Senghor, Asilah and “Afro-Arab Civilization”

Hisham Aidi offers a compelling account of how Morocco became a key site for competing political and cultural discourses in support of African and Arab pan-African solidarity. He shows that a militant and anti-essentialist vision of this unity emerged in 1966 around the magazine Souffles (Anfas in Arabic), founded by Moroccan writers influenced by the thought of Frantz Fanon. However, Aidi argues that this early initiative was superseded by the more culturally oriented the Afro-Arab Forum, established in Asilah in 1980 by the Moroccan diplomat Mohammed Benaissa under the auspices of Senegalese President and Poet Lepold Segar Senghor’s. Grounded in Senghor’s vision of civilisational métissage, the Asilah Forum has worked to resist efforts to draw a dividing line between North and Sub-Saharan Africa and continues to do so today.

By Hisham Aidi

The Senegalese poet-president Léopold Senghor and the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher Frantz Fanon, both had a keen interest in North Africa and competing visions of the relationship between “Arab and Negro.” Morocco would play a significant role in their intellectual formation and political trajectories. Fanon’s experience in the Free French army, stationed in Casablanca during World War II, would leave a mark on his political thought. In 1953, after completing his military service and studies the Martinican doctor had written to Senghor hoping to find employment in Senegal, but Fanon never received a response from the Senegalese poet and so headed to Blida, Algeria. As the Algerian struggle developed into a war, Fanon would return repeatedly to Morocco for meetings and training. It was in Oujda, in June 1959, that the Martinican, following a suspicious car accident, suffered serious wounds that would leave him temporarily paralysed, and severely affect his health.

Senghor, a close friend of King Hassan II, was a regular presence in Morocco from the 1970s to the late 1990s, appearing at conferences and media events, commenting on the continuities and similarities between Senegal and the North African kingdom, extolling both countries as models of civilisational métissage. Historians have highlighted the parallels between Morocco and Senegal, noting the persistence of French colonial legacies (how colonial policies implemented in Morocco, were often first tried in Senegal,[1]) the centrality of Sufism, the emphasis on religious diplomacy, and the institutional capacity of Sufi tariqas, which in both countries play a role akin to political parties. Scholars have long noted how Morocco’s self-image is shaped by its relationship to Spain[2] and al-Andalus,[3] and the circulation of religious discourse and symbolism between Morocco and Senegal, with Senegalese political discourse depicting Morocco as a mirror or wellspring.[4] But Moroccan political discourse also tends to speak of Senegal as a political mirror and source. The credo of Morocco as a tree rooted in Africa but open to Europe, recalling Senghor’s calls for “enracinement et ouverture,” was born at the annual Afro-Arab Forum (al-muntada al-arabi al-ifriki) launched in 1980 in Asilah by the Moroccan diplomat Mohammed Benaissa.  The prevailing discourse of Afro-convivencia, as I call it, which locates Morocco as rooted in the Sahel, but extending to Iberia, portraying the kingdom as a mirror and extension of both Spain and Senegal, found its modern expression in Asilah as a result of dialogue between Arabophone, Hispanophone and African intellectuals.

Black Maghrib

Since the post-war years, North African pan-Africanism has, reflecting political circumstances, tended to vacillate between Fanon and Senghor. In 1944, when the nineteen-year-old Fanon was stationed outside of Casablanca, his Free French division was organised hierarchically, with European volunteers and fighters from the West Indian colonies like himself positioned at the top, Senegalese and sub-Saharan infantry at the bottom, and Moroccan and Algerian troops in between. At times the French commanders would “whiten” the army, leaving out Senegalese troops but taking only Moroccan and Algerian fighters or, better yet, just the French Maquis. The racial practices that Fanon witnessed within the army in colonial North Africa would inspire the Martinican to call for a pan-African anti-imperialism, based on solidarity between “Negroes and Arabs.”

In her recent book, Maghreb Noir, historian Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik describes how North African capitals were vibrant centres of pan-Africanism from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. From 1956 to 1961 when Morocco was part of the Non-Aligned Movement and “the Casablanca bloc,” Rabat was home to various liberation movements.[5] The Bissau-Guinean theorist-revolutionary Amílcar Cabral and the Angolan poet-revolutionary Mario de Andrade of the MPLA were based in the Moroccan capital. Nelson Mandela and Frantz Fanon were attending training camps in Oujda. For almost two decades, Rabat, Algiers, Tunis and Cairo were, at different times, centres of African liberation movements and pan-Africanist intellectual networks. Upon assuming power in 1961, King Hassan began to shift the kingdom, away from the non-Aligned movement towards the pro-American camp. African liberation movements and pan-African intellectuals would depart Morocco. This political turn and the crackdown in 1965 on student and worker protests would inspire left-leaning Moroccan intellectuals to launch the magazine Souffles, a pan-African, Tri-continental publication, which published its first issue in Rabat in 1966.  Souffles (Anfas in Arabic) was launched by a handful of Moroccan writers and poets in Paris, who were writing for Présence Africaine.[6] The founders of Souffles – poet Abdelatif Laâbi, Mustafa Nissabouri, Mohammad Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed Melihi, Mohamed Chabaa, Farid Belkahia saw the Martinican thinkers Aimé Cesaire and Frantz Fanon as “elder brothers,” but they were most galvanised by the Fanon’s theory of national culture and liberation. Fanon’s thought would become central to the Souffles-Anfas project.

In dialogue with writers in Francophone and Lusophone Africa, France, and the Caribbean, Souffles would emerge as a flagship publication of the Moroccan Left, a platform for debates about the definition of Africa and the meaning of Negritude. The Souffles collective supported Fanon’s critique of Senghor. Fanon acknowledged that by affirming a black past, Negritude could help colonised Africans develop a positive sense of self. He granted that Aimé Cesaire’s writings had helped spark a political awakening among West Indians. But Fanon found the language of Negritude totalising, and echoing of colonial stereotypes; knowledge of black history was inspiring but talk of a “mythical past” was unproductive.  In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon observes that extolling the greatness of Songhai civilisation would do little to help the exploited Songhan. In privileging “race” and ignoring class conflict, Negritude enabled bourgeois rule and by extension neo-colonialism.

To be sure, Aimé Cesaire – who coined the idea of Negritude – was also a major reference point for the Souffles collective. Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s explosive 1964 poem “Nausée Noire (Black Nausea)” about a brutal head of state, was clearly influenced by Cesaire’s classic poem Cahier de Retour.  But in the debate about Negritude, the Souffles journal solidly backed Fanon’s class-based critique, publishing a number of critiques by Marxist pan-Africanists. The most well-known was the Haitian poet René Depestre’s address at the Cultural Congress of Havana in January 1968 titled “The Winding Course of Negritude.” Similarly, in April 1966, the late Moroccan art critic Abdullah Stouki penned a scathing review of the Dakar International Festival for Negro Arts that Senghor organised. He lamented the absence of progressive voices like Paul Robeson and the anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba, noting that Senghor was holding a festival under the patronage of General de Gaulle and John F. Kennedy. Senghor would respond to the Fanonists that he saw cultural values as conditioned by geography, history and ethnic and racial groups, adding that race is not a physical community, but a cultural community.

The rivalry between the leftist continental pan-African camp and the Negritude-inspired pro-Western camp played out – and still plays out – at cultural festivals. The Pan-African Cultural festival held in Algiers in July 1969, was partly a response to Senghor’s festival in Dakar. A 3000-word Pan-African Cultural Manifesto was reprinted in Souffles as a critique of Senghor’s division of Africa into a “Berber-Arab” zone (with its “Bedouin virtues”) and a “Negro-African world.” In a 40-minute taped message, Ahmed Sekou Touré of Guinea, a rival of Senghor, repudiated the Senegalese president’s ideology. The response to Sekou Touré was read by the distinguished Senegalese diplomat Mohtar M’Bow, who would later become the general director of UNESCO and a close associate of Leopold Senghor and King Hassan II. M’Bow argued that Negritude represented an intellectual-political bridge between Arabism and the “Negro-African world.” These tensions would erupt again eight years later when Nigeria decided to host the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77) as a follow-up to the Dakar festival. From the outset, Senghor demanded that North African states only have observer status at the festival. His minister of culture said Senegal would boycott the event if it was not limited to Black countries only. General Obasanjo of Nigeria, however, wanted the North African states to participate as full members, and, Nigerian officials – as The New York Times would report – would accuse the Senegalese of exhibiting “racial bigotry in the most nauseating sense.”[7] It has since been argued that Senghor opposing the participation of North African states, because of alleged Algerian political agitation.[8]

In 1972, Souffles was shut down, and the editors were arrested. The pan-African left would be repressed across North Africa. The Black Panthers would depart Algeria; Samir Amin, David Dubois and the Marxists would leave Cairo for Dar Es Salaam, and then Dakar. Souffles was at the centre of the debate over pan-Africanism. After its shutdown, for several years there was little pan-African organising in North Africa, and few intellectual ties between Morocco and the rest of Africa – until the late 1970s when a new initiative was launched in Asilah centred around Leopold Senghor.

Cairo to Asilah         

By the late 1970s, as North African states shifted rightward, a new pan-Africanist discourse centred on identity and civilisation began germinating – briefly in Egypt, but mostly in Morocco. In February 1967, Senghor had been invited to Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser, where he delivered a lecture at Cairo University on the foundations of Africanité.[9]  Senghor argued that most African leaders were conceiving of African unity as based on anti-colonialism. This was not a pro-active, positive foundation for unity. Senghor wanted to identify values common to all Africans. The Senegalese president explained that the foundations of Africanité are essentially cultural, based on the “complementary symbiosis of the values of Arabité and the Negritude.”  He would distinguish his vision of African civilisation from the Casablanca bloc’s anti-colonial politics, insisting that “Arab and Negro” were simply different ways of being African. The poet-president was clearly distancing himself from Fanon’s revolutionary vision of Black and Arab anti-colonial solidarity, but he was also subtly countering historian Cheikh Anta Diop’s vision of pan-Africanism. Diop, a vocal critic and political opponent of Senghor, didn’t draw a cultural boundary across the desert, and saw Egypt as a source of African civilisation, not as part of a separate civilisation. “Egypt is to the rest of black Africa what Greece and Rome are to the West,” Diop would write.[10]

Senghor’s civilisational project received a tepid response in Nasserist Egypt. The Egyptian president had his own vision of Arab-African-Islamic concentric relations based on anti-imperialism.  Four years later, however, Senghor would find himself back in the Egyptian capital, this time at the behest of Anwar Sadat. The Egyptian president of Sudanese descent would find Senghor’s talk of spirituality, African-Arab symbiosis and pro-Westernism appealing. The duo would form a friendship, and broach the idea of establishing a Francophone university in Egypt named after the Senegalese poet. (Senghor University of Alexandria would open its doors in 1990). With Egypt’s suspension from the Arab League in 1979, Sadat and Senghor would consider forming an Afro-Arab international organisation.            In the mid-1970s, Mohammed Benaissa was a young journalist and international civil servant official working for the UN in Ghana, and considering returning to Morocco for a run at political office. A quadra-lingual native of Asilah, Benaissa had grown up under the Spanish Protectorate, spent his high school years in Cairo, thanks to a scholarship from the Arab League – and attended the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s (along with future Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan.) Upon graduating from college in 1963, Benaissa had settled in Harlem, New York, doing an internship at the United Nations and taking classes at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Benaissa would often recall living on 190^th and Broadway, visiting churches on Sunday mornings and attending Black nationalist rallies. He would describe the Sunday afternoon in February 1965, when he was taking a train down to the United Nations, when the train was suddenly delayed on 125^th Street, as police flooded the station. A man would come aboard and cry, “They shot Malcolm X.”[11]

Benaissa would subsequently join the Food and Agriculture Association of the UN (FAO), serving for eleven years in Accra, Rome and Adis Ababa, Ethiopia (alongside Kofi Annan). In 1971, he met Senghor in Dakar, and they would strike up a friendship, brainstorming ways to build bridges across the Sahara. In 1976, Benaissa returned to Morocco, assuming the position of city councilman and eventually mayor of Asilah. He would go on to become Morocco’s Minister of Culture, Minister of Foreign Affairs, ambassador to Washington through much of the 1990s, and would remain until his death in February of this year, an elder statesman of the Moroccan government.

In 1978, Benaissa and the Asilah-born painter Mohammed Melihi founded a cultural association called Al Mouhit (The Ocean), that hoped to leverage art and culture for development and for the restoration of the old city of Asilah. Intrigued by Senghor and Sadat’s idea of an Afro-Arab international organisation, Benaissa would use the association to launch a local initiative called the Afro-Arab Cultural Forum (al muntada al thaqafi al arabi al ifriqi) based in Asilah.  A founding charter would be signed a year later in Amman, Jordan, by Leopold Senghor and Prince Hassan of Jordan, the latter was invited by the Benaissa to fill in for the Egyptian president.  In 1978, Benaissa would invite the artists and writers who had left Souffles when it took a Marxist turn in 1967  – Mohammed Melihi, Fareed Belkahia and Tahar Benjelloun – to join the Asilah project. Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, Egyptian writer Nawal al Saadawi, Senegalese Mohtar M’Bow would also join the Afro-Arab collective. Benaissa would note that maybe one day the Asilah Forum could be expanded into a broader Afro-Arab organisation, but the first step was an annual conference to build an intellectual network, alliances and an archive. The founding charter states: “The recommendations adopted by the Second Forum should be taken into account in the preparation of the draft programs, particularly those relating to the establishment of a data bank and Arab-African cooperation in the cultural field.”

From 1980 until 1999, African, Arab and Latin American writers, intellectuals and politicians would meet annually at the coastal town in August for a cultural festival that would include dialogue sessions presided over by Senghor and Benaissa. From the start, the Afro-Arab forum envisioned a tri-continental geography similar to that advanced by Souffles magazine, with Morocco as a bridge between Africa, Asia and Latin America, and with a keen interest in Andalusian influence among “the peoples of Latin America.”[12] In addition to the Afro-Arab forum, Benaissa would launch a summer institute called “La Universidad Ibero-Americana-Marroqui al-Mu’tamid Ibn Abbad,” that aimed to connect Morocco to the Spanish-speaking world, and invited Latin American writers like Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado.[13]

Berbéritude

When historians of Berber/Amazigh culture discuss Senghor’s impact on Morocco, the focus tends to be on Senghor’s friendship with the Berber politician Mahjoub Aherdane, and more broadly on Negritude’s influence on the Amazigh cultural movement.[14] Senghor introduced the idea of Berbéritude at a speech he gave at l’Académie Française in 1980.[15] In November 1981, the Senegalese president would participate in a conference in Rabat with a range of Amazigh leaders including Aherdane, scholar Mohammed Chafik and Abdelhamid Zemmouri, who had founded the Association Culturelle Amazighe in 1979.[16]  Yet all this came on the heels of the Afro-Arab forum, which was more focused on Negritude’s relationship to Arabité (than to Amazighité), and both identities’ links to the Francophone and Hispanophone worlds across the Atlantic.

The Omani Kenyan historian Ali Mazrui coined the term “Afro-Arab” in the 1960s, but largely in reference to the Gulf and the Swahili people; he had spoken of “Arab Negritude,” yet mostly referring to classical Arab poets who took pride in their dark skin. (Benaissa knew the Kenyan historian and would often reference Mazrui’s writings, but to his recollection, the two did not cross paths while at Columbia in the early 1960s.)  In Asilah, a different understanding of “Arab Negritude” would take shape, with the Moroccan-Senegalese relationship conceived as the foundation of a broader Afro-Arab relationship. As Benaissa would say, Asilah was to be “the seed” of a broader “complementarity” that would break down “the pseudo wall of the grand Sahara.” And Senghor, Benaissa would write, was a perfect partner: wasn’t Senghor the first sub-Saharan head of state to introduce Arabic into Senegal’s educational system?[17] Senghor had envisioned Negritude as a universalism that included Arabité; the two were co-constitutive, with Arabic as a connector between the “Negro-African” and “Arabo-Islamic” civilisational spheres of Africa.[18] Benaissa hoped Asilah – “this little Afro-Arab town” (“cette petite ville Afro-Arabe”) – could become a place to cultivate this vision, a space for the kind of cultural cross-breeding that Senghor had long called for: le co-nnaitre – co-birth.[19]

From the outset, the Afro-Arab forum would award the Lepold Senghor prize for African Literature. In 1989, they began awarding the Tchicaya U Tamsi prize for African poetry – named after the late Congolese poet. In 1991, the prize was given to the Haitian poet René Depestre, another Marxist who had railed against Senghor’s ideas while writing for Souffles. The awards committee would include the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Saleh, Paul Dabei of Cameroon, Henry Lopes of Congo, Edouard Maunick from Mauritius, and Charbel Daghel from Lebanon.  In 1990, on the 10-year anniversary of the Afro-Arab forum, a ceremony was held in honor of Senghor. A plaza was built in central Asilah in the president’s honor, using soil mixed by painter Farid Belkahia. Senghor was given a certificate – “the first certificate” – as citizen of Asilah.  The event was attended by Prince Moulay Rachid of Morocco and Federico Mayor, the Spanish poet and director-general of UNESCO – who gave a stirring tribute to Senghor: “This square which, on one side, is protected by high ancient walls which, if stones could speak, would tell us so many stories, and, on the other, opens out onto streets leading to the sea, in other words to other lands, to things universal, this square will then be called henceforth Leopold Sedar Senghor Square. All year-round men, women and children from Asilah and elsewhere will stop here. Some of them will utter and repeat the name, knowing who Senghor is; others will learn to read and pronounce the name, perhaps for the first time. They all will know, however, that this square honors a poet whose essential merit is that he has, through his work, which has been translated all over the world, opened up to the people of his native Senegal, to all Africa’s peoples and, beyond this continent, to the black diaspora as a whole, the paths of dignity, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of history.”[20]

In 1984, Morocco withdrew from the Organization of African Unity in 1984, following that organization’s acceptance of the Sahraoui Arab Democratic Republic as a member state. This would imbue the Moroccan-Senegalese relationship with a new urgency. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Senghor was on the diplomatic circuit, extolling the kingdom as a paragon – a country that, like his native Senegal, was a brilliant mix of civilisations. It was in the 1980s, in Asilah, where the discourse of Morocco as a tree rooted in West Africa, with branches in Europe would congeal.  In April 1980, when King Hassan inaugurated the Royal Academy in Fez, Senghor would praise the kingdom’s cultural and biological metissage, the allying of “Berberitude and Arabité.” In May 1987, at a joint event that he organised for the Moroccan royal academy and l’Académie Francaise, Senghor would explain that his aim was to use Morocco as a bridge to bring “Afro-Arab civilization” to the Francophone world, praising King Hassan as a central figure of l’Afro-Arabie.[21] The Senegalese president and Moroccan monarch had been friends since 1974, joined by their love of the French language, opposition to Communism, and more. As philosopher Abdourahmane Seck observes, “Senghor and Hassan II were both obsessed with identity, and saw each other as gateways. They saw that they could enhance each other’s prestige. Senghor, the father of Negritude, could boost Hassan II’s reputation as a pan-African leader, and the Commander of the Faithful could reinforce Senghor’s reputation as a nation builder and (Christian) leader of a Muslim nation.”[22]

A vision for the Afro-Arab future

In 1996, on the occasion of Senghor’s 90th birthday, UNESCO published a book of tributes to the Senegalese poet, including contributions from Aimé Cesaire, René Depestre, Tahar Benjelloun and Boutros-Boutros Ghali, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, who would thank Senghor for helping deisolate Egypt in the 1970s. The collection also included a tribute from King Hassan. The monarch would praise the Senegalese poet-president for his humanism, for representing the spirit of evoking several tree-related aphorisms by Senghor: “l’arbre ne tombe pas s’il est l’esprit de l’arbre ». (“The tree does not fall if it is the spirit of the tree.”)[23] He would also cite a well-known sentence from Senghor’s 1977 book on Negritude and universalism: “For only a man firmly rooted in his original civilization can actively assimilate external contributions, like a tree which, planted in rich topsoil [humus], flourishes and blossoms in water and sunlight.”[24] In March 1986, on Throne Day, the Moroccan monarch, echoing Senghor, had proclaimed “Morocco is a tree whose roots run deep into Africa and that breathes through its leaves in Europe.”[25]

The UNESCO tribute came right on time. The 1990s was a challenging time for Negritude and civilisational arguments more broadly. In June 1993, Samuel Huntington published his infamous article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” arguing that Islam’s borders were bloody, and drawing a line across the Sahara separating Islamic and African civilisations. This thesis would draw much criticism, and inspire a counter-discourse of anti-essentialism. Why the desire to reduce civilisations to an essence or “civilizational logic”? Why deploy the impossibly broad category of civilisation anyway? Negritude would come under similar critique for the civilisational-qua-culture-talk. Fanon’s critique would be revived, as Senghor’s thought was deemed as essentialist, evading questions of political economy and anti-imperialism.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars would also begin to take stock of African leaders’ views on decolonisation, their stance during the Cold War, and Senghor’s role as an  anti-“progressive” ally of the US and France.[26] Critics would reference a meeting between Senghor and Jimmy Carter in 1978, where Senghor explains to the American president the three splits rending the African continent – between Francophones and Anglophones, between “Arabs and Negroes,” and the gravest rift which was between moderates and Soviet-backed “progressives.” Senghor would observe that Senegal was located in the middle of this Arab-Negro “dividing line” – not far from the civilisational fault-line that Huntington claimed divided Islamic and Negro civilisation in Africa. The Senegalese president would note that the “progressive” states of Algeria and Libya were meddling in the Sahel, in Mali and Niger, threatening “to split all of these states,” in an attempt to gain control over local Arab populations, when the truth is “Hardly five per cent of the people in the Sahara however are pure Arabs.”[27]

After September 2001, public opinion would shift again. In November of that year, as the Bush administration embraced the discourse of “Clash of Civilizations,” launching a war in Afghanistan, Kofi Anna would call for a Dialogue Among Civilizations, to counter extremism, eventually leading to the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations in 2005, spearheaded by Spain and Turkey. Senghor’s calls for a dialogue, reciprocity and the “civilization of the universal” would find a new audience – and come to be seen as an antidote to the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric. In Morocco, as a discourse of Sufism and Afro-Convivencia was embraced, Senghor’s ideas would be discussed at the Afro-Arab forum of Asilah,[28] and the Gnaoua festival and newly-launched Andalusian festivals of Fez and Essaouira, all inspired by the Asilah festival. As Morocco geared up for a return to the African Union in 2017, the kingdom’s historic ties to Senegal and the Sahel would be celebrated.

Senghor’s thought nourished multiple intellectual currents in Morocco. The Senegalese poet and Amazigh politician Mahjoube Aherdan would organise gatherings on Amazigh culture. Senghor would write an epilogue to Aherdane’s epic poem “Iguider ou le mythe de l’Aigle” (1990), stating the Moroccan writer’s symbiosis of Berbéritude and Arabité, reflected an African form of humanism. (The Senegalese poet would also curiously observe that before Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks and Arabs arrived in Africa, Africa’s populations weren’t divided into White and Black, but rather into “Grand Africains” (Big Africans) who lived in northern Africa down to the Sahel, and “Petits Africains” (Little Africans) who lived beneath the Sahara and spoke “click languages.”)[29] Anthropologist Bouazza Benachir, a friend of the Senelagese poet, is another Moroccan intellectual inspired by Senghor as seen in his works Le siècle de Léopold Sédar Senghor (2006) and Négritudes du Maroc et du Maghreb (2011.) Morocco’s current minister of museums the poet-painter Mehdi Qotbi, was also a protegé of the Senegalese president, who dubbed him “the magical Afro-Arab poet.”

The Afro-Arab forum, now in its 45^th year, set the cultural stage for Morocco’s current Africa orientation and festivals policy, and for the rise of Gnaoua music. American jazz artists and Gnawa musicians had been jamming at Dar Gnawa in Tangier since the 1960s, and Randy Weston’s Blue Moses album (1972) record included Sufi chants, and the follow-up record Tanjah (1974), included chants and oud. But the first recording of a live Gnawa-jazz session was Asilah 80 (1980), featuring English pianist Peter Lemer and the G’Naoua d’Asilah at the local Al Kamra Theatre. As Asilah became a musical destination, Moroccan cultural officials would see the possibilities of this musical fusion and launch the Essaouira festival in 1997, which is today one of the largest jazz festivals in Africa.

In August 2015, on the eve of Morocco’s return to the African Union, Benaissa gave a speech in Asilah, laying out his vision of Morocco’s place in the continent and the Afro-Arab future. Evoking Senghor again, he observed that the universal was “the local without walls.”  He spoke of mirroring between Morocco and Senegal, and between Africa and Europe. He emphasised the obligation to cultivate local knowledge of Africa, the need to challenge colonial taxonomies, especially the distinction between “Black Islam” and “Arab Islam.”[30] Praising the 13^th century Malian sovereign Sundiata Keita, founder of the Manden Charter, one of the earliest documents to speak of human rights and pluralism, Benaissa called for a repudiation of “Afro-pessimism.”  He would conclude with a reference to the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s idea of ubuntu, “becoming human together, in reciprocity.” Mohammed Benaissa died on February 28 2025, a few months before the Forum was to celebrate its 45^th year. This year’s conference is now set to commemorate Asilah’s eminent native son and his half-century effort to make his hometown a focal point in the Afro-Arab world.

Featured photograph: First Cultural Moussem of Asilah (July 1978)

 Hisham Aidi is a Moroccan-American political scientist, author, music critic, filmmaker, and senior lecturer in international relations at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University

[1] Spencer D. Segalla, The Moroccan Soul French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 (Omaha: The University of Nebraska 2009)

[2] Hisham Aidi, “The Interference of Al-Andalus: Spain, Islam and the West,” Social Text (Summer 2006)

[3] M’hammad Benaboud, Estudios sobre la historia de al-Ãndalus y sus fuentes (Editorial Verbum, 2015)

[4] Abdourahmane Seck, “Sénégal-Maroc: Usages et Mésusages de la Circulation des Ressources Symboliques et Religieuses entre deux Pays “Frères”” Africa Development (September 2015)

[5] Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future (Stanford University Press 2024)

[6] For more on the history of Souffles, please see Hisham Aidi, “Souffles: Fifty Years Later” Souffles Monde Issue # 1 Fall 2022)

[7] John Darnton, “Islam Stirs Controversy in West Africa,” The New York Times (May 30 1976)

[8] This argument has been made by the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “African Humanities” Workshop, UM6P University, Ben Geruir, Morocco, December 16 2024

[9] Sophia Azeb, “Crossing the Saharan Boundary: Lotus and the Legibility of Africanness,” Research in African Literatures Vol. 50, No. 3, African Literary History and the Cold War (Fall 2019), pp. 91-117

[10] Chris Gray, Conceptions of History in the Works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga (African World Press 1989) p.20

[11] Interview with author, September 7, 2025 Asilah, Morocco

[12] Abdelrahim Al-Alam, ed., Kitab Asilah: fi dhikra thalathin li-mawsim Asilah al-thaqafi al-dawli (Rabat: Mahfoudhat al-Nashir 2008) p.247

[13] p.240 ibid

[14] Michael Peyron, The Berbers of Morocco: A History of Resistance (2022) p.247  Brahim El Guabli, “My Amazighitude: On the Indigenous Identity of North Africa,” The Markaz Review (June 6 2022)

[15] Roland Delcour, “Hassan II a inauguré l’académie royale de Fès,” Le Monde (April 23 1980) “Repondant au roi au nom des members etrangers, le president Senghor a celebré “le double métissage biologique et culturel qui fait les grands civilisations” et qui, au maroc, a allié “la berbéritude et l’arabité”

[16] http://www.mondeberbere.com/azayku_bio_fr.html

[17] Benaissa writes: “N’est-il pas le premier Africain au sud du Sahara à avoir introduit la langue arabe dans les programmes d’en-seignement au Sénégal?” in Benaissa, “Léopold Sédar Senghor, l’Afrique, le monde et le siècle,” Présence Senghor: 90 Écrits En Hommage Aux 90 Ans Du Poète-Président UNESCO (1997 ISSN collection)  p.93

[18] In February 1969, at an address at the University of Algiers, Senghor had explained his decision to introduce Arabic to Senegalese students: “Si nous encourageons et si nous organisons scientifiquement l’enseignement de la langue et de la civilisation arabes à l’Université de Dakar, c’est parce que l’arabité fait partie du patrimoine culturel africain et que nous autres, de la civilisation nord- soudano-sahelinne, nous l’avons assimilée comme élément fécondant.” Léopold Senghor, Liberté 3, Négritude et Civilisation de l’Universel (Paris: Seuil, 1977)

[19] On the cultural commingling of North Africa, Senghor would write “l’universel c’est, pour vous Arabo-berbères, et pour commencer, la civilisation arabe,” Leopold Senghor, Liberté III, Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Editions du Seuil, Paris 1977) p.152

[20] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000089410

[21] Léopold Sédar Senghor, Discours prononcé lors la réception solennelle de l’Académie du Royaume du Maroc (June 11 1987) https://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-prononce-pour-la-reception-de-lacademie-du-royaume-du-maroc-0

[22] Communication with author August 1, 2022

[23] Sa Majesté Hassan II, “Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor,” in Léopold Sédar Senghor, l’Afrique, le monde et le siècle,” Présence Senghor: 90 Écrits En Hommage Aux 90 Ans Du Poète-Président UNESCO (1997 ISSN collection)  p.23

[24] “Car seul l’homme solidement enraciné dans sa civilisation originaire peut assimiler activement les apports extérieurs, comme l’arbre qui, planté dans un riche humus, s’épanouit, fleurità l’eau et au soleil » Leopold Senghor, Liberté III, Négritude et civilisation de l’universel (Editions du Seuil, Paris 1977) p.152

[25] Béatrice Hibou and Mohamed Tozy. Tisser le temps politique au Maroc – imaginaire de l’État à l’âge neoliberal (Paris: Éditions Karthala. 2020)

[26] Christopher T. Bonner, Cold War Negritude: Form and Alignment in French Caribbean Literature Book; Jean-Michel Djian, Léopold Sédar Senghor: genèse d’un imaginaire francophone (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 223-224.

[27] “President Senghor pointed to one split in Africa between Arabs and Negroes. Algeria and Libya are playing on this. Senegal is on the dividing line and has removed both tribalism and religious wars. A more important split is the cultural one between Francophones and Anglophones. Senegal is combatting this by developing bi-lingualism. President Senghor said that the worst split in Africa is between “progressives” and moderates. The progressives, supported by the USSR and Eastern Europeans, seek to destabilize areas that they do not control. The OAU refuses to accept an East-West split in Africa and condemns intervention. Algeria however opposes Morocco and Mauritania and has intervened in Mali and Niger. They and the Libyans are interfering in the Western Sahara, and want to split all of these states to gain control of the Arab populations. Hardly five percent of the people in the Sahara however are pure Arabs.” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v17p2/d35

[28] https://www.jeuneafrique.com/219274/archives-thematique/quel-choc-des-civilisations/

[29] Mahjoubi Aherdan, Iguider ou le mythe de l’Aigle (Socodif, 1990) p.69-70 I am grateful to Aomar Boum for directing me to Leopold Senghor’s contribution to this volume.

[30] Mohammed Benaissa, “Africa in the Mirror of Europe,” a version of the address would be published: https://www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-summer-2024–issue-no-27/africa-in-the-mirror-of-europe