Witch doctors, voodoo medicine + tribal lords.
(PHOTO: Djemaa El Fna, Marrakesh, Morocco)
Djemaa El Fna has long been Morocco’s proudest anti-landmark, and Marrakesh’s axis of begrudged tradition and surprise modernity. The square, essentially unchanged in concept for a cool millennium+, was typically the meeting point for any number of the following social groups:
1. Storytellers, who congregate in enormous circles and tell inherited (and wildly fantastical) tales with swinging arms, untuned violins, the clapping of primitive percussion instruments and spinning tassel hats.
2. Henna women, who almost seductively coerce pink-faced tourists into gooey 1/2 day ink smear tattoos.
3. Snake charmers, who play Berber flutes to hypnotise the tired cobras. It’s been claimed that the snakes are drugged by I have no personal evidence of same.
4. Monkey tamers wearing djellabas, who parade little barbary apes around on punkish chains and insist on letting the eccentric little mammals stand on tourists’ sunburnt heads.
5. Orange juice and street food vendors, who bark at would-be customers every evening, and who’ll promise a platter of elephant, giraffe and fish + chips to encourage hungry, nervous-looking tourists to choose number 34 over number 33.
6. Traditional medicine men + traditional dentists, who offer a variety of unusual roots, spices, herbs, dried poppy flowers, incense and angry tooth-removal (with a pair of hardware store pliers, and a selection of former customers’ teeth as replacement).
7. Hustlers, pickpockets, and hashish dealers, though in all fairness, the Moroccan tourist police have actually done a stellar job in neutralizing their antics. In years prior, tourists could hear constant beckoning from the shadows.
