly an encouraging opening to the world of American Studies programs in the Maghrib, which should be a natural counterpart to study of the Maghrib by American scholars.

We thank Doctors Elaggoune, Boudechiche, and Toulgui for making the trek to Tangier and TALIM, but also for helping us focus on that rich area of potential collaboration, using one of our main strengths: our history, our building, and its original purpose.

American studies at TALIM... at the historic Legation which saw the first overtures by Revolutionary-era America to the Arab and Muslim world.  American studies with a difference: Maghribi scholars examining the long history of American involvement in Morocco and North Africa.

Sometimes it takes outsiders looking in to shine a light on a potentially rich stream of research topics.  TALIM welcomes Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Libyan, Mauritanian - and American! - researchers in American studies.  We've got the stories - lots of them.

Gerald Loftus

Mascarades: Lyes Salem

فوضى

Pronunciation: Fwḑá

Definition: chaos

It's one of our favorite words, a way to smile at the confusion that sometimes swirls around us.

Arabic teachers searching for that perfect visual aid to illustrate the fawda that can come to inhabit life in places like Algeria could do no better than show the hilarious opening sequence of Lyes Salem's Mascarades, released in 2008 in Algeria and shown last night at the Middle East Studies Association film festival in San Diego.

The MESA screening, with the director/star Lyes Salem providing commentary, was sponsored by TALIM's mother organization AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.  Amidst very serious presentations of papers ("Revisiting Modernity and Heteronormativity in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East," just to cite one with a 50 dollar word), Mascarades provided welcome comic relief.

Not that Lyes Salem does not take his film making seriously.  First of all his choice of colloquial Algerian Arabic (vice the French that often, unrealistically but more commercially, shows up in otherwise excellent Algerian films vying for European financing and audiences).  Such choices are "political," according to Lyes Salem, though Mascarades cannot be said to be overtly political in tone.

There is, however, that running joke of the unseen "Colonel," who provides employment to the principal character Mounir (played by Lyes Salem), and whose convoy of high-powered security SUVs can be rented out for marriage cortèges.  Anyone familiar with Algeria, and with the privileges meted out to those in power, will spot this sly wink at the presence of le pouvoir at the village level. It's just biznes.

Mounir himself is not above using some 50 dollar (or maybe 500 dinar) phrases.  He's a "horticultural engineer" (using the French ingénieur instead of the Arabic), but his friends know that he means gardener.  Mascarades is a good-natured romp through the life of a somewhat dysfunctional but lotsa-fun family, from the six year old son with a soft spot for tortured toads to the narcoleptic bride-to-be sister of Mounir.

Lyes Salem's description of Algerian humor as self-deprecating is on the mark, and he has said that he's tired of the repeated depictions of the difficulties of life in Algeria in much of Maghrebi cinema.  For Mascarades, the director has found inspiration from the zany cinema of Emir Kusturica and the incredibly funny story of life in Italy's shanty towns from 1976, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, one of the classics of Italian comedy.

Lyes Salem, with such inspiration, is on to a good thing.  I look forward to his next films.

(This commentary also appears on TALIMblog).

Mascarades: Fawda Was Never So Much Fun

فوضى

Pronunciation: Fwḑá

Definition: chaos

It's one of our favorite words, a way to smile at the confusion that sometimes swirls around us.

Arabic teachers searching for that perfect visual aid to illustrate the fawda that can come to inhabit life in places like Algeria could do no better than show the hilarious opening sequence of Lyes Salem's Mascarades, released in 2008 in Algeria and shown last night at the Middle East Studies Association film festival in San Diego.

The MESA screening, with the director/star Lyes Salem providing commentary, was sponsored by TALIM's mother organization AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.  Amidst very serious presentations of papers ("Revisiting Modernity and Heteronormativity in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East," just to cite one with a 50 dollar word), Mascarades provided welcome comic relief.

Not that Lyes Salem does not take his film making seriously.  First of all his choice of colloquial Algerian Arabic (vice the French that often, unrealistically but more commercially, shows up in otherwise excellent Algerian films vying for European financing and audiences).  Such choices are "political," according to Lyes Salem, though Mascarades cannot be said to be overtly political in tone.

There is, however, that running joke of the unseen "Colonel," who provides employment to the principal character Mounir (played by Lyes Salem), and whose convoy of high-powered security SUVs can be rented out for marriage cortèges.  Anyone familiar with Algeria, and with the privileges meted out to those in power, will spot this sly wink at the presence of le pouvoir at the village level. It's just biznes.

Mounir himself is not above using some 50 dollar (or maybe 500 dinar) phrases.  He's a "horticultural engineer" (using the French ingénieur instead of the Arabic), but his friends know that he means gardener.  Mascarades is a good-natured romp through the life of a somewhat dysfunctional but lotsa-fun family, from the six year old son with a soft spot for tortured toads to the narcoleptic bride-to-be sister of Mounir.

Lyes Salem's description of Algerian humor as self-deprecating is on the mark, and he has said that he's tired of the repeated depictions of the difficulties of life in Algeria in much of Maghrebi cinema.  For Mascarades, the director has found inspiration from the zany cinema of Emir Kusturica and the incredibly funny story of life in Italy's shanty towns from 1976, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, one of the classics of Italian comedy.

Lyes Salem, with such inspiration, is on to a good thing.  I look forward to his next films.

Gerald Loftus

Of Gods and Men and Algeria

Des Hommes et des Dieux

Though this film portrays terrorism and its victims, this is not another "post 9/11 film."  In fact, the events it portrays transpired between 1993 and 1996, and had nothing to do with America, George W. Bush, or Iraq.  The victims were French, and the perpetrators Algerian.  But which Algerians?  One of the film's characters even gets to utter the question raised by countless Algerians and outside observers, "Qui tue qui?" (Who is killing who?).

Image: Why Not Productions

For the monks of Tibhirine, that question may never really be answered with certainty.  What is certain, however, is that Xavier Beauvois has given us a unique film - the Cannes 2010 Jury Grand Prize winner.  A film that is very difficult to categorize, neither a "thriller" nor just a film about monks or terrorists. That said, it has plenty of suspense, even if pretty much everyone knows of the eventual fate of the monks.

Our time spent with the monks gives us a sense of their world, before Algeria's decade-plus of bloodshed intervened to change their pastoral idyll forever.  It is the portrayal of the monks' lives, and their anguish over the violence taking over their adopted country, which is so powerfully rendered in Des Hommes et des Dieux.  The spectator is transported to Algeria in the mid-Nineties, and the sigh that a monk utters over the sheer beauty of the landscape of the high steppes and forested hills is something that one can almost feel.  And the sense of impending loss.

Beauvois has given us a beautiful film, and the casting is perfect.  Lambert Wilson as Brother Christian, the Prior of the monastery, has an ascetic intellectual steel behind wire-rimmed glasses beloved of French priests.  He resents the intrusion of the warring factions on the monks' work, though his decision to stick it out in the isolated mountains causes him constant anguish.  Olivier Rabourdin as Christophe is riven with doubt, and closeups of his eyes replace any need for extraneous dialogue.  Brother Luc, played by an avuncular Michel Lonsdale, has seen it all - literally.  During Algeria's war of liberation in the Fifties, Luc was taken prisoner by the FLN, only to be released when they realized that Dr. Luc Dochier was treating Algerians - both FLN fighters and civilians.

Despite the difficulty of treating such a subject, Olivier Beauvois gives us a very subtle film, one that hints at the ambiguities of the record.  The monks recoil at the violence perpetrated by both sides, and their stubborn insistence at staying with the villagers who depend on them for employment, for medical treatment, and for intelligent conversation becomes an annoyance to the combatants.

A hovering helicopter gives a premonition of the fate that may have befallen the monks, the loud, whirling blades audible as they pray in their chapel.  Is it Army protection, or something else?  In 2009, former French military attaché in Algiers General François Buchwalter testified that the monks were in fact killed in a botched attack on what the Army took to be an Islamist group.

Of Gods and Men is an ode to a group of incredibly brave men, beautifully acted and filmed.  A fitting memorial to the monks buried on a hillside in their beloved Algeria.

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