Dima Africa, daily darija: im/migrant sociality, settlement, and state policy in Tangier, Morocco

ABSTRACT

During the 2018 African Nations Championship football tournament, Morocco filled new suburban stadiums around the Kingdom, boasting its capacities to host major African events. Such displays contribute to Morocco’s ongoing politicking in the African Union even while Morocco walks a thin line between regularising immigrants and surveilling them. Tournament spectators blurred ostensible social-culture boundaries during matches, and its official slogan (Dima Africa) reflected a Moroccan mix of darija and French. In Tangier’s Ibn Batouta Stadium, potentially antagonistic spectators from diverse social, religious, ethnic, and class positions across Central and West Africa cheered unanimously for Nigeria against Libya’s national team, with constant jeering and verbal abuse targeted at the then recently exposed allegations of slave markets in Libya. Based on ethnographic research around the 2018 Championship matches in Tangier, this paper situates emergent trans-ethnic, religious, and national solidarities within emic political and social discourses in Tangier. Such discursive fabrics reveal how im/migrants’ time spent waiting in Morocco potentially predicates comprehensive social bonds, including the deceptively spontaneous and eventful socialities articulated above. Understood in these contexts, waiting time is not vacuous, but productive of new forms and languages of belonging and difference with potential political consequences.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• ethnography
• migration
• Morocco
• Tangier
• waiting

Acknowledgements

. The author would like to thank Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. Lorena Gazzotti, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, as well as Brian Larkin, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brinkley Messick for their advice on this article. Previous drafts of this article were presented at: the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange in Rabat, Morocco; the Tangier-American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies in Tangier, Morocco; and the Middle East Studies Association annual conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This annual event is sponsored by a coalition ranging from foreign governments to Moroccan royal sponsors. The event draws Moroccan and European writers together to discuss both their own works and salient national questions. Debates around identity and language in Morocco have featured in the four editions that I have attended between 2012 and 2018.

2 Tanjaoui is a derivative of the Arabic ‘Tanja’ (Tangier), marking someone or something from or of Tangier.

3 This research took place with the approval of the Moroccan Ministry of the Exterior, granted through my affiliation with the Tangier-American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies, as well as the approval of the Columbia University IRB (IRB-AAAQ8496).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation under the Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, Grant ID P022A1700; the American Institute for Maghrib Studies under the Long-Term Research Grant; and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers under the CAORC-Mellon Mediterranean Region Research Fellowship.