Podcast guest K. Barrett Bilali has recently published articles on ChatGPT’s crisis and AI in (Moroccan) art and music.
An American “MomOf4” drew a quarter-million views with her YouTube video “Why I Moved to Morocco.” Apparently, moving to Morocco is becoming a thing. The other Kevin Barrett, who moved to Morocco before I did, joined me on the Truth Jihad podcast to explain why, and to express his potential willingness to serve as a consultant for those considering such a move. (To contact him, subscribe to his Substack and reply to his welcoming email.)
God is currently showering blessings on Morocco in the form of rain and snow, which the country badly needs after seven years of drought, and also in the form of soccer victories, most recently last night’s thrilling Arab Cup final against Jordan. Next week Morocco starts hosting the Africa Cup, in which its team is the top seed, using infrastructure developed in preparation for hosting the World Cup in 2030, when it will be rolling out the world’s biggest stadium, the Hassan II stadium in Casablanca. Since it overperformed in the last World Cup by reaching the semifinals, Morocco has become a soccer powerhouse, recently winning the U20 World Cup and putting in strong performances in various other categories.
But infrastructure development in Morocco isn’t limited to stadiums. Transportation and communications are also getting big upgrades. The Buraq high-speed train linking Tangier and Casablanca ranks among the top ten of world’s fastest trains, with more high-speed rail under development, and Tangier Med is the biggest port in Africa. Having diplomatically won an international consensus that the Moroccan Sahara is indeed Moroccan, the government is also building the Dakhla Atlantic Port, a $1.2 billion deepwater project scheduled to open in two to three years. It will connect landlocked Sahel countries (Mali, Chad, Niger) to global markets and serve as a hub for renewable energy, fishing, and industry.
Internet connectivity has exploded as well. If you need fast, reliable internet, Morocco is your best bet in Africa. Here in Eastern Morocco, which generally trails Western Morocco in infrastructure, people are excited about the Medusa fiber optic cable that will link Nador to Marseille, France. There is also quite a bit of buzz about a big AI project in Berkane, the closest real city to my Mediterranean vacation town of Saidia.
Like the Chinese, Moroccans are blessed with the impression that their country is growing, developing, and generally moving in the right direction. That’s a marked contrast to the perception among Americans, especially the better- informed among them, that the USA’s glory days are behind it, and that Trump is not only failing to make America great again, but rivaling Caligula as a mad emperor overseeing societal collapse.
Living in a developing, improving, optimistic country is one benefit of Moroccan residency. But there are more tangible ones as well. The cost of living is among the world’s lowest. The food is arguably the world’s best, as is the weather. The people are generally kind, welcoming, and helpful—sometimes a bit too helpful, truth be told. (If you don’t understand how being overly helpful can actually sometimes be unhelpful, you’ve never been to Morocco.)* And the culture and history are uncommonly rich: Greco-Roman civilization and its Arab-Islamic upgrade form an unbroken legacy stretching back thousands of years, and today’s political Morocco (al-Maghreb al-Aqsa) traces itself back the founding of the Idrisid dynasty in 788. You can get by speaking French almost anywhere, Spanish works in the north, and English is increasingly common among the younger, wealthier, and better-educated segments of the population. If, like me, you’re ambitious enough to want to master Arabic, untold linguistic, cultural, and spiritual riches will open before you like a treasure house opening to a magic password. And if you’re even more ambitious than me, you can study the various varieties of Amazigh (Berber) as well.
Excerpt from the podcast
K. Barrett Bilali: What I try to do is promote English and develop audiences here in Morocco that are English-centered or anglophone and create a space where they can communicate and expand.
Kevin Barrett: That’s interesting, because my friends and co-conspirators here in Saidia, on the other side of Morocco from you, just created a brand new English language “Saidia City in English” page on Facebook.
And yeah, Morocco is getting into English language because it’s the global language. Even though the American empire is crumbling. English isn’t.
And that leads us to Morocco. We’ll get back to your recent posts on AI later. But first, comment a little bit about Morocco as a kind of a happening place. Everybody’s heard that Morocco is doing really well in soccer. They reached the semifinals in the last World Cup. They’re going to host the 2030 World Cup. They’re now heading into the finals in the Arab Cup soccer (which they won). And they’re going to host the Africa Cup, which is this huge—it’s like the semi-Super Bowl of soccer for this part of the world. So anyway, it’s Morocco is on a world soccer map.
Yeah, it’s on the world soccer map and that’s all well and good. But I’ve been here years and I’ve seen tremendous growth in this country. And I think sometimes that the people don’t really appreciate how much they have, as an African nation. A little aside here: The influence of English is so powerful now that the Buraq, which is the high-speed train for Morocco—it’s the only one in Africa, I believe, and in fact, America doesn’t have one—but Morocco has a beautiful high speed train. It goes from Casablanca to Tangier in about two hours and 30 minutes, I think. And it’s an amazing high speed system. When I first got on it—I was almost the first one to take it back several years ago. It was not very well attended then. No one really went on it. But now it’s packed. Sometimes I can’t even get a ticket. I have to buy it ahead of time so I can be on it.
And at first they used to say the announcements in Arabic and French. Now they say the announcements in Arabic and English, because English is taking over. You can see it in the media. The young people, they prefer English over French. And despite the fact that France has its claws into the society, into the education system, into the economy of Morocco, the younger people are preferring English. And it’s a beautiful thing to see. And the younger people, because they have chosen English, are usually more technologically savvy. They have higher disposable incomes, the English speakers, and their families. And they’re more apt to engage in reading and writing and things that are of English. I believe English is a beautiful language for reading and writing, and that’s why everybody chooses it. And economically, this country...
Zee French would not aghree weeth you that zee Engleesh is better than zee French for reading and writing.
Yes. Well, the French, sadly, are losing it. I don’t know if they’re losing it on their own behalf. Well, they’re losing it because of their actions. They’re certainly losing it in Africa between Burkina Faso and other African nations like Niger and Mali. They’ve left the the confines of the French system and mindset. Even Benin just last week had a coup d’etat in which the French are slowly being pushed out.
But what’s happening here in Morocco to make it more stable and more developed is that Morocco is becoming a hub of those countries and a neutral kind of geopolitical power. They have good relations with every nation. As long as any nation accepts the formerly Western Sahara as the integral part of Morocco, they have good relations. If not…well, Moroccan diplomacy plays different games to make sure that that happens. Because that’s the most important thing here.
With that, Morocco is offering the South, the Saharan provinces, Dakhla and these areas down there, which were part of the Western Sahara, more security, more development. There’s investors coming into the South. There’s infrastructure being built. There’s desalination plants. There’s so much going on here that is positive for the populace and for the rest of Africa.vBecause in King Mohammed VI created what was called the Atlantic Initiative. And this initiative is connecting Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania—countries locked out of the French system with no oceanic border—to the sea. He is opening up Morocco and the south, Dakhla, and building a huge port there so that products from Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso can come and reach the Atlantic and go to America, China, and so on.
As I said, I see a lot of economic development, a lot of social development, too, even if it’s not at the same pace. There’s still a lot of problems in the society here in terms of employment, in terms of quality of life and different things. But I see...Morocco as being a hinge and a connecting point between Africa, Europe, the Khaliji in the Gulf, and the Americas. And they’re doing really well to keep it that way.
Yeah, it’s a relatively competently administered country, for sure. And you mentioned that it’s adopting English, and that especially the upwardly mobile, educated and younger segment of the Moroccan public is increasingly getting into English. And that actually leads to wondering whether you and I may not be the last Americans and native English speakers to come and spend time and maybe settle in Morocco. A lot of people these days are not too happy with the way things are going in the US. Whether it’s Muslims who say “hey, I’d really rather be in a majority Muslim country,” or whether it’s people up in the northern states in the United States who are shivering in the winter and saying “man, I could be enjoying nice weather and my spending power would be a lot higher, I could survive on my pension,” this sort of thing. So I wonder if there’ll be more native English speakers, Americans, coming here.
I think so. I have a little business I’m doing with my English. But if I could expand it to open up a travel agency. And it’s possible because providing English services is what I do. So a tourist agency would be an amazing thing for Anglophones, maybe Muslims, coming to a country where Islam and Halal meat and everything is available. They would be able to come here and live very well. If they wanted to go to McDonald’s, they could do that. Burger King, KFC, if that’s your thing, it’s all here. In addition, you have security, stability, lower prices, and a lot of other perks.
I’ll give you an example. I have a friend who I’ve just met. So I guess it’s an acquaintance, but I call her a friend. She... And her aunt and uncle met me, and they wanted to find a place to live in Rabat, in the capital here. And part of the reason is that one lives in Ghana, in Accra, and she’s just tired of the electricity going off. Sadly those countries down there don’t have the stability, the infrastructure. Ghana Gambia, Cameroon…I have a friend down there, and the electricity is off all the time. The water systems, the traffic system…it’s just not working down there for a lot of African-Americans, specifically.
And so she’s coming up here and she may be bringing people with her because there is stability here in Rabat and in Morocco, all over the country, especially in the bigger cities. There’s security, there’s stability, there’s development.
It’s not as easy to make money here. And it’s not the same kind of money you can make in America for sure.
But if you’re on retirement or if you want to sell your house and want to build something or buy something over here and be on the Atlantic coast, or, like you are, on the Mediterranean coast, you can do very well here. And so there’s a potential for a business opportunity to attract Anglophones to Morocco.
*Here is an example of a Moroccan being unhelpfully overhelpful: I was running barefoot along Saidia’s 14 km Mediterranean beach when a passerby helpfully stopped me to explain that I shouldn’t be doing that. In the winter, he said, the beach cleaning crews don’t come out in force, so there is a chance that a buried object might injure your foot. That had actually once happened to someone he knew. I thanked him and told him I would be careful. He told me I should be running on the sloping wet sand close to the water, where it was safer. I thanked him again with the various Moroccan ways of thanking people (barakAllahu fik = may God bless you for it, Allah yarham walidik = God bless your parents, shukran bizzaf = thank you very much, etc. etc.) and managed to extricate myself, and continue my run, politely starting off on the sloping wet sand as he advised…and then, when he was well behind me, returning to the flat, slightly more dangerous sand that I had run on many dozens of times without incident. Had I tried to explain to him that running on the flat sand was reasonably safe since I kept a close eye out for hazards, that my joints didn’t like running on sloping sand, and that the health benefits of running where I was able to comfortably run outweighed the very small risk of incurring a cut on my foot, he probably wouldn’t have understood, because helpful Moroccans always think the type of help they’re offering is the last word, even though it often isn’t.
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