Casablanca—the city associated by almost everyone with Michael Curtiz’s film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, even though neither the famous melodrama nor the idea for the play originated in Morocco. The film’s main characters, Rick and Ilsa, like Romeo and Juliet, never existed in reality. Yet in the mass imagination they live forever. We make pilgrimages to Verona to stand beneath the lovers’ balcony, while in Casablanca we ask about Rick’s American Bar.
The White City does not need Hollywood plots; it has its own true love story, as full of passion as Rick’s love for Ilsa or Juliet’s for Romeo. Casablanca’s history included two powerful lovers who, through their passion, gave it power and ensured its development. One was a giaour in love with this Eastern beauty, the other a powerful and vengeful sultan.
One thought his affection was reciprocated; the other was convinced that he had humbled her and forced her into obedience. Both were mistaken. They were deceived and betrayed.
The giaour in love and the white girl from the seaside
A man of paradoxes. Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934). The first Resident-General of Morocco under the French protectorate. A Catholic, monarchist and distinguished colonial administrator, he arrived to take up his post in April 1912. A royalist in the service of the Republic, an aristocrat from a country where the guillotine socially equated the nobility with the common people by cutting off the former’s heads. A Catholic defending Islam. To this day, false rumors circulate in Morocco that he changed his faith and became a Muslim.
In his time, Casablanca was awakening after a three-hundred-year sleep. Abandoned by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century because of constant pirate attacks, it was slowly beginning to gain importance as a port on the trade route from Marseille, prospering greatly thanks to new, very fast steamships.
A beautiful and innocent girl in white from a port city. Who would believe her? Did she sing “Sit at my table, Milord” when she first met him? Did this experienced soldier and outstanding tactician suspect nothing? Or is that simply what happens whenever a man falls in love with a woman? He believes in the white of an innocent dress, a gentle smile, a whisper sweet as the sound of waves, while the port tavern where he finds her is merely romantic, insignificant scenery.
Lyautey decided to make the White City queen of the ocean and give her a rich gift: a modern port. Even the sea was against him. Tides and strong wind currents repeatedly destroyed the structures erected with great difficulty. Advisers and builders said the project could not be completed. And Casablanca patiently awaited her gift.
She received it. In the 1930s, the port’s capacity grew to 3 million tons of transported goods. Thanks to it, the provincial girl of uncertain repute became a metropolis and queen of finance.
Today, with 4 million inhabitants, it is one of the world’s largest port cities, the fourth-largest city in Africa and the largest city in the Maghreb. Ten percent of Morocco’s population lives here; all the major banks are headquartered here, while large international companies have offices and representatives here. The textile, food and metallurgical industries account for 60% of all factories in the country.
Hubert Lyautey had one passion and one goal. The French Republic disappointed him; he felt unnecessary there with his views. He judged secularization and social equality in access to power negatively. As he himself wrote, loyalty to the aristocracy and monarchy ran in his blood. He wanted to protect Morocco from Europe’s mistakes. He therefore strongly supported a system that was slowly dying out on the continent. Casablanca, queen of the ocean, was to bring wealth to the new Morocco he had created. He made a mistake, just as his successor did. Neither of them asked her opinion.
The vengeful sultan
Morocco’s Sultan Hassan II (1929–1999), a ruler who tolerated no opposition, decided to discipline the girl by marking his authority over her.
He never met Lyautey, who died in France in 1934. He never felt great affection for the city. He suffered from asthma, and the seaside climate did not suit him. Yet, like everything in Morocco, Casablanca belonged to him as well. The white girl was his property, and he decided to enforce that claim. In the heart of the most Europeanized city, he built the largest mosque in the world after those in Mecca and Medina.
Hassan II was also not fond of the system prevailing in Europe. The opinion he expressed in an interview is still preserved in the “Le Figaro” newspaper’s archive of quotations by famous people: “Western Europe is interested in nothing but great feasting. It is under the yoke of chicken, wine and abstractions.”
He sensed the city’s betrayal, its rush toward great feasting. Casablanca was putting on a chador.
On a platform supported on the ocean floor, an outstanding work was taking shape, intended to contain everything most beautiful and important in the culture and art of Muslim Morocco. Work continued seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Hassan II was already old and ill and feared he would not live to see the work completed. The mosque, whose construction was funded by every subject because compulsory taxes were levied for that purpose, was completed in 1993, six years before the king’s death and after more than thirteen years of work. Official sources state that its construction cost approximately 400 million euros.
Today the mosque is the city’s showcase, distinguishing it and attracting tourists curious about the work. First there is the mosque, then the city. Hassan II named it after himself. Lyautey has only a tiny equestrian monument, hidden in the garden of the French consulate by Place Mohamed V. The mosque can accommodate more than 100,000 worshippers, while Casablanca’s port still ranks among the world’s leading ports, handling around 20 million tons of goods.
Both protected a system based on tradition and faith. Neither stopped change. As the faithful press their faces to the ground and bow to God, the white girl passes by unnoticed.
Today she is called Greater Casa. Her kingdom is nightclubs and bars where the children of Morocco’s wealthiest people have fun. “Rich Kids” was the title of an article in a Moroccan weekly. The first photograph shows four girls in skimpy outfits dancing on a bar in a nightclub. Young, wealthy and carefree. Children of the financial and political elite. The clubs and discos of Casablanca, Morocco and Europe are their second homes. They buy sports cars as others buy socks. They spend 8,000 euros a day and have fun without thinking about work or the future, which their wealthy daddy will always provide.
Greater Casa is a world of unimaginable luxury for the ordinary Moroccan. Greater Casa has such financial power that it managed to surprise the ruler himself, Mohamed VI, who collects the latest and unique car models. Once, when he was about to sign an order with Mercedes for a freshly produced model, he was informed that this prototype had already been ordered. And where? In his own country, by a wealthy thirty-year-old from Casablanca. Mohamed VI canceled his order and had to accept the disappointment; he was not first.
Hubert Lyautey’s white girl now wears a miniskirt and high heels on slender legs. She walks freely along the seaside promenade, her bare breasts gently swaying beneath a light blouse. She dances on a bar in nightclubs, flies to Madrid on her wealthy daddy’s money to go shopping. She does not care about her virginity, makes love when she feels like it and has sex when she falls in love. She is a girl from the port. She knows what she wants and can take care of herself.
Grażyna Hanaf