Background of French Morocco

As you travel in the train from Spanish into French Morocco you pass for a while through a strip of territory which resembles my own mental picture of the Russian collective farms. Black earth, with here and there a tractor plough crawling across it, stretches away to the horizon on either side of the line, and every few miles there is a neat cluster of limewashed cottages and agricultural buildings. This is the fertile coastal belt, watered by the winds from the Atlantic and producing a million tons of wheat annually. Needless to say, the Arabs do not own an inch of it. It is all owned by a French syndicate which works it with gang labour. The Arabs, the vast majority of whom are small peasants, cultivate a dried-up, treeless soil on which they grow barley, lucerne and various fruits and vegetables. They live chiefly on barley and the milk of miserable goats which graze on cacti, and whose daily yield is a quarter of a pint per head.

The general poverty of the country is startling, and probably worse than anything to be seen in India. Beggars are as common as flies. Children are herding goats or sheep by the time they are six, and are often doing a full day’s work at carpentering or blacksmithing when they are twelve. Most of the transport of the country is done by tiny donkeys, which cost ten shillings each and are worked to death within a few years. Bigger than England in size, Morocco barely supports a population of seven millions, and even if not under alien rule it would still be desperately poor, because of its lack of water. There are no considerable rivers, and until you come to the Atlas Mountains there are no wild trees at all, except in a few areas where the French have started reafforestation. The French settlers cultivate the land successfully and grow first-rate oranges and olives and a rather inferior wine, but this depends on having sufficient capital to dig wells and storage tanks. Apart from its agricultural and animal products the country has not much in the way of natural wealth, though the Atlas Mountains, which are not fully explored, no doubt contain minerals.

There are some 200,000 Europeans in Morocco, French or Frenchified Spanish. The seaport of Casablanca has a white proletariat of perhaps 70,000. Of the rest of the population about 5 millions would be Arabs, 100,000 Jews, and the rest chiefly Chleuh, a rather primitive Berber people inhabiting the Atlas. Except for Casablanca the big towns are really enormous villages where the peasants come to sell their beasts and buy cooking pots, nails, etc. Everything is made by hand with tools which have not altered since Biblical times. The Moroccan handicrafts, especially the pottery and the blankets, are some of the finest in the world, and have held their own against European or Japanese imports because of the miserable wages paid to the people who make them. A highly-skilled potter or carpenter earns round about a penny an hour. Except for agriculture the Jews do the same work as the Arabs, and seem on average to be somewhat poorer.

I may have seemed to paint a picture of general misery, but I must record that in 1938 and 1939 the people in Morocco struck me as being happier than, for instance, the people in London. One saw everywhere the most shocking destitution and drudgery, but also, on the whole, one saw happy faces and magnificent bodies. The Chleuh, even poorer than the Arabs of the plains, were one of the most debonair peoples I have seen. One must remember that Morocco is still almost entirely in the feudal stage, barely touched by industrialism with its conveniences and its discontents. The French took the country over in 1906, but they did not complete its conquest till 1934. The Arabs are not French citizens (for them this has the advantage that military service is not compulsory), and the country is ruled indirectly, through the Sultan, who is the creature of the French but towards whom the Arabs have a feudal loyalty. The excellent motor roads have carried a thin trickle of French culture from the Mediterranean shore to the southern slopes of the Atlas, but the mass of the people are untouched by it. Hardly any Arabs speak French correctly and few Frenchmen bother to learn Arabic.

The European population is made up of three quite distinct strata. At the top there are the well-to-do business men, bureaucrats and army officers, forming a society similar to that of Anglo-India, but probably stupider and certainly more reactionary. Then there are the small settlers, shopkeepers and minor officials, who look down on the Arabs and treat them as children; and then the white proletariat, who do not perhaps despise the Arabs but tend to keep aloof from them. Even very petty official jobs are done by Frenchmen, so that there are probably more white officials in Morocco, with its 7 million inhabitants than in India, with its 350 millions. The normal French attitude towards the Arabs is patronising, though not unkindly. Even in 1939 the country was ripe for Fascism. Almost the whole of the Press was pro-Franco—one of the principal papers was run by Doriot’s party—Gringoire and Candide were the favourite reading of the army officers, and the petite bourgeoisie were anti-Semitic. The left-wing parties had little footing in the country, even in Casablanca. The attitude of the Arabs towards the French occupation was rather difficult to gauge. Although the conquest was comparatively recent it seemed to have left no scars behind, and the absence of race-hatred was very striking. Wherever one went one met with friendliness, though no servility—even the beggars were not really servile. The Arabs have probably transferred some of their feudal feeling to the French régime, and the French have found it easy to recruit an excellent mercenary army of the colonial type. But towards the poorer classes of French the attitude of the Arabs appeared to have an undercurrent of good natured contempt. They were very much nicer human beings than these petty functionaries and shopkeepers, and perhaps they were aware of it. It would be absurd to expect a revolutionary movement of anything like the European type to arise in Morocco, but a violent nationalist movement, non-existent three years ago, could probably arise quite suddenly. The French defeat by Germany may have paved the way for it.

It now seems as though the United Nations are going to have control of Morocco, and what they ought to do with it is clear enough in general terms. A country like Morocco cannot be genuinely independent, because it cannot defend itself; it must be under some kind of tutelage, and it must have the loan of European technical experts; but to free the Arabs from economic exploitation would be very simple, and would hurt nobody except a few wealthy men in Paris and Casablanca. There is no need to interfere with the small French settler, who improves the soil and does little harm. But the big syndicates which have absorbed all the best land and given themselves a monopoly of the wine and tobacco trades should be expropriated forthwith. Above all, that strip of fertile soil down the west coast should be given back to the peasants. The buildings and the machinery for collective farms are already there; but even if the land were split up into small holdings the possession of it by the Arabs themselves would raise the standard of living perceptibly. It would be very easy for us and the Americans to do this, our own interests not being directly involved. Such a deed would echo round the world and cause convulsions in Franco’s colony next door. But when one tries to imagine it actually happening, and then looks at the faces of the people who rule us, one remembers rather sadly that the age of miracles is over.

Tribune, 20 November 1942

This transcription is based on the Collected Works, edited by Professor Peter Davison, with spelling mistakes corrected silently.

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Operation Torch, the Allied liberation of north Africa, began on the 8^th November 1942. The Western Task Force which landed in French Morocco was commanded by General George Patton. Two weeks later George Orwell used material which had appeared in his 1939 essay “Marrakech” in this account for readers of Tribune. It was, presumably, because of this duplication of the earlier work that Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus did not include this account in Volume Three of the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.