Western Sahara

       

The days of plenty are behind us. Gone are the hazey aromas of the tagines, fist-sized gooey dates, the markets exploding like a fruitarians wet dream. They disappeared gradually together with the sparsening of the foliage and the replacement of ‘Stop’ signs with those simply showing a camel in mid-stride. Even the local wildlife has had to adapt or die. Entire herds of goats are seen nesting in the highest branches of the occasional tree – the mystery of how their hoofs became apposable still to be solved. The butcheries no longer tell you what kind of meat they’re displaying. Its gastric Russian roulette out here. You see, we have crossed the threshold from Morocco into Western Sahara and the two are absolute worlds apart.

Firstly, this is perhaps the only place on earth where our Green Mamba passports are not scorned and scrutinised for signs of forgery but, au contraire, afford us a kind of VIP status. The reason for this is that Western Sahara was actually a completely different country from Morocco in the past – administered by Spain as ‘The Spanish Sahara’ for most of the 20^th century, while the rest of Morocco ate baguettes with the French . Then after the Spanish decided that the 70’s were just too groovy for colonisation they gave it up only for Morocco to promptly invade and, in the words of our right-wing Saharawi host “took our sand, took our women and, yes, even took our phosphate!” While the rest of the world has largely ignored this for the past 20 years, our government has stood by the little guys and championed freedom for these turban-clad individuals. It is, I suppose, a bit of a sad irony that the Saharawi here revere us as South Africans to such an extent as to offer us free nights in hotels and an extra baklava at the end of our meals, while hardly any of us know that Western Sahara even exists.

The other differences are everywhere. Some small: the people speak Spanish instead of French, khaki military uniforms are everywhere, more road blocks, more donkeys, more sand, less cats. Other changes are enormous:  the people here drink coffee instead of tea. This shakes the very foundation of Moroccan society where every street corner has at least three tea-shops, always full with patrons fervently decanting tea back-and-forth between their glass and the pot. Every Moroccan gives a different, increasingly implausible reason as to why this is done.

“It is for good filter”

“For flavour – strong like the desert!”

And the least logical: “For strength – for you and your wife in the night”

The truth, I suspect, is simply to draw out this sacred ritual of consuming sickly-sweet minty tea they hold so dear. And, in doing so, get the most bang for their buck. So in their absence, everything we thought we knew about Moroccan society has come crashing down. And with it almost our entire Arabic vocabulary – all of which related to the foam a good tea-pourer makes. Now all we can converse about is flatulence.

There have also been other weird curiousities around. The seaside village of Tarfaya is a good example. An ancient building sits in the middle of the surf, halfway out to sea. The entire shore is lined with hundreds of thousands of washed up miniature purple jelly-fish. The most translated French book in history ‘Le Petit Prince’ was written there and the only museum for 500kms is the one dedicated to him. Old men in white jelabas ride donkeys up-and-down the streets. People keep their goats within their houses, locked up behind five metre high concrete walls. They are clearly aware that, like everything else in these parts, these creatures are just not like all the other kids.