I boycotted the world cup for reasons I have explained before. Didn't watch a single game nor read a single match report. The rise of the Moroccan team ,though, intrigued me for a number of reasons one being the ubiquity of the Palestinian flag being flown at the tournament and the other being the team coach's insistence that they were an African team.
This took me back to the only time I have been to Morocco when my wife and I took a desert safari lasting a few days and slept in the open while expecting Kabir. I still remember the first day of our tour in the hotel car park as all the drivers and others accompanying staff introduced themselves.
The majority described themselves as Berbers while others said they were Arabs. This rather surprised me though not as much as I knew that large minorities in Algeria (particularly in the mountain regions, as with Morocco) and Libya also expressed a Berber identity, because we are habituated to seeing North Africa as a homogeneous region of Muslim Arabs. The sudden eruption of the Icelandic volcano that year extended our stay and gave us a fascinating opportunity to listen and learn from our Berber hosts for most of whom the loss of their fertile lands and being forced into the mountains, has been a constant sore over centuries.
This then take us into a slightly darker territory where we in the West have culturally inherited a way of seeing and understanding the "other" as simple, homogeneous entity devoid of all the complexities that are a part of what constitutes "us". I can understand this approach as being of benefit to the coloniser. But this deeply embedded concept continues to hamper "our" understanding of the many "communities" that make up multi-cultural Britain. I hope therefore, that this, admittedly long, piece will help us to understand the fascinating complex and ever evolving identity around language, religion and geography in Morocco and challenge some of our traditional ways of engaging with true diversity of human societies.
I heartily recommend this brilliant article to anyone who wishes to delve deeper.
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