Dates: 3 – 5 January 2014
Country: Morocco, Essouaira
By Don Murray*
The quote was memorable. “I never expected, after the trials I had been through, to face death in Essaouira.” This was the opening paragraph of the story of African refugees fleeing war and trapped in Morocco. The quote, from a woman, referred to the death of a friend, thrown, she said, by police from his 5th floor balcony. The police called it a suicide.
The openning quote, like the story, was unexpected. In almost two days of the workshop on diversity, the plight of African refugees in Morocco had barely been mentioned.
The story was written at the Media Diversity Institute (MDI) inclusive journalism workshop in Moroccan city Essouaira, on 3 – 5 of January 2014, as part of the project „Promoting Freedom of Expression, Diversity and Inclusion in Morocco“ funded by the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC).
The openning quote, like the story, was unexpected. In almost two days of the workshop on diversity, the plight of African refugees in Morocco had barely been mentioned.
There were other surprises, notably the story entitled ‘Papa Noël en visite’. This was an original take on the misery of children in an impoverished district in the region in the form of a visit from Santa Claus. The children in the story reacted with incomprehension and even fear. ‘A child thief,’ one cried. A clever effort, Safi Naciri, the Moroccan trainer, judged, but not quite journalism.
Almost all the other pieces were journalism and some, like the report on African refugees, good journalism. Several of the short reports concentrated on economic exclusion and a couple on social exclusion, including a piece on ‘key ladies’ who rent out rooms in their houses to live but are often regarded as prostitutes.
These were the work of middle-aged men, most of them ‘stringers’ for newspapers based in larger cities. Almost all had no formal journalism training and almost none could live alone from their journalistic work and had better-paying jobs as teachers or civil servants. But several said, in introducing themselves, that they chosen journalism to help right injustices. And injustices there were all around them, judging from their pieces.
Their enthusiasm and appetite to learn were infectious. Listening to their stories, I felt I was learning as much as they were. And walking about the old city in the evening with Safi Naciri, I learned more, this time about Essaouira itself. It was built as a model city by a captive French architect by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah in 1760, with a large Jewish population until Moroccan independence in 1956. It was also the set for much of Orson Welles’ film Othello. The Jewish population has gone, their streets now filled with tourist shops and the only wisps of Welles’ passage are the signs for the Palazzo Desdemona and the Espace Othello in small side streets.
That was the past. The present, in part, is the energy of the stringer-reporters in a poor region marked by inequality and economic and social exclusion.
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*Don Murray was the trainer at MDI workshop. He is a journalist and former correspondent CBC-Radio-Canada