A GREY TEDDY BEAR

Every time I  met an old tourist my memory takes me back to a funny incident happened to me when I was 8 years old. At that time, I was still living in the countryside.It was a fresh March morning and as we were playing in the fields a bus full of tourists showed up suddenly, and we gathered up in a circle all astonished and amazed by the amount of differences there were between us and them. We used to watch Mexican series and therefor we saw blond people, but seeing them in the real life for the first time was something extra.  

Some of them were really happy to see these weird, forgotten kids and others looked at us with a look of compassion.. but also admiration of the beauty of the image. They've taken pictures and I was kind of shy and frightened at the same time, because I remembered all the things the Imam of the Koranic school I was going to every summer told us about the foreigners and every time they try to take a picture I used to take a step back with my hands tight behind my back. Of course that was pretty silly and childish, but this Old french tourist really wanted to take a picture of me and she even gave me things to make me agree like A grey Teddy bear and a Board of Chocolat.. and I ended up agreeing. However, days later I regret it and I couldn't confess it to anyone. I thought that I've done something highly dangerous because of all the bad things I used to listen to my parents and everyone around me says about foreigners and especially Europeans .  

It brings to the mind an essential question: WHY DO WE HAVE THIS FEAR OF FOREIGNERS? 

During the 19th century there was an Imperialism expansion in which Morocco's location was highly important because it was the nearest country in Africa to Western Europe. This made these European countries fight over it and this fight ended up by the French-Spanish colonisation of the country. Yet before this solution, some countries attacked Morocco and horrified people. They raped women and enslaved poor, weak ,  ignorant men and their kids, stole their money  and briefly commit horrible crimes. After that we had the well known colonisation and the severe inhuman abuse of the poor Moroccan  citizen by the foreign solders and authorities, and this made people develop this fear towards insiders and their children inherited it.. This kind of explain's it perfectly. Moroccans didn't only hate foreigners, they hated anything that was related to them even if it was for their own benefit! They hated school, for example and took their children to Mosques instead, and saw that it would be better to accept all the forms of tyranny and persecution from their governors just because they belonged to the same Geographical spot and had the same language / skin color / Religion..

They say that the best way to  understand the present is by analyzing and understanding the past. But History is a bitch indeed, we're not sure of the historical events, we know because the whole process in which they've been brought to us is dubitable, considering that we only get the events written by the winners, and they're not always the good part. Thus we always ask the ordinary question: " are we missing something?? ", yet we wonder if would it change anything if we figured out whether we do or not? 

The Algerian Philosopher Mohamed Arkoun said: " Social sciences MUST uncover and dissociate and clear some created periods of the past, and other distorted parts  of the present and delusional perceptions of the future, which all have one task that is to incarcerate our minds in a continual series  of alienations ". He thinks that we have to understand and apply the deconstruction method in order to fully understand the past and therefor to figure out which are the fake and genuine events  and that besides that we have to question everything we see too, and be wise enough to criticize and read between the lines so that we can have the veritable spectacle all clean from the forged adds. Thence we can get rid of these so called " delusional perceptions " of the future and we can therefor save ourselves from making the same mistakes twice because  the only meaning of stupidity is: " Repeating the same thing twice and waiting for different results " .

So yes, The way Moroccans nowadays look at foreigners is a consequence of a  dangerous combination of Imperialism and religious teachings that work side to side to take over the social subconscious that is crawling slowly to be a fact in which everyone believes. Hence, I am proudly declaring that humanity is still roaming in the same vicious cycle. because it's not only the Moroccans or any other Arabian / African / third world  Citizens who have this kind of Phobia from the "OTHER ",  It has always been and still a dialectical sociological situation and therefor the centre of attention of many brilliant minds through the history, except the experimental scientific ones because the scientists knew that human beings are one race and deep down they're all the same (Geography disjoints them but forcing them to go through different experiences and therefor adopts different thoughts and mindsets)  and this is why we have to make space for each other and always renounce anything that can change this amazing fact, no matter how important it is in our lives, but it will not be as important as the impact you might have had if you were one of the Slaves that has been taken from Africa to America or One of the kids who've been to the Nazi camps...