“Where are you from?” It depends …

“Imagine there’s no countries.” - John Lennon

Telford Vice / Casablanca

“WHERE are you from?” If you’re asked by someone who votes for Nigel Farrage or Herman Mashaba, you’re probably not white. And they’re really asking what the hell are you doing here.

But if you’re white on the streets of Tangier’s medina and your questioner is somewhere on the spectrum of café au lait to terracotta that covers most Moroccans, it really is about where you’re from. The query comes from a face bright with curiosity.

“Mars,” you want to say.

“South Africa,” you say.

Your questioner’s eyes tighten with uncertainty.

You try again: “Afrique du Sud.”

And perhaps still again: “Janub ’Afriqia.”

You’ve used up most of your relevant French and Arabic, and you have no Darija, the Moroccan Arabic vernacular. You also don’t have Tarifit, Tashelhiyt, Tamazight, the major languages spoken by Amazigh people, whom the colonists called Berbers.

Their lexicons took shape while many of their speakers were nomadic. Consequently the Amazigh have no linguistic concept of national borders. This philosophy isn’t only ancient. Here’s John Lennon in 1971: “Imagine there’s no countries …”

The Amazigh have never imagined countries. They’ve lived for eons in what others call Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Canary Islands.

Telling an Amazigh where you’re from takes more than arbitrary lines on a map. They describe their origins. They don’t label them. “The place south of the Orange, Molopo and Limpopo rivers and between the Atlantic and Indian oceans” might cut it. But that’s a long way to say South Africa.

The argument against borders is unimpeachable. Amazigh translates as “free people”. You are not free if someone is able to demand your vote, your taxes and your blood when the shooting starts.

None of us would think of leaving home for another country without a passport, but the modern version wasn’t part of our lives until 1920 — when nation states exploited the aftermath of World War I to impose another layer of themselves on us in the shape of this utterly irrelevant document.

You could have an illuminating discussion with an Amazigh on the subject. If only you could talk to them. Nevermind. The face you’re looking at suddenly clears: “Ah! South Africa! Welcome! We are Maroc! We are the front door to Africa!”

Does that make South Africa the back door?

You don’t have enough shared language to be sure your joke is not taken as an insult, so you don’t make it. You smile, accept the good wishes with a pat of your hand to your heart and a slight tilt of your head, and move on.

You are, of course, lost in the medina. Your phone can guide you only so far into an apparent anarchy of lanes that might have been inhabited as many as 12,000 years ago. But you have the time and inclination to play the psychogeographer, wandering around, no direction home, mislaying the self dreamily. Where am I from? Can’t quite remember. Where am I? Dunno. Don’t really care …

You are never far from a carpet or leather goods shop or a bakery or patisserie, and their accompanying clowders of cats, and from the smell of the lives of people who can’t afford proper plumbing.

At a patisserie, you choose what you want from a glass case festooned on the inside with bees in search of sweetness. You hold out a handful of coins. The woman behind the counter picks out the required amount and gives you the change. Do buy miloui: small layered, rolled, flat semolina pancakes drenched in butter and honey.

They are as habit-forming as the hashish that drew William S. Burroughs and the Beatles, among many cultural colossi, to Tangier. That and the ease of finding transactional sex.

From 1954 to 1956 Burroughs confined himself to room No. 9 of the Hotel El Muniria to write the unreadable “Naked Lunch” between bouts of drug-fuelled rent boy bashing. Burroughs claimed that during this febrile time he rarely took a bath or removed his clothes “except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction”.

You remove some of your clothes. On the beach. There are many shirtless men in the water, but all the women are covered from neck to wrist to calf. It’s alright for you, a man, but your female partner in her one-piece demurs. She has worn a caftan over her costume, and there’s no way she’s swimming in that.

You return two days later, your partner armed — legged? — with a pair of shorts over her swimsuit. As you emerge from your first dip, three of the world’s whitest women arrive, strip to their bikinis, dip their toes in the water, decide it’s too cold, and return to their towels.

One of them plops onto her stomach and pulls her bikini bottom halfway up her alabaster arse. The other two lounge on their backs, parading perky breasts. Nobody blinks, much less tells them to get dressed.

A hill top castle in Fez. (Photo: Telford Vice)

Being treated impolitely in any way in Morocco seems impossible. Complete strangers show each other a level of kindness unheard of elsewhere. On the platform in Tangier, on your way to Fez, a man walking past sees you steel yourself, a heavy suitcase in each hand, as you contemplate a looming flight of stairs. He stops to gesture you to a route to the same destination that doesn’t involve stairs.

Once you’re on the train, you look up from wrestling your bags out of the way and see a queue of people waiting. There is no shoving or complaining. There is only patience.

On some trains bigger luggage is left near the door of the carriage. A man can see you’re nervous about not being able to see your stuff from your seat.

He tells you, in his smattering of English, not to worry; he will watch your bags. You’re waiting for him to name his fee. Halfway into the three-hour journey, as the train approaches a station, he pops up to say, “Monsieur. Pardon. I leave now. Your things safe.”

You’re still struck by him apologising for daring to disembark, and wondering how much you might have to pay him, when he hops off the still slowing train and strides along the platform. Your luggage, just like he said, is exactly where you left it.

The contrast with London, maybe the rudest place on earth, where people step through you to grab the seat on the underground you were about to sit in, is palpable. It’s also infectious. Soon you are treating people with as much respect as they do you, regardless of where they’re from.

“Where are you from?”

This time your answer sparks enthusiasm from your questioner, who yells, “Manilla!” You look puzzled. So do his companions, who whisper at him urgently. “Pardon,” he says, and tries again: “Mandela!” Call it a back-of-an-envelope moment.

Fez is more conservative and traditional than Tangier. “The people there are very disciplined,” someone says. The city has more than 300 mosques. Heard in splendid isolation, the call to prayer is a beautiful reinforcement of the best of what it means to be human. But 300 muezzins doing so en masse, all at slightly staggered starting times, deploying different pitches and intonations, sounds like the start of an F1 race. You can’t help hearing Murray Walker: “And away they go …”

Meanwhile in Oujda ... (Photo: Telford Vice)

Onto Oujda, a provincial backwater in the north-east. Basically, it’s Bloem without booze. In the handful of hotel bars where you can get a drink, the gin isn’t often in the same room as the tonic. But the people are as empathetic as everywhere else.

In Casablanca, a vast industrial sprawl that could easily be in southern Europe, Sam is still playing “As Time Goes By” on the piano at Rick’s Café. But he’s actually called Issam Chabaa. Rick’s opened in 2004 — 61 years after the propaganda movie, shot entirely in California, was released. The “letters of transit” central to Casablanca’s plot never existed. Would that the passport didn’t, either.

At least, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, at Rick’s the tonic is close to the bartender’s hand.

Sunday Times Lifestyle