Marrakech Quotes

When you walk through a town like this—two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in—when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact.

Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies.

"Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They're the real rulers of this country, you know. They've got all
the money. They control the banks, finance—everything.”

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more
important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white
skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a
labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a
hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don't even see him…He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa
are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap
trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown
skins their poverty is simply not noticed.

Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare
can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have
turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up
brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful
labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double
like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields,
tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering
lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it,
thus saving an inch or two on each stalk.

She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman, that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas--on the whole--the
plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely
pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible.
Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is
generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.

It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actually is a look of
profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is a French
citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors
and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence
before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his
masters, and he still believes it.

“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?”

It was curious, really. Every white man there had this thought stowed
somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so
had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white N.C.O.’s marching
in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too
clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it.