Marrakech – On Thursday, the official account of Algeria’s Ministry of National Defense published a glossy promotional video on X, and partway through it handed Morocco the clearest confession Algiers has made in years.
The footage parades the Koutoubia minaret and the churning throng of Jemaa el-Fna, the beating heart of Marrakech, and folds them into a montage meant to glorify Algeria’s supposed stewardship of the African continent. A day later, after commentators from Rabat to Algiers had flagged the pilferage, the reel remains online, unedited, its Moroccan skyline still masquerading as Algerian patrimony.
Consider what sits inside that frame. The Koutoubia’s minaret, raised in the 12th century under the Almohads and completed in the reign of Yaqub al-Mansur, has presided over Marrakech for more than 800 years; its silhouette shaped the Giralda in Seville and the Hassan Tower in Rabat.
Jemaa el-Fna, a few paces away, is no ordinary square but a living theater of storytellers, Gnaoua musicians, and Amazigh performers that UNESCO proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001 and inscribed on its Representative List in 2008. The medina that cradles both has carried the World Heritage designation since 1985.
These are not generic Maghrebi backdrops a careless editor might confuse. They are Moroccan to the marrow, catalogued and certified as such by the very international bodies Algiers claims to court.
Then there is the script. Over the stolen imagery the narration intones that, despite the clamor of the world, Algeria “remains the calm voice of wisdom amid the noise,” a nation that “raises the banner of defending the rights of African peoples.” It proclaims that Algerian “sincerity” and “transparency” have forged “a beacon of trust on the continent and a voice that does not fade in an age of hesitation.”
Then comes the climax: thus, we are told, “Algeria writes history once again and inscribes its name in letters of light in the continent’s ledger.” The effrontery is almost too neat to credit. A film boasting that Algeria inscribes its own name can summon no image grander than someone else’s minaret to do the inscribing.
An army speaking for the country’s foreign policy
Note, too, which organ of state released this paean. Not the Foreign Ministry, nor any civilian bureau charged with diplomacy, but the Ministry of National Defense, the army itself, broadcasting a continental foreign-policy manifesto under its own escutcheon. In most republics that would read as a category error. In Algeria it reads as the plain truth of the arrangement.
The generals are the suzerains of the Algerian state; the presidency at El Mouradia is their vassal, the civilian veneer over a praetorian core. When the soldiers narrate the nation’s outward face, the line between barracks and chancellery does not blur so much as vanish, because it was never honestly drawn. A junta that rules by fiat abroad as at home will naturally mistake a neighbor’s monuments for props it may requisition.
None of this is a maiden offense. The purloining of Marrakech belongs to a weary catalogue. Algerian channels have passed off evenings of Moroccan Andalusian tarab as their own; the caftan, that most Moroccan of garments, has been claimed from Algiers; the zellige of Fez has been annexed to a rival banner. Each episode detonates the same derision online, and each time the lesson goes unlearned, because the impulse behind it is structural rather than accidental.
Appropriation as symptom
Here the incident asks to be read through the grammar of cultural studies, for it is a textbook case of appropriation as symptom. A nation narrates itself to itself through symbols, what Benedict Anderson called the imagined community, stitched together from shared images and remembered glories. Where that storehouse runs deep, a state draws on it freely; where it is shallow or contrived, the state must borrow.
Eric Hobsbawm taught us to see how modern regimes confect “invented traditions,” dressing the new in the costume of the ancient to manufacture a pedigree. Algeria’s official self, forged almost wholly from the militarized memory of the 1954 war and policed ever since by the army that won it, is a narrative of remarkable thinness: a single foundational myth standing in for a civilizational inheritance.
The regency that answered to Ottoman deys until 1830, and the long French interregnum that followed, bequeathed the postcolonial state a patrimony it has never quite rendered into usable, exportable splendor. So when the junta needs a picture of grandeur to sell its African ambitions, it reaches across the frontier and filches Marrakech, because its own repertoire yields no equivalent. The theft is not strength flexed but poverty disclosed, a simulacrum of heritage, an ersatz civilization confected in an editing suite.
And the insult, let it be marked, lands first upon Algerians themselves. A citizenry equipped with every tool of modern visual literacy can tell the authentic from the hastily borrowed in an instant. To feed them Marrakech and christen it Algiers is to presume their credulity, to treat a whole public as marks for a cheap confidence trick. The quarrel here is not with the Algerian people, heirs to their own genuine traditions, but with the praetorian apparatus that governs them and evidently thinks so little of their discernment.
The timing seals the reading. The reel surfaced just as Washington circulated a draft resolution on Morocco’s Western Sahara to the parties of the manufactured dispute, a text that observers judge will, in its American wording, inter the Polisario separatist project Algiers has bankrolled for half a century.
A regime staring down defeat in the Security Council has every motive to stage a pageant of continental triumph for home consumption, to anesthetize opinion against the humiliation gathering abroad. Vainglory on a screen is a cheap narcotic when the diplomatic ground is sliding away beneath one’s feet.
So let the video stand, unedited, for as long as its authors dare. Every hour it remains aloft, it testifies against them. It was meant to broadcast Algerian greatness; it broadcasts instead the hollowness at the center of the enterprise, a state that cannot picture its own majesty without borrowing the face of Marrakech, and a junta so estranged from any authentic patrimony that it mistakes larceny for statecraft. The letters of light it promised to inscribe spell out, in the end, a single unintended word: Morocco.
