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What is a Nazi to a Moroccan?
I’ve watched the movie Casablanca many times now but I never cease to be inspired by it. Nazis always make the best villains and it is a joy to watch as cynical and broken characters are one by one inspired to rejoin the fight. Bulgarians, Americans, Russians, French, Czechoslovakians and Norwegians, all of them enemies and often victims of a Nazi Germany that threatened (with its allies) to take over the world.
And yet the movie takes place in Casablanca, a city in the then French-occupied Morocco. Which makes me wonder how Moroccans might have viewed the Nazis differently from how Europeans and Americans did. And how Africans in general must have viewed World War II in terms of how it affected them.
At the time of the Second World War, control of Morocco was split between Spain and France. Prior to that, for many years, Turkey, England and Portugal vied with France and Spain for control of Morocco, as was the case for many other African countries. In fact, a primary driver of the First World War was Germany’s feelings that they were not adequately included in the plans to carve out Morocco and the rest of Africa among the leading European colonial powers.
During World War I, France used many soldiers from Morocco and other African holdings to fight their battles. Like the French troops, only worse, Africans were fed to the war machine and…