At the festival, the young Moroccans joined thousands of militant-artists from across the African continent, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Hotels were overflowing with official delegations from newly independent states, so Ben Jelloun and other non-official attendees had to sleep in schools, in gymnasiums, and even under bridges. His role is to be a militant, a fighter. Monopolizing postcolonial cultural production, the Algerian government propagated the idea of freedom as a collective, Pan-African liberation from foreign rule.
Furthermore, by focusing on Pan-Africanism as a state ideology, Algerian leaders hoped that anticolonial agitators would continue to channel their anger outward, toward the former colonial powers, rather than inwards, toward their increasingly authoritarian leaders. In the decade or so after independence, two different forms of Pan-Africanism collided in the Maghreb.
The other was a state-skeptical project led by a fluctuating group of militant-artists who created a Pan-African culture, dissenting from both the enduring legacies of European colonialism and the authoritarianism of the postcolonial states.
Maghreb Noir tunes in on these conversations of dissent among militant-artists of what I have termed the Maghreb Generation because of the central role the Maghreb played in their political and artistic evolution. Indeed, the Maghreb has become, for many Africans, an entryway into Europeβa place of passage, a liminal space in which to wait for visas or boats.
