Essay: Before the Last Witnesses Depart

1. Myth

In the summer of 1600, a man arrived in London who should have changed everything. Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, ambassador of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco, came to the court of Queen Elizabeth I as the representative of a major empire – one of the first Muslim envoys to do so, negotiating as an equal. He was not a curiosity. He was a diplomat. For six months he lived on The Strand with his sixteen-man entourage, lodged in the house of the wealthy merchant Anthony Radcliffe, proposing what must have seemed, to the Elizabethan court, almost unimaginable: a joint Anglo-Moroccan military alliance against Spain, including a shared campaign to wrest the Americas from Habsburg control. Elizabeth received him. The city watched him. He and his entourage were invited to state occasions. Londoners were fascinated, sometimes hostile, toward their Moroccan dress and their Islamic practice, the five daily prayers audible in the street. A portrait was commissioned. When the business was over, he and his fleet sailed home, and the record closed behind him.

Soon after, an ambitious playwright wrote Othello. The timing is not incidental. William Shakespeare knew about the ambassador; the Moroccan presence in London was visible, widely discussed, diplomatically consequential. And what he did with that presence is one of the most consequential acts of myth-making in the history of English literature. The sovereign Moroccan diplomat became a tragic outsider who apologises for his own voice. The negotiator became a weak man destroyed by romantic jealousy. The political equal became the figure who must, in the end, be explained away. Shakespeare gives Othello the words to diminish himself: “Rude am I in my speech, and little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.” (Othello, Act I, Scene 3.) On the stage, the sovereign has already internalised the frame. He apologises for his voice before anyone asks him to. Real presence became symbolic problem. The archive was buried. The myth travelled, and it is still travelling today.

I want to be precise about what I mean when I say myth, because I am not accusing Shakespeare of malice. He is considered, and rightly, a writer of extraordinary talent. But so-called genius operating inside a structure of power is still operating inside a structure of narrative control. Shakespeare used the Moroccan as material – as dramatic problem, as psychological spectacle – without sitting with him, without relationship, without accountability. Many scholars have now written about his deeply ambivalent treatment of what he called the Moors and the Muslims. Their presence in his work has always been a problem to be dramatised, not a reality to be understood. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written, the danger of a single story is not only that it is incomplete. It is that it becomes the only story. It displaces every other. And those who fit the role inherit the false mythology whether they accept it or not.

Chronicles are still being written about people like me – about the Moroccan, the Algerian, the Muslim in Europe – by people who have not sat with us, who have not read our archives, who work from the outside, from power, from assumption. What the chronicler Matthew Paris was doing in 1213 when he encoded North African Muslim sovereignty as warning, claiming King John of England had offered to convert to Islam for protection and gold; what Shakespeare was doing in 1604 when he turned an ambassador into myth; what the gossip columns do today when they report, with that knowing tone, that King Charles III – patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, longstanding partner in business and ceremony with Muslim royal families – must secretly be a Muslim: it is the same mechanism, in different centuries, with different instruments. The same anxiety about proximity to Islam that produced Othello in 1604. Eight hundred years later, a relationship with the Islamic world in England still cannot be named plainly. It must be whispered. Framed as concealment. Made into a problem. The single story told from a distance, mistaken for truth because it carries institutional force and finds a thirsty audience ready for gossip, drama and spectacle.

My role as an artist is to introduce the protagonists the archive already contains. To name the ambassador. To name the others. To puncture the mythology and replace it not with a counter-myth, but with presence – with the specific, irreducible, documented reality of who these people were, what they made, what was taken from them, and what survived. What I am doing with this hidden legacy and its musical constellation is not crossover. It is, perhaps, historical correction. But the question of how to make that correction – which form can carry the archive without crushing the audience under it, which language can reach people who have never heard these names – is the question I have been living inside for seventeen years. It is the question I am still living inside now.

II.  Archive

Here is some of what was in the archive that the myth replaced.

In 1213, King John of England sent a secret embassy to the Almohad Caliph in Morocco, seeking financial support and a military alliance against the Pope. The diplomatic relationship between England and North Africa is older than most people know. Between 1568 and 1648, the Dutch Republic fought its eighty years’ war of independence against Spain, drawing on a North African trade that included Moroccan saltpeter – the raw material of gunpowder – alongside the larger streams from the East Indies and the Baltic. Without the North African trade, the Dutch Republic as we know it might not have existed.

This was not only a trading relationship. It was a human one. Samuel Pallache, a Jewish Moroccan diplomat born in Fez to a family originally from Córdoba, arrived in Amsterdam in the 1590s and held the first Jewish prayer service in the city in his own home. He negotiated one of the first formal treaties between a Muslim state and a Protestant republic in 1610, and was a personal friend of Maurice of Orange. When Pallache died in The Hague in 1616, he was buried in the Portuguese Jewish cemetery; his gravestone reads simply, “Moroccan Envoy.” In the winter of 1609–1610, a young Moroccan diplomat lived as a guest of a Dutch printer on the Oudebrugsteeg in Amsterdam, teaching him Arabic and Islam. In 1613, the Moroccan ambassador Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari walked freely through Leiden under the Treaty of Friendship, exchanging knowledge with Thomas Erpenius, who would become the first professor of Oriental Languages at Leiden University through direct exchange with Moroccan envoys. Jews, Muslims and Dutch Protestants were not distant trading partners. They stayed in each other’s homes.

In 1600 – the same year the ambassador arrived in London – Moroccan copper was being used by Dutch trading firms to mint the manillas, the horseshoe-shaped rings that served as the principal currency of the Atlantic slave trade, carried on ships to the West African coast and exchanged directly for enslaved people. Processed differently, the same copper became the primary material for casting bronze cannons. Currency and artillery, both serving the same military-industrial machine. The Moroccan saltpeter that fuelled Dutch independence became Dutch gunpowder that armed Dutch slave ships that reached the Americas – Suriname, Curaçao, Barbados. In 1600, while the ambassador was in London, and while I puncture Shakespeare’s myth-making of Othello to correct the playwright and the archive, Moroccan copper was also purchasing enslaved Africans on the Atlantic coast. This history is heartbreaking. It is also precise.

There is a third founding relationship that is almost never taught. On the 20th of December 1777, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognise the independence of the United States of America – before France, before any European power. Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah opened Moroccan ports to American ships at a moment when the new republic had almost nothing to offer in return except the fact of its existence. The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship, signed in 1786 with the direct involvement of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, remains the longest unbroken treaty in American diplomatic history. In 1821, Morocco gifted a building in Tangier to the United States – the first American diplomatic property on foreign soil anywhere in the world. North Africa was not peripheral to the founding of the modern West. It was present at the birth of all three of its major powers: the United Kingdom, the Dutch Republic and the United States.

The Regency of Algiers also established formal relations with the United States in the eighteenth century, signing the Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1795, negotiated by a commissioner appointed by George Washington himself. North Africa was present at the founding of American diplomacy from both sides of the Maghreb.

III.  Complicity & the Reckoning

What the archives tell, and what is almost never taught, is how complicit North Africa was in the systems it also suffered under. This is not a comfortable history. The archive does not offer comfort. It offers clarity.

The Saadian dynasty that came to power in Morocco in 1549 was an Arab Sharifian house, ruling over an Amazigh-majority population. (The Almohad caliphate that had ruled the Maghreb four centuries earlier was, by contrast, an Amazigh dynasty out of the High Atlas Masmuda.) The Saadians operated sugarcane plantations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that relied on enslaved sub-Saharan African labour. Moroccan sugar – exported to England, France and Italy, and accepted exclusively by Queen Elizabeth I for her royal household – was also traded for arms. Moroccan saltpeter, exchanged for English naval timber under the 1585 Barbary Company charter, helped supply the gunpowder of Elizabeth’s navy against Spain. Historians cite the need for more enslaved labour as a significant motivation for the Saadian invasion of the Songhai Empire in 1591. Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur – the same man simultaneously negotiating the joint military alliance with Elizabeth I – sent four thousand soldiers across the Sahara. They defeated the Songhai army at the Battle of Tondibi. They sacked Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné.

The Songhai Empire was one of the largest states in African history. Timbuktu held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Ahmad Baba, one of the greatest Islamic scholars of his age, was arrested, shackled and deported to Marrakesh. There he was held under a form of house arrest, forbidden to teach publicly, his library confiscated. He continued writing in captivity – legal treatises, a biographical dictionary of Timbuktu scholars, works of Islamic jurisprudence. After twelve years he was permitted to return home. He never recovered his sixteen hundred volumes. He died in Timbuktu in 1627, still writing.

The Songhai collapse had a long consequence. The people of what is now Mali and Niger were left without a kingdom to protect them. Historians observe that the political fragmentation caused by the Moroccan invasion left the Songhai people among those most exposed, in the century that followed, to Atlantic slave raiders on the coast. Morocco did not ship enslaved people to the Americas; the Atlantic trade ran from coastal West African forts – Elmina, Gorée, Ouidah – directly across the ocean. Maghrebi ports were never part of that infrastructure. The trans-Saharan trade ran north into Mediterranean and Ottoman markets; the trans-Atlantic ran west. At the level of individual lives, the two circuits rarely intersected. But at the level of statecraft and finance, they were one system. The gold looted from Timbuktu – 100,000 mithqals sent to Marrakesh – funded the El Badi Palace and the same Saadian diplomatic apparatus that was trading copper and saltpeter with England and the Dutch Republic. Moroccan copper minted into manillas purchased enslaved people on the Atlantic coast; the same copper cast into bronze cannons armed the ships that enforced the system. Guns south, gold and enslaved people north, copper west onto slave ships – one ecosystem with different compass directions. The Moroccan army did not load Songhai people onto the ships. It demolished the wall that stood between them and the coast.

Algeria’s role must be named as well. The Regency of Algiers – the Ottoman province that governed Algeria from 1516 to 1830 – financed itself through privateering and the slave trade. Algerian Saharan hubs were primary destinations of the trans-Saharan route; caravans from Timbuktu arrived carrying enslaved people, gold, ivory and copper. Barbary corsairs operating out of Algiers – alongside their counterparts in Salé, on the Moroccan Atlantic coast – raided as far as the Portuguese coast, the West Cork village of Baltimore in 1631, and Iceland in 1627, selling captured Europeans in the slave markets of Algiers. The city held enslaved sub-Saharan Africans and enslaved Europeans at the same time. It was a slave city at the intersection of three systems: the Saharan, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This is not only Morocco’s history. It is Algeria’s too.

I name this not to flatten the distinction between colonised and coloniser – those distinctions remain real. I name it because the archive demands honesty, and because the impulse to construct a simple narrative of victimhood is itself a form of myth-making. The history is entangled. North Africa was caught inside the same Atlantic system it also helped to operate. Understanding this does not diminish the horror of what was later done to North African people by European empires. It deepens the picture of statecraft and imperial complicity.

And then came the reckoning.

In the First World War, 450,000 North and West African soldiers were used as shock troops at Verdun and the Somme to protect European bodies. Their heroism was left out of European history books.

Between 1921 and 1926, King Alfonso XIII and Francisco Franco, with German chemical expertise, dropped mustard gas, phosgene, diphosgene and chloropicrin on the indigenous Rif resistance – on civilian areas, rivers and markets – the first systematic chemical air campaign in history, almost entirely absent from collective memory, never accounted for, never cleaned up. To this day, the highest rate of oncology patients in Morocco is concentrated in that region, with a diaspora living mainly in the Netherlands and Belgium. My own family is from one of those villages.

Between 1940 and 1942, more than 70,000 North and West African soldiers captured by the Germans were held in segregated camps on French soil – the Frontstalags, in Rennes, Orléans, Lyon and elsewhere. They were kept in France specifically to prevent what the Nazi administration called “racial mixing” in Germany. They became a pool of forced labour for the German war machine – armaments factories, military installations, fortification work, including stretches of the Atlantic Wall along the coasts of occupied Western Europe. The wall that shielded the Reich was built, in part, by the bodies of men from the Maghreb. Their captivity was doubly erased: first by the Nazis who kept them out of sight, then by a post-war memory that did not account for them because they were colonial subjects and therefore collateral.

Between 1941 and 1945, North African resistance fighters who fought the Nazi occupation were deported into the camp system – some under the Nacht und Nebel decree, the Night and Fog directive that stripped prisoners of their names and reclassified them as political ghosts. They were sent to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Neuengamme. Some came back. Djaafar Khemdoudi, an Algerian Muslim born in Sour El-Ghozlane, forged documents in occupied Lyon to save Algerians, Jews and Europeans from deportation. He was denounced in June 1944 and sent to Neuengamme; transferred to Malchow, then to Ravensbrück; liberated by the Soviet army on the 21st of May 1945. He returned to France. He was awarded the Legion of Honour, the Military Medal and the Medal of the Resistance. A plaque in his former cell at Montluc Prison in Lyon now bears his name. He died in 2011, aged ninety-three. The country he had served had been largely silent about him for sixty years. 

Most did not come back. Rabia Boucif, born in Constantine in the 1890s, came to Saint-Étienne to work as a miner. He had eight children. He was arrested in December 1943 – the reason still unknown – and passed through Lyon prison and the Compiègne transit camp before being sent to Neuengamme. A few weeks before the end of the war, he was forced onto one of the death marches that ended at Gardelegen, where SS guards locked more than a thousand prisoners inside a barn and burned them alive on the night of the 13th of April 1945. Rabia Boucif died on the march or in the barn. His family in Algeria, never told he had been arrested, assumed for almost eighty years that he had abandoned them. They learned the truth only when his pocket watch came back to them, through the Arolsen Archives’ #StolenMemory campaign. His great-grandson, Kabir Boucif, now carries his legacy. 

These are the hidden witnesses. Their names are only now being recovered. For a Dutch audience this is not distant history: Neuengamme is a short drive from Rotterdam; the Atlantic Wall ran through the dunes of this coastline; the labour that built it passed through these near waters.

In November 1942, the Allied landings in Casablanca, Oran and Algiers – Operation Torch – liberated French Morocco and Algeria from Vichy collaboration and turned the Maghreb into the operational engine for the liberation of Europe. (Tunisia, where German and Italian forces moved in directly after Torch, would be liberated six months later, in May 1943.) The pre-invasion intelligence work was coordinated from the American Legation in Tangier by the Office of Strategic Services – the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that would become, in 1947, the CIA. The Legation was the same building Morocco had gifted to the United States in 1821. The Maghreb did not only receive liberation; it provided it. And the address had been Moroccan-American since before the American Civil War.

In August 1944, as Allied forces prepared to liberate Paris, a directive from Allied command – driven in part by an American military still racially segregated – required the division entering the city to be white. More than half the army that had liberated southern France was colonial. Those soldiers were removed from the march.

On the 8th of May 1945, V-E Day, French police fired on a nationalist demonstration in Sétif. The violence escalated; about a hundred European settlers were killed by Algerian crowds in the surrounding countryside. The French military and settler militias responded by killing thousands of Algerians across Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in the weeks that followed – historians today estimate between six thousand and thirty thousand dead. European joy answered African demand for freedom with massacre.

In December 1959, under the law that took effect at the moment of decolonisation, the French government “crystallised” the pensions of veterans from its former colonies – froze them at independence-era levels while French veterans’ pensions continued to rise. The same soldiers who had liberated southern France, who had been removed from the Paris parade in 1944, were now told their service was worth a fraction of their French comrades’. By 2006, a French veteran with a one-hundred-percent disability rating received roughly six hundred and ninety euros a month; a Moroccan veteran with the same rating received sixty-one; an Algerian, fifty-seven. France’s Council of State ruled the practice illegal in 2001. The state did nothing. It took a film to move it. In September 2006, Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes – released in English asDays of Glory – opened in five hundred French cinemas, telling the story of the North African soldiers who liberated southern France. President Chirac attended a private screening; on the day the film opened, his government announced that the eighty thousand surviving veterans of the former empire would finally be paid the same as their French comrades. No arrears were paid. Forty-seven years of withheld pensions are still owed.

On the night of the 17th of October 1961, the colonial war came home to Paris. The Prefecture of Police had imposed a curfew that named, by category, who it applied to: “Algerian Muslim workers,” “French Muslims of Algeria.” The FLN called for a peaceful demonstration against it. Of the hundred and fifty thousand Algerians living in Paris, between thirty and forty thousand came out – men, women, children. The Paris police, under the orders of police prefect Maurice Papon, attacked them. They beat demonstrators with truncheons. They shot some. They threw others into the Seine. Bodies floated downstream for weeks. Eleven thousand people were rounded up and interned in the Parc des Expositions and other holding sites – several of the sites previously used under Vichy. The French government denied the killings for thirty-seven years. In 1998, it acknowledged forty deaths. Historians today estimate the real toll between two hundred and three hundred, some scholars as many as four hundred. The same Maurice Papon who gave the order had been, two decades earlier, secretary general of the Gironde police prefecture under Vichy, where he organised the deportation of one thousand six hundred and ninety Jews from Bordeaux to Drancy and onward to Auschwitz. He was convicted of crimes against humanity for those deportations in 1998. He was never charged for what happened on the Seine. France did not formally recognise the 17 October 1961 massacre until 2012. President Macron, sixty years after the night, called it “an inexcusable crime.”

Between 1960 and 1966, France detonated seventeen nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara – beginning in 1960, two years before Algerian independence, and continuing for four years beyond it. Algerian prisoners were documented as used to study the effects of the blasts. The first was four times more powerful than Hiroshima. The contamination continues. No apology has been made. No restitution. No cleanup of the earth or the bodies.

These facts are in the archive. They were simply not considered important enough to teach, not in Morocco, not in Algeria, not in the Netherlands, not in Spain, France or England. The vacuum around them was not accidental. It was the condition under which the myth could continue to function.

IV.  Spiritual Technology

But something else was also happening inside all of that history.

The music was moving. And it is important to be precise about the direction. To say that jazz arrived in North Africa in the 1950s is a colonial lie. The music did not travel from America to the Maghreb. It returned home. The 6/8 pulse, the call-and-response, the percussive blues – these were not imports. They were a homecoming. The Gnawa ancestors who were funnelled through the Maghreb into the Atlantic holds carried that sonic technology with them. It survived the crossing. It became the blues. It became jazz. When Randy Weston sat with Maalem Abdellah El Gourd in Morocco in the 1970s and said he felt he was recovering something, he was right. He was not discovering. He was returning a spiritual signal to its source. Home. 

Gnawa/Diwan – the spiritual music of the Gnawa people, whose ancestors were brought to North Africa through the trans-Saharan slave trade – carried African rhythmic memory, Islamic mystical practice, and a precise understanding of sound as medicine across generations. It survived because it was carried in the body. It could not be confiscated at the border. It could not be destroyed by decree. Raï, the music of the Algerian port cities, absorbed Andalusian, Bedouin, Diwan and French colonial influences into something entirely its own – the sound of people who had been colonised and who refused the silence that colonisation tries to impose. The Master Musicians of Joujouka in the Jebala hills kept a musical tradition older than any category applied to it. The Atlas music of the Amazigh people – the music of Mohammed Rouicha, the great troubadour who sang in Tamazight with a voice that held centuries – held a sonic world that the “world music” label would try to contain in an ethnographic box and could not.

From the 1870s onward, a commercial industry developed around what European and American promoters called “ethnographic exhibitions” – staged spectacles in which non-Western performers were contracted, transported across the Atlantic, and displayed in constructed “native villages” for paying audiences. The logic was colonial: the performers represented the primitive, the audience represented modernity, and the admission price went to the promoter. North African performers appeared at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (where a “Street in Cairo” became one of the most visited attractions), the 1900 Paris Exposition, the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair. 

But the story in New York is more specific than a general history of exhibitions. At its centre is a man named Hassan Ben Ali – Moroccan by birth, naturalised American citizen, impresario, broker, organiser. From the 1890s onward, Ben Ali periodically contracted groups of Moroccan performers – acrobats, musicians, dancers, mostly Riffians from the north – and brought them to Luna Park and Dreamland at Coney Island, to vaudeville houses and theatres across New York, to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and state fairs across the country. In 1911, he brought twenty-five Moroccans to Broadway for The Garden of Allah – a production that became a hit, toured nationally for years, and was adapted into a motion picture three times between 1916 and 1936. The New York Times reported their arrival: more than twenty Riffians, in turbans and tunics, walked from Twenty-third Street to the Hotel Knickerbocker the day after landing at Ellis Island, drawing stares and commentary from the Broadway crowds. These were the photographs. These were the men. Ben Ali was under bond to the immigration authorities for every one of them – financially liable if any disappeared before he could put them back on a ship to the Mediterranean. They carried the guembri pulse into the Bowery. They played to audiences who wrote in their diaries about rhythms that moved through the body before the mind could process them, about music that induced something close to trance. The reviewers called it fascinating, exotic, primitive. The musicians kept playing. They were not tourists performing exotica. They were the reverse ambassadors – carrying the sonic technology of the Maghreb into the American cities where jazz was forming, planting a frequency that would take decades to be recognised for what it was. Ben Ali kept the contracts. The immigration authorities kept the bond. The producers kept the revenue. When the season closed, the performers were shipped back home from Ellis Island. But the frequency stayed.

In 1913, Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple of America in Newark, New Jersey, teaching that African Americans were Moors, descended from the Moroccan Empire, Muslim by faith, Moorish by nationality. His followers carried identification cards affirming both American citizenship and Moorish identity. This was not confusion. It was a legal strategy. By claiming Moroccan nationality, African Americans living under Jim Crow were reaching for an identity that placed them outside the racial classifications the American legal system used to oppress them. Morocco – the first country to recognise American independence in 1777 – became the symbolic anchor for a form of Black self-determination. The sonic and the legal became inseparable.

In the 1920s and 1930s, early jazz musicians in Algiers and Tangier were recognising the Blue Note in the pentatonic scales of the Gnawa/Diwan. The exchange was not theoretical. Tangier had professional jazz infrastructure: Dean’s Bar, clubs in Algiers, Le Petit Poucet in Casablanca – spaces where jazz was lived as a North African practice, not an import. In the Casbah of Algiers, Mustapha Skandrani was translating Arabo-Andalusian modal forms into the piano, working across chaâbi, classical and jazz idioms. In 1965 he recorded Istikhbars and Improvisations in Paris: solo piano meditations on Algerian vocal modes that sit at the exact point where North African tradition and European jazz sensibility become indistinguishable. Purists greeted him with scepticism. He kept playing. After independence, Ahmed Malek – born in Bordj El Kiffan in 1931 – became the composer who gave post-revolutionary Algerian cinema its sound, fusing Arabic tradition with jazz, psychedelic rock and funk. He died in 2008. His daughter gave his full catalogue to a record label in 2015, and the world began to discover what Algeria had already known for fifty years. Langston Hughes and Claude McKay came to Tangier in genuine encounter – not passing through, but reading American identity through the lens of the Maghreb and carrying things back.

Then the state arrived. In 1949, the United States installed a Voice of America relay station in Tangier. From 1955, the VOA broadcast The Jazz Hour to thirty million to one hundred million listeners worldwide across the Cold War period. Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong were sent by the Eisenhower administration as jazz ambassadors to manage Cold War optics across the Maghreb. Morocco became a global jazz hub not because of any artistic decision, but because of geopolitics. The music that had been called primitive in 1900 was now being weaponised by the American state. The same sonic structures that had carried spiritual memory across the Atlantic were now being broadcast as propaganda.

The clandestine engineering did not stop. After September 2001, the United States and the European Union began funding what came to be called “Sufi diplomacy” – the strategic promotion of Sufi Islam as the moderate, manageable alternative to political Islam, formalised in the RAND Corporation’s 2007 report Building Moderate Muslim Networks and operationalised through conferences, cultural festivals and broadcast partnerships across the Maghreb. In parallel, the State Department launched Next Level in 2014: a hip-hop diplomacy programme that sent American MCs, DJs, beatmakers and B-boys into youth centres in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and beyond, to engage the demographic the security state was newly anxious about. The frequency had once been jazz, then it was Sufi music and conscious hip-hop, but the operation was the same as the one Eisenhower had run with Gillespie. Manage the youth politics of the empire’s edge by offering culture as a substitute for sovereignty.

Josephine Baker understood this before Baldwin named it. During the Second World War she lived in Morocco for three years, protected by the Pasha of Marrakech, carrying intelligence for the French Resistance written in invisible ink on her sheet music. The melody was visible; the message was underneath. The official content concealing the real one. This is what the sonic machine has always done: carried the frequency the institutions could not see, hidden in plain sight inside the form they thought they were managing. The guembri carries the memory of the enslaved ancestors in its tuning. The blues carries the rupture of the Middle Passage in its structure. Baker’s sheet music carried the intelligence of the resistance in its margins. The vessel and the message are inseparable.

James Baldwin saw all of this. Living in Paris from 1948, he watched Algerians being murdered in the streets and drew the connection the American government did not want drawn: that the tactics used against Algerians – surveillance, disappearance, torture, the erasure of political identity – were structurally identical to those used against Black Americans. Algeria existed on the European map, he wrote, only insofar as European power had placed it there. He made the same argument about Harlem. Later, the Black Panthers opened their first international section in Algiers. Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the Algerian War became the theoretical framework for Black radical politics in America.

In 1964, John Coltrane released A Love Supreme. In 1969, Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba performed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, where jazz and liberation theology recognised each other without introduction. In the 1970s, Randy Weston recorded with Maalem Abdellah El Gourd and described the experience as recovery – as returning to something that had always been there. In 1988 and 1989, Nina Simone lived and healed in Casablanca. The loop closed.

The connection is not metaphorical. The polyrhythmic, pentatonic, modal structures of Gnawa/Diwan and Raï and the Saharan blues are structurally convergent with the blues and jazz – not because one borrowed from the other in a simple way, but because they share a common origin in West African musical memory, transmitted through different routes, through different histories of violence and survival. The Gnawa tradition in Morocco and the Diwan music of Algeria are themselves the living sonic memory of the enslaved sub-Saharan Africans trafficked north across the Sahara. The descendants of people separated by two different trafficking systems – one going north, one going west – found each other again, in the twentieth century, through the same sonic memory that neither system had managed to destroy.

John Coltrane did not travel to North Africa. He did not need to. When I heard the bassline in A Love Supreme in 2008, I recognised a Bambara, Fulani, Hausa, Mossi, Soninke kinship – a structural memory that had crossed the Atlantic and come back. I was not projecting. I was hearing a structural reality: African sonic structures moving through American cities, carried by performers whose music moved through the audience whether the audience had a category for it or not. Music travels. It always has. It carries what official archives and institutional genres bury, before the explanation arrives.

V.  Unsung Heroes

Raï music was not invented in Paris or in a studio. It was invented by Cheikha Rimitti – born Saadia El Ghizania in 1923 in Tessala, western Algeria, from the Amazigh tribe Beni Ouragh. Orphaned as a child by French colonial violence. Walking barefoot. Working the fields. Composing in her twenties from the raw material of working-class Algerian women’s lives – desire, poverty, sexuality, survival. She recorded more than three hundred songs across fifty years. She was banned by the colonial administration, denounced by the Algerian nationalist movement, censored by the post-independence state. She kept singing. None of them succeeded. Later, Cheb Khaled, Rachid Taha, Faudel, Cheb Mami and others refined and electrified what she had built. They became stars – the kings and princes of Raï. They were called the voices of a generation. Rimitti was called la mamie du Raï, the grandmother. She was the origin. A street in Paris bears her name today, but her influence has yet to be fully acknowledged. When she collaborated with Robert Fripp and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1994, she later said the recording had been exploitative – she never met the musicians who played on it. Her sound was taken to a global audience. She remained in the roots.

Hasna El Becharia was born in 1950 in Béchar, in the Algerian Sahara, daughter and granddaughter of Gnawa/Diwan musicians – one of the first Algerian women to touch a guembri publicly, and later acoustic and electric guitar. She played for thirty years before she recorded her first album. Thirty years. She was fifty-one when the world outside Algeria first heard her. She died in May 2024, at seventy-four. They called her the rocker of the desert, as if the desert needed a Western rock frame to become legible. The Diwan was already there. Her rhythm had always been there.

Nass El Ghiwane: founded in Casablanca in 1970, out of the working-class neighbourhood of Hay Mohammedi, out of avant-garde political theatre, out of the oral compositions of their own mothers. The lyrics came from the mothers, and this matters. They built a sound that became the conscience of a generation living through Morocco’s Years of Lead. Martin Scorsese reportedly called them the Rolling Stones of Africa. That is a compliment wrapped inside the exact problem this essay exists to name. They were not the Rolling Stones of Africa. They were Nass El Ghiwane. That was enough. The comparison, offered as a compliment, is also a confession of ignorance: the Rolling Stones built their sound on African American blues, which was itself built on the same West African sonic memory that runs through Gnawa, through Raï, through the music Nass El Ghiwane were carrying. To explain the source by reference to the derivative is not a compliment. It is the whole problem, stated without knowing it.

The same pattern runs through jazz. The Gnawa maâlems who sat with Weston, with Shepp, with Pharoah Sanders, with Ornette Coleman – who gave those musicians something that changed the direction of their work – were treated as local colour. The American musicians left with the knowledge and were celebrated as explorers, as visionaries, as African jazz ambassadors. The elders stayed, without an ecosystem to hype them up. Named sometimes as collaborators and influences, invited on some tours and ceremonies. Rarely as authors. Almost never as true equals. Intellectual property and financial gains were hardly shared. Who gets to build a pension? Who gets access to healthcare and a dentist? Who is not only symbolically celebrated but met with the financial dignity that systems are supposed to offer their national music heroes?

Jazz has been canonised – its conservatoires, its syllabi, its Grammy categories, its cultural ambassadors. That canon acknowledges West African roots, the blues, the Great Migration. It does not adequately acknowledge North Africa. This is historically incorrect. The “world music” label deepened the omission by ensuring the exchange could not be read as what it was: a conversation between contemporaries, between traditions of equal depth. The spiritual technology of survival has now become a festival theme, a workshop, a semester module, a T-shirt. The deep structure of extraction has not changed – only the product has shifted, from copper, gold, sugar and saltpeter to sound and soul and commodification.

VI.  Artistic Dilemma

All of this landed in Amsterdam. In a child whose mother was Algerian and whose father was Moroccan; who learned her ABC and her do-re-mi in Dutch; in a flat northern city built on the Atlantic trade that this history moved through. I knew Raï from my mother’s kitchen and Chaabi and Gnawa from her tapes and records, and Dutch pop and jazz from the radio. I knew these things were related, but I did not yet have the language to say why. I still carry my Amazigh roots – the people whose music Mohammed Rouicha carried in the Atlas mountains, whose identity was suppressed by the French colonial administration and then, after independence, by the Algerian and Moroccan states that needed a unified national identity and found Amazigh plurality inconvenient.

My formative years were the years after September 2001 – the years when North African identity in Europe became a security category, when being Muslim and Moroccan and Algerian in Amsterdam meant something different than it had before. I was not studying these mechanisms from a distance. I was living inside them, and they crushed me. But coal under extreme pressure turns into diamond. That is what my brother Malcolm – may he rest in eternal peace – always told me, and he was right. I carry him with me into every room I enter. He was half Algerian. He was the first grandson of Malcolm X, his namesake, his first male heir – killed in 2013 before he could follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. He never got to do what he was born to do. But he opened my eyes. He informed this vision. I name him here because the archive demands it, and because I dedicate this work to him.

I hold two passports. James Baldwin held one too – an American passport that gave him the freedom to leave but never the freedom to belong. Claude McKay moved through Tangier on papers that marked him as other wherever he went. Richard Wright’s American passport in Paris was a partial liberation and a precise register of what America still refused him. The freedom they found in Paris was real and it sat on top of another reality. James Baldwin, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright had come to Paris fleeing the crime scene of Jim Crow America: segregation by law, lynching as social ritual, the entire legal architecture designed to keep Black Americans second-class citizens in the country of their birth. They had stepped off one crime scene and onto another. Paris, in those same decades, was the metropole of an empire conducting a parallel crime in real time – most acutely against Algerians during the war for independence, but reaching into Moroccans, Tunisians and the broader North African population the French state policed, surveilled and pushed into the bidonvilles on the city’s edge. The bidonvilles were the perimeter of the scene. The Seine, on the night of 17 October 1961, would carry the bodies of Algerian demonstrators thrown in by Paris police. The writers walked the same arrondissements, used the same Métro stations, walked beside the same Seine. Baldwin read the scene the way a witness reads a crime. He drew the connection the American government did not want drawn – that the surveillance, the disappearance, the legal erasure used against North Africans were the same tools, in different hands, that had been used against Black Americans under Jim Crow. The crime had a different name in each city. The architecture was the same. The freedom of one Black diaspora was, in those years, underwritten by the violence being done to another.

The double passport is not only my condition. It is the condition of everyone in this constellation who found in movement a freedom that was also a measurement of exclusion. The difference is that my peers – musicians from North Africa who come from the same roots, who often know more than I do, who have been playing Gnawa or Raï or Diwan since childhood – cannot get a Schengen visa to perform at the same festivals that invite me. The paperwork decides who is a contemporary and who is a visitor, who belongs to the world and who belongs to somewhere others are told they belong. This is the Ellis Island mechanism, still running – the same one I described earlier: the Moroccan and Algerian acrobat troupes in the Bowery, the human zoo, the conditional welcome. Admitted as spectacle, sent back when the performance was over. The visa system does the same work today that the steamship ticket once did. The paperwork has changed. The mechanism has not. It decides who circulates freely and who must justify their movement, who is a contemporary and who is still confined to a living exhibit.

So who do I follow?

Do I follow Shakespeare – take the archive, make it legible, digestible, laughable, add some pity porn, some rounds of victim olympics, give the audience a story and a representation they can hold, dip my pen into honey so they can easily digest stories from an unjust world? Choose the form that travels easily? Or do I follow the archive – stay with the complexity, refuse the resolution, trust that the audience can hold what I hold?

The Shakespearean path is seductive. It is how you get a standing ovation and fame. It is how you become the acceptable face of the thing you came to correct. The archive path is harder. It asks the audience to do work. It refuses the exotic fantasy. It names the mechanism instead of staging the spectacle. But I think the dilemma is false, or at least incomplete. Because neither Shakespeare nor the archive, alone, can do what I need to do.

Music theatre is the form where rhythm can carry the argument and silence can carry what words cannot. It is the form that can hold the archive without flattening it, and reach the audience without lying to them. That is why I make what I make. Not to resolve the dilemma, but to inhabit it honestly, in front of people, in real time.

Because the generation of indigenous heroes and the migrants who brought us here is slowly dying. The people who carried the living memory – who knew the village, who spoke Darija and Tamazight, who sang the music without knowing they were preserving anything – are leaving the world now. Idir, born Hamid Cheriet in 1949 in Kabylie, Amazigh singer who sang in Tamazight while the state was suppressing the language, whose A Vava Inouva reached seventy-seven countries from a Radio Alger session he almost did not do – died in Paris in 2020. Mustapha Skandrani died in 2005. Ahmed Malek died in 2008. Cheikha Rimitti died in Paris in 2006. Larbi Batma of Nass El Ghiwane died in 1997. Hasna El Becharia died in 2024.

The thinkers in my constellation – Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun – are not academic references to me. They are a road map. A way of understanding where I come from, before the people who could have told me directly are gone.

We – indigenous North African people who ended up as migrants in Europe – are living between a rock and a hard place. Between the empire that extracted from North Africa and the post-colonial states that sacrificed and extracted from their own people. Between the music that was called primitive and the industry shelf it was later placed on. Between the passport I hold and the visa my colleagues cannot obtain unless I submit an inhumane amount of paperwork and accept enormous financial risk as a guarantee. Between the archive that exists and the living memory that is disappearing.

Shakespeare turned the ambassador into a myth almost immediately. I am trying, slowly, with patience and with the archive behind me, to turn the myth back into presence. Before the last witnesses depart this earth.

(Music.)

Rotterdam 25 April 2026 – Rajae El Mouhandiz is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, composer and songwriter, raised in Amsterdam and based in Rotterdam. This essay is written in the context of A Love Supreme / Port Cities as Living Archives, a music theatre work premiering in May 2027 at O. Festival.

Dedicated to my brother Malcolm Latif Shabazz, May he rest in eternal Peace. – and for a Free Palestine.

Photo: N.Y. October 14, 1911, 25 Moroccan Riffian performers walking north along Broadway from 23rd Street to the Hotel Knickerbocker (located at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway) shortly after they arrived via Ellis Island, brought to the United States to appear in a hit play ‘The Garden of Allah’ at New York’s Century Theater, an elaborately staged drama based on a novel by Robert Hichens. The production was so successful that it toured nationally and was later adapted into several films.