The Cosmopolitan - The French Colonial Tourism Industry in Ifrane, Morocco

Hello. You're listening to MAGREB and Past and Present podcasts, a space dedicated to history, art, culture, politics, sociology, anthropology, and many other subjects. This episode was recorded on 05/31/2024 at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies. Today, we're delighted to welcome Rhys Hollister to speak on his research entitled The French Colonial Tourism Industry in Ifrane, Morocco, which he conducted in Morocco as a Fulbright grantee. Reese Hollister is a 2023 graduate of Manhattan College in the Bronx.

He's a young historian who recently completed a Fulbright student research grant here in The Kingdom Of Morocco. Reese is a lover of the Arabic language, participating in the Salaam program in Oman to continue modern standard, and the Fulbright Critical Language Enhancement Award to learn Moroccan Darija. As a historian still finding his niche, Rice is now shifting his energies towards studying Morocco and The Maghrib more broadly. He runs the YouTube channel, Historical Method Man, where he shares his undergraduate work that was sitting in a drawer. Reese will be commencing graduate studies at North Carolina State University's Master of International Studies program in 2024.

So Reese, welcome. We're delighted to have you today.

Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here Tangier and thanks everyone for listening.

So it's fun for us to have a scholar with us who's at the beginning of this career. We've had a chance to host a number of pretty senior folks and it's great to have your perspective as you're looking at both Morocco and at doing research and methodology here in Morocco. I know you were focused on Ifran. Tell me a little bit more about Ifran. What is it?

What does it look like today?

So I became in Ifran when I went to look online at the programs at Jamiat Al Ahwahine, Ahwahine University. And looking at the architecture of the place, the first thing you notice is how it doesn't really look Moroccan. So when you're looking at this place, it's known as colloquially as the Switzerland Of Morocco. And with that entails architecture of a framed gables, a framed homes, architecture that's reflective of France, and a place that doesn't really seem distinctly Moroccan. So I became interested in this place by looking at the university.

Ifran today and Ifran in the past was a hub of tourism within Morocco, but initially within the French protectorate. The reason why it's so popular is because of the beautiful nature up in the cool climate in the mountains. Sometimes there's snow in the winter, and if you just go to the place, it's really incredibly breathtaking.

I have to say it's probably the most surprising place I've ever visited in Morocco. It really does feel like some place where you should order some Swiss Recklet. So this was your first time conducting archival research abroad. For the young aspiring scholars who may be listening, tell us a little bit more about that process for you.

So when conducting research in another country, 1 of the first barriers that seems to come across is the barrier of language. And the opportunity with Fulbright to learn Moroccan Darasia, not only to conduct research, but also just to meet people and make friends was really, really special to me. And also, as a historian, going to experience the archives for the first time, going in to see original documents rather than just reading what someone else wrote, is a really special experience. It allows knowledge production. And this is the first time in my life where I was able to go to a place and create new knowledge out of sources that have never really been touched before.

And for that reason, archival research is very exciting. Another thing that's exciting about being in the place where you're researching is opportunities for ethnographic research, opportunities to go and meet people, to explore what Rahimi Al Gobli would say is our other archives. Archives are not brick and mortar, but archives that are within the imaginations, within the minds of people. Being able to talk to taxi drivers, being able to talk to anyone who's experienced the history, that's really special as well, able to conduct research.

Do you have any advice to folks who are looking to undertake archival research in Morocco? Hints that would make it easier for them?

So we like to say, you have to know a guy. But my real advice is to show up to the place that you want to go. Emailing is not really going work in this country. And if you just show up to Arshif To Marok in Rabat and interact with the people there, establish a report, and meet with them, that's 1 of the best things you can do. Another thing that's really important is to look at nongovernmental archives, like the archives at Jamiyad Al Ahwain in Ifanan, and also looking at archives in local places, looking going to town halls, going to places locally, and seeing what archives they have there.

And then archives are not necessarily stored in a building. Archives are within people's homes. Archives are within people's scrapbooks. So meeting people and trying to find these special other archives will allow researchers to go beyond more official narratives and see how people remember their past by themselves and see what they preserve for themselves.

So let's go back to Ifran and its unusual history. You've told me separately that Ifran's history is part of a larger conversation about Colonial Hill Stations. I don't actually know what a Colonial Hill Station is. Tell me more.

So Ifran is a colonial hill station, and a hill station is a type of urban settlement generally located high up in the mountains and generally located up where the climates are cooler. In East Asia and South Asia, we have about a 108 hill stations mapped out. And Ifran is an example of 1 of these places, but it's within Northwest Africa. Hill stations, I would define as having a couple requisites. The first being climate and the second being health.

European So colonialists at this time generally believed that climate and health were very, very closely interlinked. That's the reason that you get places like the now abandoned hospital in Benzmir, Morocco, high up in the mountains. These places were types of sanitariums. And over time, places of rest became places of leisure. So when European colonists are settling the interiors of Morocco and interiors of other countries within the Colonial Hill Station model, they established tourism over time.

And what's important to note about Colonial Hill Stations is that they're a settlement. They're not a place that existed otherwise. So if you look at Ifrane itself, it was developed in about 6 months in 1929 from near nothing. I'm not going to say nothing because many Tamazare speaking communities lived there, especially the Benny Magild imagines. But the place sprung up very quickly.

Another thing about Hill Stations is that the people that worked there, the people that labored are not necessarily the people that benefited from this, and this is where the colonial relationship really comes in. Within Ifran, we have photographs and records of about 400 prison laborers from the area who were forced to labor to build this town, And this is common within the French Empire and common within other hill stations more broadly. And hill stations generally located high up in the mountains are located far away from the so called native in the European colonial relationship. And this is why you get the sister city of Tim Dakin next to Ifren, which originally was a Bidonville, a shanty town. And of course, Tim Dakin has gotten better over time, especially after independence.

But the population that worked in Ifren did not live there. The population that was served in Ifran was visiting there from outside. And even before that, they were settler colonialists coming in either from Europe or coming in from Morocco's coast towards the interior.

So Ifran is a shining example of Morocco's early tourism industry. Let's delve into that a little bit more. What were some of the drivers of the early tourism industry in Morocco?

The largest driver of the tourism industry in Morocco is empire. And with the French Empire, the French were trying to establish fondness for Morocco and other colonies like Algeria, which was considered a colony while Morocco was considered a protectorate by the French. But the reason is empire. In 1912, there was a treaty of Fez, which established the French protectorate Morocco that moved the capital from Fez to Rabat. Generally, settlements in French Morocco were centered in the coastal areas.

The coastal areas had tourism at that time, but what was happening in a larger way was the rapid change of the cities and the rapid change of who lived in them. There's rapid urbanization from Moroccans who are going into Casablanca, are going into Rabat, and the massive creation of Bidon Vios. And also at the same time, there's many, many, many European settlers coming in from Europe. About 60 of 160,000 were French by 1931. Moroccan tourism develops around 1934 with the creation of the the Moroccan office of tourism, pardon my French.

And at the same time, the French protectorate and the colonial government is fighting resistance movements inside the Reef Mountains, inside the Moyen Atlas, and within the Tassusit region. So as French military moved in closer to the interior, bringing military infrastructure like roads, electricity, and telecoms, and telecommunications, once they suppress and quell once they quell Tamazir speaking groups, this existing military infrastructure changes, and it becomes a tourism infrastructure. So the core of Moroccan tourism and the infrastructure behind it comes from military infrastructure. And this not only allows tourism to occur, but it allows for the rapid settlement of the interiors of the country. So in this way, I argue that tourism is a wing of colonialism, and I argue that tourism is a way in which the French were able to settle the interior of Morocco.

So you talked a little bit about the office nationale de tourisma. Tell us a little bit more about how the tourism industry advertised and promoted Morocco as a destination.

So within Archiv du Moroc, in Rabat, there is a unicorn document that comes from the Moroccan office of tourism from France. And this document is titled, and this document discusses the ways in which different forms of propaganda and advertising supports the French colonial project. If settlers and folks from France are coming into Morocco, they see Morocco, and they might say, well, this is a part of my country. This is a part of my empire. And there are many ways in which the civilizing mission is brought there.

Within the advertising, there's 1 document I have that talks about the civilized man and camping. It's an advertisement for a camper van. And roughly translated, it says, the civilized man, part excellence, is an animal of luxury. He has demands. The civilized woman is doubly demanding.

It is necessary for the civilized man to adapt to the savage life, only being able to live in it with certain commodities. This is a rough translation of a document within Archie de Marocque. The reason I bring this up is that within the French civilizing mission, it permeates the tourism industry as well, where there are ideas about bringing civilization to Morocco, sort of differentiating between the civilized and the savage. And this goes back to classic orientalism and what we see with Edward Said's work. The idea of there's a people who need to be protected until they're ready to become sovereign.

And that's the whole foundation of the French protectorate. So in advertising the camping industry and camper vans in a way that makes it seem as if there's a way to experience this savage land in a civilized way, It's another way in which the French justified empire. And if it was in an advertisement for a camper van, imagine it in military and political activities as well.

So again, thinking about the young aspiring scholar who might be listening and dreaming of their own projects. If you could go back and start this project again from the beginning, is there anything that you would do differently?

Oh, yes. When I started this project, I noticed a 3 way business relationship between the production of the tourism industry, the consumption, how tourists consumed Morocco, and labor. I touched the first 2, but because my diary skills were not at that next level, I wasn't able to properly do justice to the people who worked in Morocco. Luckily, and timely so, archivists at Jameyat al Ahwahen University have been recording oral history interviews with many older folks who have grown up in Ifran and who have labored there within the colonial period and afterwards. These interviews are in Darasia, and they need to be researched.

I wasn't able to because my Darasia skills weren't up to snuff, but that would be the next project, inshallah. What's really important about looking at oral history interviews is the ability to understand the perspective of the people who worked. As historian Todd Cleveland wrote in his A History of Tourism in Africa from 2021, the voices of those who labored within tourism more broadly have been lost, and especially within the African context, where the most that we might know about the people who worked there is from accounts by travel literature from Europeans. This is all from a European colonial gaze. But the people who labored within the tourism industry were smart.

They spoke multiple languages, African and European. They were translators. They worked in official ways. Maybe they sold fruit next to the official hotel. And these are stories that are worth uncovering.

And the fact that there is an oral history project in Ifran that has not been studied yet is an excellent opportunity that's sitting on a silver platter for someone to finally research the labor aspect. If I were to do this project again, I would look more deeply at those who labored with Inifrin.

Well, we have found that people who come to Morocco tend to come back. It's that kind of place. So we hope to see you back, and perhaps you will be the person delving more into the history of labor in Ifron. Reese Hollister, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having

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