Marrakech – To call oneself African in Morocco, or more broadly in North Africa, remains an act laden with hesitation. It is not ignorance of geography – no one disputes the stubborn fact that Morocco is located in Africa. Instead, it is a hesitation born of centuries of conceptual sedimentation, of cartographies both material and mental that have stratified difference across the Sahara.
At first glance, this – both the attitude and its traditional justification – appears as mere linguistic habit. Upon closer anthropological excavation, however, it reveals the persistence of colonial and civilizational grammars that continue to structure self-understanding in the Maghreb. When a Moroccan says, half-jokingly yet half-earnestly, “I have never been to Africa,” the utterance is not trivial. It indexes the deep entanglement between geography and meaning, between the space of the continent and the space of the imagination.
As Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne observes, “you will easily find a Moroccan or a Tunisian who says, ‘I have never been to Africa,’” because “in his mind, Africa is sub-Saharan Africa.” He adds, almost ironically, that the same person “knows it, of course – since with the Africa Cup of Nations he must play against Cameroon or Gabon.”
Yet, this sporting reminder of belonging does little to unsettle what Diagne calls “a kind of tropism of the Mediterranean lands south of the sea, toward Europe.” For him, “to consider that there is a separation between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa is precisely a colonial way of thinking our continent.” Hence his insistence on “a re-appropriation of the concept of Africa by Africans… against this colonial division.”
Colonial invention still shapes Morocco’s imagined geography
The term “Africa” in local vernacular usage has long been metonymically reduced to mean “Black Africa.” In Moroccan Arabic, Afrīqī (أفريقي) typically signifies a sub-Saharan person; it is not a continental marker but a racialized descriptor. Everyday language in Morocco thus employs “Afrīqī” to mean “Black” or “sub-Saharan,” not “a person from the African continent,” linguistically setting Moroccans apart from “Africans.”
Ethnographic and discourse studies have documented this semantic slippage, noting that in ordinary conversation, “Africans” commonly refers to West or Central Africans, while the term’s connotations carry deep historical residues of servitude, alterity, and distance. The semantic field of Afrīqī remains haunted by the memory of trans-Saharan slavery and its social hierarchies, which continue to shape racial imaginaries long after their formal abolition.
In this sense, everyday speech reproduces a symbolic geography in which the Sahara is not merely a desert of sand but a frontier of meaning – an epistemic wall dividing the familiar from the othered. The same linguistic pattern reverberates across the Maghreb, where “African” evokes an elsewhere inhabited by the dark-skinned, the migrant, the non-Arab, or the economically subordinate. As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, language is never innocent: it is a repository of power, “a structured and structuring structure,” through which hierarchies are naturalized and continuously re-enacted.
To understand why this boundary endures, one must return to the historical moment in which North Africa was first conceptually amputated from the rest of the continent. French colonial scholarship, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forged a dichotomy between “l’Afrique du Nord” and “l’Afrique noire” (North Africa and Black Africa). Given its obsession with typology, the colonial administration needed distinctions to justify differentiated rule.
“The Maghreb,” as Abdelmajid Hannoum has demonstrated, was less an ancient civilizational entity than a colonial invention – a category meticulously crafted by French cartographers, ethnographers, and administrators to demarcate a supposedly Mediterranean, semi-European sphere distinct both from “primitive” south of “Afrique noire” and the “Middle East.”
Through this taxonomy, the Maghreb became Europe’s southern mirror rather than Africa’s northern limb. In the process, cartographic lines were transposed into epistemological ones: what the colonial map separated, the colonial mind naturalized. The result was a durable territorial-symbolic imaginary in which the Maghreb appeared adjacent to Africa, but not quite part of it – a liminal space suspended between continents, a geography of exception that still structures modern consciousness.
Language and empire forged Morocco’s mental borders
This northward orientation crystallized into a durable habitus. The colonial notion of “Mediterraneanism,” which celebrated the Maghreb’s climatic and cultural affinity with southern Europe, became a post-independence aspiration. Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian elites – educated in French institutions, fluent in European idioms of modernity – embraced the Mediterranean axis as a way of narrating belonging upward, toward the north, rather than southward into the continent.
The sea, rather than the desert, defined their imaginative geography. Thus, the Mediterranean came to symbolize civilization, commerce, and cosmopolitanism, while the Sahara symbolized backwardness, poverty, and tribal timelessness. The anthropological irony is sharp: what had historically been a zone of exchange, the trans-Saharan trade routes that linked Timbuktu to Marrakech, became recast as a natural divide, a frontier between two civilizations rather than a bridge connecting them.
The Eurafrica project in mid-20th-century Europe framed North Africa as Europe’s southern extension and corridor to Africa, embedding a geopolitical imagination in which the Maghreb mediates “Africa” rather than belongs to it. This genealogy still shapes policy rhetoric and mental maps.
Overlaying this Mediterraneanism was the ideological pull of pan-Arabism. The mid-twentieth century witnessed the rise of a supra-identity that stretched from Casablanca to Baghdad, anchored in the shared idiom of Arabic and the universalist rhetoric of Islam.
In the decades following independence, to be modern in Rabat or Tunis was to situate oneself within the Arab world rather than the African continent. Arab nationalism offered political solidarity and cultural prestige, particularly at a time when “Africa” in the Eurocentric imagination was – and still – essentially synonymous with underdevelopment and primitivism.
The Maghreb’s Arabization policies – linguistic, educational, symbolic – reinforced this orientation, inscribing the Arab world as a collective homeland while marginalizing both the Amazigh and the sub-Saharan as peripheral references. This Arabist horizon became a primary vector through which many North Africans ceased to see “African” as their primary descriptor.
The Amazigh revival that emerged later did not fully undo this. While Amazigh movements resisted Arab hegemony and sought to reclaim indigeneity, they often articulated identity in terms of North African particularity rather than continental unity. The emphasis on being autochthonous, on belonging to the Atlas and the Maghreb, asserted difference from the Arab East (Mashriq) but did not necessarily foster affinity with sub-Saharan Africa.
Indeed, many Amazigh discourses reaffirmed the Sahara as the southern limit of their world. Thus, even de-Arabization did not equate to Africanization. Both Arab and Amazigh identities, in their different ways, privileged the Maghreb’s uniqueness – either as the western pillar of Arab civilization or as the cradle of an ancient Berberity – over its continental embeddedness. Scholarship on identity movements in Morocco shows Amazigh and Afro/Black activism sometimes running in parallel – and sometimes in tension – further complicating a single “African” self-label.
Color hierarchies sustain Morocco’s inherited distance
Race, of course, remains the silent grammar underpinning much of this detachment. The trans-Saharan slave trade and the centuries of servitude that followed inscribed a color hierarchy into Moroccan society, one that persists subtly in language, kinship, and folklore.
Histories of Black Morocco show how institutions of slavery and servility shaped enduring hierarchies of color and status; their afterlife survives in cultural memory and everyday vocabulary. Words that once designated servitude or difference continue to echo in the present, where “Black,” “servant,” and “African” sometimes collapse into one another. In this way, language becomes the repository of an older order, one that habitually others “Africans” as a category apart from “us,” maintaining, through words, the quiet continuity of racialized distance.
The descendants of enslaved Africans, the Gnawa, embody these layered entanglements. Celebrated as quintessentially Moroccan yet rooted in enslaved populations from the Sahel, their heritage oscillates between recognition and marginality. In popular parlance, “African” often functions as a synonym for “Black,” and “Black” remains burdened with the social meanings of subservience.
The Gnawa are thus simultaneously folklorized and sidelined – hailed as cultural heritage while rarely acknowledged as co-founders of national identity. Their identities are narrated through shifting frames: national folklore, trans-Saharan memory, and global “world music.” Each frame connects them to Africa yet also marks that Africa as elsewhere – a distinct origin, not an everyday “we.”
As historian Chouki El Hamel argues, Moroccan racial consciousness cannot be disentangled from the long memory of slavery, in which “dark skin became associated with servitude and inferiority.” The everyday refusal to identify as African thus conceals an unspoken racialized distinction: to be Moroccan is to be something other than the “Black African,” to occupy a higher rung in the civilizational ladder internalized since colonial times.
Contemporary politics reinforce yesterday’s imagined separations
This racial geography has been renewed in contemporary politics of migration. Since the 1990s, and particularly after the European Union’s externalization policies deputized Morocco as a border sentinel, sub-Saharan migrants have become hyper-visible in Moroccan cities. They are called “Africans” in newspapers and official discourse, as if Moroccans themselves were not. The border produces difference: those who cross it are “Africans,” those who guard it are “Mediterraneans.”
Ethnographers of migration have documented how humanitarianism, policing, and media coverage conspire to reproduce this othering. The moral economy of compassion – “we must help the Africans stranded here” – rests on a linguistic boundary that excludes the speaker from the identity of the helped. Thus, even as Morocco re-engages diplomatically with Africa, the lived experience of “Africanness” within its borders remains externalized.
Other press studies echo this pattern: Moroccan media frequently frame sub-Saharan migrants through securitized or problem-oriented narratives, even when adopting a sympathetic tone. “Africans” thus appear as a discrete social object – visible, pitied, or feared, but rarely included.
Recent reportage from Casablanca and other cities documents everyday cohabitation and intermarriage, yet alongside them persist stereotypes and online xenophobia, revealing a paradoxical intimacy: proximity without belonging, encounter without identification. Africanness is thus an identity to which compassion is extended, but which is not shared.
In other words, media discourse amplifies this disjuncture. Studies of Moroccan press narratives on migration reveal recurrent tropes of victimhood, security threat, or humanitarian charity – never simple co-belonging. The “African migrant” appears as an object, not an interlocutor.
This framing subtly reassures the readership of its distance from the portrayed subjects. To be “African,” in these texts, is to occupy a social problem category. Such semiotic repetition naturalizes detachment: it tells Moroccans, daily, that they relate to Africa as observers, hosts, or intermediaries, not as constituents of the same continental self.
Education and state classification also perpetuate the separation. In school curricula, “Africa” often appears as a developmental region studied in geography or economics, not as a shared civilizational home. Morocco’s inclusion within the bureaucratic label “Middle East and North Africa” further institutionalizes the distinction.
When statistical agencies, international organizations, and even Moroccan ministries categorize the country under “MENA” rather than “Africa,” they codify an epistemological boundary into technocratic routine. This constant reproduction through institutional language ensures that generations grow up encountering “Africa” as something one visits or does business with – never as where one simply is.
The orientation is reinforced by the geopolitics of aspiration. For Moroccan youth, the horizon of social mobility points north: France, Spain, Italy, Canada. Europe remains the imagined space of opportunity. Africa, in contrast, signifies poverty or exile. Surveys consistently show a preference for migration toward the European Union, not to African states.
This aspiration, cultivated by historical colonial ties and contemporary economic dependency, sedimented into a collective sensibility that turns identity outward toward the Mediterranean and upward toward Europe. The notion of belonging to Africa feels incompatible with the pursuit of modernity as locally understood.
At the same time, Morocco’s constitutional and diplomatic rhetoric has, in recent years, sought to recalibrate this relationship. The country’s 2011 constitution lists Moroccan identity as “Arab-Islamic, Amazigh, and Saharan-Hassani, nourished by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean tributaries.”
The inclusion of “African” acknowledges continental ties, yet its phrasing – one tributary among others – renders it adjectival rather than foundational. Similarly, Morocco’s return to the African Union (AU) in 2017, and King Mohammed VI’s speeches invoking “African solidarity” and “south-south cooperation,” mark an elite project of re-Africanization. But official discourse rarely filters seamlessly into popular consciousness. The habitus of everyday talk, the inherited lexicons of distinction, change far more slowly than diplomatic alignments.
Global hierarchies shape Morocco’s symbolic self-worth
From a sociological perspective, one can read this as a question of symbolic capital. In the Moroccan social field, to be “Mediterranean,” “Francophone,” or “Arab” carries cultural prestige and access to valued networks; to be “African,” by contrast, has lower symbolic yield. Identity becomes a resource whose value fluctuates with context.
The preference for northward self-positioning reflects a pragmatic adaptation to global hierarchies of value, where proximity to Europe connotes advancement and distance from “Africa” connotes backwardness. The anthropologist must therefore avoid moral judgment and instead observe how actors navigate identity as a field of social power – choosing descriptors that enhance rather than diminish their standing within transnational circuits of recognition.
Yet beneath these hierarchies lies a deeper civilizational narrative. The Sahara, once a porous space of caravans and scholarship, was re-imagined as a racial frontier through colonial and post-colonial epistemes. The philosopher’s geography – Friedrich Hegel’s dismissal of “Africa proper” as lying below the desert, devoid of history – haunts these perceptions.
Scholars also caution that the Sahara’s image as a “natural” civilizational boundary – white/Arab north vs. Black/sub-Saharan south – is an inherited fiction. Critical race work on North Africa argues that treating “whiteness” as indigenous to the Maghreb and “Blackness” as external reifies colonial binaries; undoing them requires re-telling Saharan histories of circulation.
North Africans internalized, perhaps unconsciously, the same partitioning gaze that colonial philosophy cast upon them: to distinguish themselves from the Africa deemed “dark,” “tribal,” “non-historical.” This internalized colonialism, as Frantz Fanon might phrase it, manifests not in overt racism alone but in a more insidious symbolic whitening – a will to belong to the luminous shores of the Mediterranean rather than the shadowed interiors of the continent.
Reclaiming Africa demands unlearning colonial imagination
Nevertheless, historical counter-currents complicate this detachment. The Sufi networks of the Tijaniyya, the pilgrimage routes between Fez and Kano, the commercial corridors that once bound the Sahel to Marrakech – all attest that the Sahara was never an absolute divide. For centuries, spiritual and intellectual life flowed southward and northward alike.
Yet these memories have been eclipsed by modern nation-state narratives, which re-inscribed the Sahara as a security border rather than a conduit. Reclaiming those forgotten histories could provide the cultural ground for re-imagining continental belonging – but such recovery demands institutional as well as epistemic labor.
One might then ask whether change is possible. Signs exist: the visibility of sub-Saharan students in Moroccan universities, the rise of pan-African business ventures, the soft-power diplomacy that casts Morocco as “gateway to Africa.” Yet even these gestures often reaffirm hierarchy: Morocco as mediator, leader, bridge – never simply peer.
The very metaphor of “gateway” implies externality; one does not enter one’s own home through a gate. Thus, the new Africanism promoted by the state remains performative, strategic, and top-down, while everyday language still lags behind, holding onto the older partitions of meaning.
Ultimately, the question of why Moroccans and other North Africans rarely call themselves Africans is not reducible to ignorance or prejudice. It is an outcome of layered histories – colonial epistemology, linguistic semantics, racial stratification, economic orientation, and symbolic economies of value.
Each layer reinforces the next, producing what might be termed a continental disidentification: a structural condition in which the idea of Africa has been externalized from the self. The anthropologist’s task is to trace not only the genealogy of this condition but its subtle reproduction in mundane acts of speech, schooling, and aspiration.
To speak of re-Africanization, therefore, is not merely to change diplomatic vocabulary but to reorder the categories of everyday consciousness. It would require unlearning centuries of north-facing desire, recovering the historical intimacies of the Sahara, and re-signifying “African” from a mark of alterity to a horizon of shared destiny. The work is as epistemic as it is political.
Until then, when a Moroccan says, with a faint smile, that they have never been to Africa, they are uttering a truth larger than they know: that the Africa they have never been to is not a place on the map, but a continent estranged within their own imagination.
