Two "Moroccos"

One of the leading concepts for describing economic development in late-industrializing, post-colonial countries is "dualism." For example, the label "Belindia" has been used to describe the radical inequality between Brazil's relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan south/southeast (Brazil's "Belgium") and its backward northeast (Brazil's "India"). Would Morocco, a country slightly larger than California and just smaller than Spain, exhibit similar characteristics?

The answer was revealed when we left the cosmopolitan comforts of Marrakech and crossed to the other side of the Atlas Mountains. Marrakech, like other Moroccan cities we visited, was complex in and of itself. In fact, it was several cities in one: an ancient, walled, and sacred city (the medina) alongside an automobile-based, fashionable and vaguely secular city (the French new city). A construction boom in sprawling homogenous modern villas aggressively marketed to Europeans and Moroccan elites appeared to announce the arrival of yet another (post-modern?) phase in Marrakech's urban development. Altogether the city exhibited a vibrant mix of old and new.


Yet the journey across the mountains and deep into the desert revealed an entirely different Morocco, one far removed from the hustle and bustle of the city and seemingly disconnected from national life elsewhere. Above all, it revealed the staggering poverty of life in the desert. Here, on the edge of the Sahara, the government appeared to have little reach. The most visible signs of the state were military compounds strategically spread out across the land and the occasional elementary school. Yet there was a vibrancy here too grounded in the traditions of nomadic and desert life, and
seen in the bright blue clothing, red carpets, and green pottery.


In short, our trip from one side of Morocco to the other-from the ocean to Marrakech and across the mountains to the sandy frontier with Algeria-revealed several Moroccos, coexisting rather tenuously yet forming a complex whole.
- Dexter Boniface, Political Science