by Paul Bowles
In spite of the Madison Avenue techniques being applied to the launching of campaigns in praise of the new millennium, old cultures do not lie down and die merely because they are told to. They have to be methodically killed, and that takes a certain time. Deculturizing programmes have to be arranged, resettlement projects undertaken, rehabilitation camps set up and filled, and all this in each place before the party in power is superseded by an enemy party, which in Africa often means very soon indeed. It is not astonishing, then, that the drive to standardization should have proven to be a bumpy one and that, now, there should be geographical pockets on the continent where all kinds of anachronisms are the temporary norm. There is still bangui in the Congo precisely because the region has not yet been successfully unified and steam-rollered by the grown-ups’ pets; the hillsides of South Africa are still covered with dagga because no organized group has had the time to uproot it; kif is still widely smoked in Morocco because the forces which would otherwise be being used to suppress the practice are too busy tracking down illicit arms and blackmarket currency. There is so much the African progressives find themselves unable to do that this complaint might almost seem premature, were it not for the fact that their eventual success is guaranteed: they are implemented by all the technology of the Judeo-Christian world.
Kif pipe with mottoul - the traditional storage bag of camel leather. Paul Bowles photographed this for the cover of his four kif-inspired tales, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (City Lights, 1962).
The terms expounded below have nothing esoteric about them; they are as much a part of the everyday vocabulary in North Africa as words like chaser, neat or soda are in the United States, with the difference that over the centuries cannabis has played a far more important part in shaping the local culture than alcohol has with us. The music, the literature, and even certain aspects of the architecture, have evolved with cannabis -directed appreciation in mind.
In the wintertime a family will often have a ‘hashish evening’: father, mother, children and relatives shut themselves in, eat the jam prepared by the womenfolk of the household, and enjoy several hours of stories, song, dance and laughter in complete intimacy. ‘To hear this music you must have kif first’, you are sometimes told, or: ‘This is a kif room. Everything in it is meant to be looked at through kif.’ The typical kif story is an endless, proliferated tale of intrigue and fantasy in which the unexpected turns of the narrative line play a far more decisive role than the development of character or plot
Quite apart from the intimate relationship that exists between cannabis and the cultural and religious manifestations of both Moslem and animist Africa, there exists also the explicit proscription of alcohol in the Koran’s accompanying Hadith. The moral (and often the legal) codes of Moslem countries are based solely upon Koranic law. The advocated switch to alcohol can cause only moral confusion in the mind of the average Moslem citizen, and further lower his respect for the authorities responsible for it.
CHQAF (plural CHQOTA) The L-shaped bowl, generally made of baked clay, which fits the end of the pipe-stem and holds the kif. The diameter of the bowl’s opening is about a quarter of an inch. In the throat, at the angle, is a tiny uvula upon which the chqaf’s efficacy depends. In order to avoid damaging this, smokers never clean their chqofa when they get clogged with tar, but put them into the fire until they are burned out. The chqaf breaks with great ease, usually as it is being fitted on to the stem. Attempts have been made to obviate this by fashioning chqofa of metal (a failure, since no one will use them) and of stone. In Taroudant there are artisans who carve excellent ones out of a translucent soapstone; these have the advantage of enabling the smoker to see just how far down his ash has burned in the bowl. The only objection to these is that they cost roughly twenty times as much as the clay ones.
CORREDOR (northern Morocco) A small-time kif retailer who sells to cafés and acquaintances. Never has a large quantity on hand.
DJIBLI Third-grade kif, grown in the lowlands. The plant attains a great height, but is short on cannabin. There are two categories of djibli kif: hameimoun, considered slightly better because it is at least able to cause hunger, and the ordinary – the harsh, cheap kif sold to tourists.
HACHICH The word has various meanings. First, it is a blanket term for all parts of the kif plant save the small top leaves. In the preparation of good smoking kif, these small leaves are the only part used. At least two-thirds of the plant is discarded. Large, dried or damaged leaves, flowers, seeds and stalks are all rejected. The term is also used to refer to candy made by boiling these unusable parts with water and sugar. This is the poor man’s majoun. You can buy two pounds of it for a quarter of a dollar. (Xauen, 1960.) True hashish, made with the pollen of the flower, is not commercially available in North Africa. The word M’hachiyich indicates the state of mind induced by having eaten the candy.
JDUQ JMEL (known in northern Morocco as QOQA) Tiny snail-shaped seeds, available at the magic stalls of Marrakesh and other cities, which are sometimes used to intensify the active properties of edible kif preparations, and even on occasion in kif for smoking. Popular belief holds that too many seeds can cause permanent mental derangement.
KETAMI Adjective derived from the place-name Ketama, a town in the western Rif, center of a large kif-growing district. It is still legal to grow the plant here, since it is the only crop that can be grown on the steep mountainsides. In other words, it can be grown but not transported. As soon as it leaves the vicinity of Ketama the chase is on; if the shipment gets through the blockade, it reaches the consumer directly, by the normal channels. If it is captured by the authorities, the route to the consumer is of necessity more circuitous. Fines are levied according to quantity seized. Several thousand people of the area depend for their livelihood upon its cultivation. Ketama, at an altitude of about five thousand feet, supplies all of Morocco with its first-grade kif; and the word ketami is a synonym of the best.
KHALDI Second-grade kif, grown in the mountains around Beni Khaled, which although in the Rif lies at a lower altitude and thus produces a somewhat inferior smoking leaf.
KIF The Cannabis saliva plant of northern Africa and the Middle East. (The cannabis of east Africa, south east Asia and the Americas is of a stronger and less subtle flavor.) Also the small leaves of the plant, chopped to a coarse, slightly greasy, grayish green powder for smoking.
KSESS The cutting of the kif. No matter how good the quality of the raw material, if the cutter does not know his business, the result cannot be the desired one. It takes roughly eight hours of steady hard work for a professional to cut a pound of finished kif properly. The cutter has the marks of his trade emblazoned in callouses on his fingers.
MAJOUN Literally, jam, but universally understood to be jam containing cannabis. There are almost as many procedures for making majoun as there are people who make it, but the ingredients are more or less standard: kif, honey, nuts, fruit and spices in varying proportions.
MKIYIF The state of the individual who has smoked enough kif to feel its effect clearly. (Usually followed by the phrase ma ras plus the proper pronomial suffix.)
MOTTOU Leather pouch for kif. There are always at least two compartments in a mottoui, and sometimes as many as four. A different grade goes into each compartment. If you know A well and watch him offer kif to B, you can tell the degree of his esteem for B by the kif he gives him to smoke. The ceremonial facets of kif smoking are fast disappearing as persecution of the custom increases. Good mottouis are no longer made, and the average worker now carries his kif in a small tin box, or, even more abject, in the paper in which he purchased it.
MSOUSS Kif which has not a sufficient quantity of tobacco blended with it is described by this adjective (as are unsweetened or partially sweetened tea or coffee). Kif is never smoked neat, the popular belief being that kif msouss is bound to give the smoker a headache.
NABOULA A cured sheep’s bladder for storing kif. Glass and metal are not considered as efficaci
ous for preserving the highly volatile preparation. The naboula, tightly tied at the neck, is truly hermetic, and the kif kept in it remains as fresh as the day it was packed.
NCHAIOUI A man whose entire life is devoted to the preparation, smoking and appreciation of kif.
RHAITA The datura flower. A square inch of the petal dropped into the teapot is enough to paralyse five or six people, particularly in combination with kif. (Generally added by the host without the knowledge of his guests.)
SBOULA The unit by which kif is sold wholesale. A sboula comprises a dozen or more stalks tightly tied together. Stalks are about eight inches long.
SEBSI (plural SBASSA) The stem of the kif pipe. A few decades ago the sebsi was commonly, anywhere, from sixteen to twenty-four inches long, and usually came in two parts that could be coupled to make the pipe. The recent tendency has been to make them increasingly shorter, so that they can be pocketed as swiftly as possible under adverse conditions. The elaborately carved sebsi is becoming a thing of the past; nowadays they are often simple wooden tubes. The variety of wood determines the quality of the sebsi. Olive and walnut are considered good, run-of-the-mill materials, although there are still numerous recherché varieties to be found by the connoisseur in the interior of Morocco. There are sebsi stalls in the public markets of most towns.
SMINN Rancid butter, preferably aged for a year or longer, which when mixed with kif makes an unpleasant-tasting but powerful and cheap substitute for majoun.
ZBIL The residue of stalks, leaves, seeds and flowers which is thrown out after the small leaves have been extracted. The foreigner is always appalled the first time he sees this great quantity of what elsewhere would be considered perfectly good material being tossed into the fire. In cafés it is chopped up and used by unscrupulous corredores to hoodwink the ingenuous foreigner. Moslems refuse to smoke it.
ZREYA The uncrushed seeds of the kif plant, sold until recently in pharmacies and apothecary shops as a culinary adjunct.
Café in Morocco
Holiday, September, 1966
THE BEACH, very wide along this coast, is protected by a crumbling breakwater a few hundred feet offshore, so that from here in the garden the waves make only a distant murmur, a somnolent backdrop for the nearer sounds of bees buzzing and the occasional low voices of the men inside the café. I came into the garden a few minutes ago and sat down on a large woven-grass mat near the well. The mat has been provided with piles of bottle tops to be used as counters in whatever game I may be going to play.
The garden spreads out along the foot of the town’s ramparts, hidden behind a jungle of fig trees and cactus, buried in total shade beneath a ceiling of grape leaves. At this season the heavy bunches of grapes hang down between the meshes of cane trellis above, and bump against my forehead as I come through on my way to the well. Facing me, in a corner, like a Chinese lantern big enough to hold a man, is a wicker fish trap left to dry: this is a fisherman’s café. At night, after it is shut and the beach is deserted, the customers often return with their own teapots and invade the garden, lying on the mats talking and smoking, and when the grapes and figs are ripe, eating the fruit. Mrhait, who runs the establishment, find this as it should be. “The fruit is here for our friends to eat,” he declares. There are a few tables and chairs around for those who want them, and even these are left out all night for the customers’ convenience. They represent the major part of his capital, and they could easily be carried away. But this is a small town; no one has ever stolen anything from him.
The traditional café in this part of the world is conceived of as a club where, in addition to enjoying the usual amenities of a café, a man may, if he wishes, eat, sleep, bathe and store his personal effects. The fact that the nearest café may be five or ten minutes’ walk from where he lives (it is seldom farther, for the establishments are numerous) does not prevent him from considering it an extension of his home. Each café has its regular clientele whose members know one another; the habitués form a limited little community in which the appearance of an unfamiliar local face is as much an intrusion as that of a complete foreigner. It is difficult to induce a Muslim to go into a café where he is not known: he does not enjoy being stared at.
Upper-class Muslims generally refuse to be seen in cafés at all, their contention being that one sits and drinks tea in a crowded public place only if one cannot do so in one’s own house. But for these good bourgeois, as for us Europeans, the taking of tea is thought of as a relaxing pause, a respite from the affairs of the day. The hour or two spent on the terrace of a café counts as time off from the involvements of daily routine; one sits and watches life go past. The average Muslim here, on the contrary, goes into a café in order to participate as intensely as possible in the collective existence of his friends and neighbors. In a land whose social life is predicated on the separation of the sexes, the home is indisputably the woman’s precinct; the man must seek his life outside. And the generally prevalent uproar in even the middle-class Muslim household makes the all-male café a necessity. Only there does the man feel free to talk, smoke his kif pipe, play or listen to music, and even, if the spirit moves him, to dance a little in front of his friends.
And it is in the café that the foreign visitor, too, can feel the pulse of the country. Nowhere else can he manage to observe a group of individuals repeatedly and at length in their daily contacts with one another, or succeed in existing at their tempo, achieving in occasional unguarded moments a state of empathy with their very different sense of the passage of time. And to experience time from the vantage point of these people is essential to understanding their attitudes and behavior. Today, when even in the farthest reaches of the bush there is beginning to be established a relationship between the number of hours a man works and the amount of wages he collects, any human institution where the awareness of time has not yet penetrated is a phenomenon to be cherished.
With its luxury of unmeasured time the Moroccan café is out of harmony with present-day concepts, and thus it is doomed to extinction. Ask any café owner. It takes approximately three minutes to prepare each glass of tea. The customer may then sit for as many hours as he wishes over the one glass. Since the maximum profit per order is equivalent to about one cent, it seems clear that economically there is no future in the café business. There are other factors, too, that militate against the continued life of the traditional “Moorish” café. It is claimed by the authorities that cafés cause men to waste time that might be used to better advantage. Whatever places are shut down in periods of civic reform (and latter-day puritanism has made these campaigns fairly frequent) are thereby permanently destroyed, since if and when they are reopened, it is invariably as European-style establishments. The change-over in clothing also has its effect. As long as the clientele was composed exclusively of men wearing the customary garments, it was sufficient to cover the floor with grass matting. The increasing number of those who sport European apparel, however, induces the owners to provide chairs, since the Moroccans like their trousers to be so tight-fitting that to sit in their normal position on the floor while wearing them would be an impossibility.
The traditional floor-café is a result of natural processes; one might say it is strictly functional, in that the intent is merely to make as comfortable and pleasant a place as possible for the greatest number of people, and at minimum cost. The cheapest materials – cane, bamboo, palm, thatch, woven reeds and grass – are not only the most attractive visually, but also provide the most satisfactory acoustics for the music. The modern table-and-chair café, on the other hand, is an abstraction: its primary aim has come to be the showing off of the expensive foreign objects that have been acquired (including, in the cities, electric refrigerator and television) and that distinguish the place from its humbler rivals. Practical considerations fade before the determination to make this all-important display. Thus it is that the new-style cafés achieve only a sordid uniformity in their discomfort and metallic noisiness, while
the old-fashioned places are as diverse as the individuals who created them.
This garden here by the sea with its ceiling of grapes; the flat roofs of the Marrakesh cafés where men sit at midnight waiting for a breath of cool air; the cave-like rooms in the mountain markets of the High Atlas, to which the customers must bring their own tea, sugar and mint, the establishment furnishing only the fire, water and teapot; in Fez the baroque wooden palaces among the weeping willows of the Djenane es Sebir, whose deck chairs line the river’s wandering channels; the cafés where the tea drinkers bring their prayer mats and retire into a small carpeted room to perform their sundown prostrations; the countless little niches in the alleys of every town, where a plank along the wall and bottle crates turned on end are the only furnishings; and then the cafés with dancing boys, like the Stah in Tangier; the sanctuary cafés whose shadiest customers remain unmolested by the authorities, like the one opposite the gardens of the Koutoubia in Marrakesh; the superb improvised tent cafés at the great religious pilgrimages in the wilderness; the range is vast. Few countries can supply such a variety of décor and atmosphere.
And what goes on in these places? The men converse, tell interminable stories, eat, smoke kif, sleep and play games: cards, checkers, dominoes, parchisi and, during Ramadan, bingo, whose prize used to be a glass of tea for each winner, but which nowadays often mysteriously turns out to be a bottle of cooking oil. In cold weather they sit as near as they can to the bed of burning charcoal under the water boiler. At night latecomers anxiously ask as they enter: “Is there still fire?” Once the embers have been allowed to die there is no more tea until the next day. The water boiler is an improvised samovar made of copper with a tap on the side; once in a while it proves to be the real article, with Cyrillic characters incised on its flank. Being the most important item in the place, it is put in the spot where there is the most light.