Marrakesh Musings by Will Nett

North Africa. This is not the Africa of Sir William Nettleton III infamously lost explorer and drinker of gin. This is another Africa. The Africa of endless desert dunes and the epicentre of French colonialism. You would be mistaken however were you to believe that the ancestors of Will Nett, traveller and occasional author, (some my say itinerant bum) had never walked those dunes. Though Marched would be more accurate, or perhaps stumbled…

in the early 1900’s a Bill Nettlton, otherwise known as Bill Jest, joined the French foreign legion. After a incident where a hand grande was mistaken for a cricket ball, as may did at the time, he joined to forget, or perhaps to be forgotten. In the former he was successful as according to his diary entries for the life of him he could not remember why he had joined, or what had happened one day to teh next due to a combination of sunstroke, barrack room brandy, and multiple venereal diseases including sever thought only to exist in members of the Dromedarius species. In the latter he was also successful as no one remembered him at all after he was killed by a camels kick. Except a few lady’s of negotiable virtue, whom he short changed. And a camel called Matilda whose virtue he paid for with his life, but the less said about which the better

In any regard, as he just won’t get his own blog, Will Nett sent me another guest post. In this one instead of bumming it around eastern Europe he has followed in Bill Jest’s footsteps and headed to North Africa.

Marrakesh Musings by Will Nett

He’s charging me ten dirhams to look at his snake. But I’ve already seen it. I think it’s a cobra. If it is, it’s a very lethargic one. There can’t be much money in the ‘ol snake charming racket these days if this wizened old fiend needs to chase potential audiences through the town square to extract payment, as this sultan of serpents is doing now. It’s not any old town square, although it is old; it’s Jemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakech, on the edge of the maze of the Mouassine medina.

His twisted desert-hardened face comes in close, led by an attendant open palm that I send away empty and closed. The cobra, and its dance partner, a ‘viper’ I’m told, look doped up to the eyeballs. They’re not paying attention to the music; they continue to oscillate wildly even after it stops, so it’s their stimulus is unclear.

The anticipation of night perhaps, as it rolls in on waves of smoke and the snakes are presumably put to bed. I don’t know where the smoke is coming from but there’s so much of it, billowing through the food stalls this Saturday night.

It’s like an episode of Stars in Their Eyes. Maybe the landmark Café Argana- looming over all like a moored cruise ship about to set sail- has exploded again, as it did in 2011.

It is in nightfall that the market comes to life; it’s whole pulsing mass absorbing the surroundings as its tentacles creep out past the restaurants and cafes stretching towards Koutoubia at the southern end, where row upon row of formerly fantasia horses stand hitched to chariots awaiting tourists, marshalled by a stockman with a whispered sideline in ‘hash…women.’

Moody sim cards- for those unlike me whose mobile phone wasn’t lost at sea yesterday; that’s a whole other blog entry- and even moodier football shirts and baseball caps are in heavy surplus amongst the street vendors.

The hypemen on the periphery of the food stalls cajole and corral me into sitting down in front of one of the ready-made khobz of warming bread that are already in place at every table, waiting to be eaten. Chleuh Berber acrobats flip and bounce over a cacophonous riot of gourds, zithers and Eurobeat backing tracks as an upturned cap is passed around for a collection plate. I’m momentarily distracted; first by shouts of ‘BEETLE…BEETLE’ from a boy on a fruit stall. I’m initially confused, he points at my hair, mimics a guitarist and bellows ‘BEATLE…GEORGE.’ In his shirtsleeves and bowtie he’s

impressively well turned out for a fruiterer, but nowhere near as sartorially slick as the Barbary macaque in a two-piece silver lame suit fiddling with the ignition on a nearby moped.

You want it? Jemaa el-Fnaa’s got it. The scene is not so different to the time of it’s 11th century Almoravidian conception, we can suppose; the same aggressive sales techniques, and similar wares but with the added amenities of the modern age; nappies; cigarette lighters and wood carvings sit alongside casks of powdered aphrodisiacs, baklava, Turkish Delight, exotic fruits and nuts, and ceramic tagines. One man throws me a dried fig as an appetizer before unleashing his patois but we’re interrupted by a football bounding past. Two enterprising youngsters have set up a pitch at a dirham-a-pop to topple a pair of empty plastic bottles, one balanced on top of the other. Beside them, a three-card monte merchant looks suitably bored by his own set-up as others queue to kick to win. Cats- the real rulers of Morocco- roam as freely and proudly as any race of people here ever have or will; travelling in packs on orchestrated outings to the butchers and bakers. They’re not interested in candles. Outside of a zoo I don’t think ever seen such a varied proliferation of animals in such close proximity to each other. Another monkey, dressed like some half-baked African dictator in epaulettes, ceremonial jacket and cap, looks on as the cats stride proudly by as though in some feline military parade. I wait eagerly for the monkey to salute, but even he knows there isn’t a cat on the planet that would be impressed by such a gesture. I can tell the monkey is male, because…well, I can tell.

And so, this monkey-marshalled menagerie of Morrocco’s Marrakesh medina, will mesmerize for many more moons.*

Awww; shit. Here come’s the snake bloke, again.

*A Canadian woman at the bar of L’etoile Du Musee has just bet me I can’t fit a tongue twister into this piece. I’ve already thrown in Smiths and B-52 lyrics, so why not?