Essaouira, Morocco. Julien Lagarde/flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In a 2012 interview titled “Dans la peau d’un noir au Maroc”, Bassirou Ba, a Senegalese professional, narrated his experience of being black-skinned person in Morocco. Like many Senegalese students, Ba arrived in Morocco on a scholarship to complete his studies and also found employment there. In 2007, he gained a master’s degree in journalism and communication in Rabat and worked as journalist for a number of francophone magazines. However, his experience was also marked by multiple everyday forms of racism that reveal, in his view, the sense of superiority that some Moroccans feel vis-à-vis sub-Saharan Africans, and their views of black people as ‘slaves’, ‘servants’, and ‘moral inferiors’.
Ba’s testimony is part of a debate underway in Morocco about the issue of ‘anti-black racism’ and its relationship with the racial legacies of slavery. The magazine Jeune Afrique helped begin this debate in the early 2000s by publishing personal testimonies of both black individuals from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africans on their own experiences with racism. The attention given to this question has substantially increased since 2013, however, following a spate of violent incidents between Moroccans and sub-Saharan migrants that included the murders of the Congolese Alexis Toussaint and the young Senegalese Ismail Faye.
