I can’t believe I didn’t post about this sooner - I suppose it’s worth mentioning that now that I live in Boston and work full-time (as opposed to my previous life as a 20-hour-per-week English teacher), I don’t have the time for blogging that I used to. I also don’t have the internet like I used to.
Anyhow, as I wrote over at Global Voices last week, the most newsworthy story involving Morocco in my head is that of Madeleine McCann’s apparent lookalike, young Riffain Berber girl Bouchra Benaissa. Spanish tourists traveling through the Rif (most likely on a hashish buying mission) photographed a young blonde girl on the back of an older, traditionally dressed woman and submitted it to authorities on suspicion that the girl looked a little too much like Madeleine McCann, the missing British child.
Thus, the Benaissa family was intruded upon because the Spanish were too stupid to recognize that Moroccans (their next door neighbors, one might add) come in all colors. Honestly - that’s how I see it. I’ve received some comments arguing that the Spanish tourists did the right thing, as there have been previous “sightings” of Madeleine in Morocco and that Bouchra does bear a resemblance to her, but I have to disagree. A blonde girl upon the shoulders of a traditionally dressed woman does not a Briton make.
In other words, this is racial profiling at its worst (or best, depending on how you look at it). Morocco is full of diversity - Just in my job as a teacher, I taught at least five redheads (who could’ve been plucked from Ireland), two blondes with blue eyes, several green-eyed folks with olive skin, plenty who appeared African, and a mix of all of the above.
Or as blogger Naim put it best: “The main purpose of my post is to show just one fact. The nearest neighbours of Morocco have a total ignorance about the ethnic reality of Morocco.”
