Tarfaya Culture and History

Tarfaya is a city, previously also known as Villa Bens during the Spanish period, located in the Laâyoune Province of the Laâyoune-Boujdour-Sakia El Hamra region of southwestern Morocco. It is a port town on the Atlantic coast, close to Cape Juby, which shares its name with the southern region of Morocco, and is located 890 km southwest of Rabat. According ot the 2004 census, Tarfaya has a population of 5,615, the smallest of the four municipalities of the region, but it is the only one outside of the disputed Western Sahara.

In the 1920s, the French commercial air carrier Aéropostale constructed an airfield here. A small monument now stands at that site to honour the air carrier, its pilots in general and the French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in particular. He served as station manager here during his career as an airmail pilot.

Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they built a trading post called Casa del Mar. The building is currently in a state of complete disrepair. The Sahrawi tribes[which?] then solicited the intervention of Sultan Hassan I who negotiated the withdrawal of the British in 1885 by acquiring their trading office[citation needed]. In 1912 the territory of Tarfaya, then named Cape Juby, was occupied by Spain as part of the Spanish Sahara. The greater Cape Juby region plus Tarfaya were unified with Morocco in 1958, at the end of the Ifni War.

The wreck of Assalama

In early 2008, a ferry service was established between Tarfaya and Puerto del Rosario[citation needed]. The car ferry Assalama, operated by the shipping company Naviera Armas made the trip three times a week[citation needed]. It was the first ferry service between the Canary Islands and the coast of Africa[citation needed]. The anticipated car traffic between the Canaries and Morocco provided a modest economic upturn for the town.

This ferry service was, however, halted due to an accident on 30 April 2008, during a botched maneuver in the port. The ferry struck a sandbar and later sank in shallow water near Tarfaya. The Panama registered passenger ferry Assalama was wrecked after leaving Tarfaya in poor weather. The vessel was about five miles offshore when high seas washed over its deck and it began to list and be carried back to shore. 

Passengers and crew were successfully evacuated by Tarfaya fishermen as the ferry only had 2 obsolete lifeboats for 113 passengers after the ship beached on a sandbank just off the port entrance. Approximately 80,000 litres of fuel oil were spilt, severely damaging the local fishing industry. No compensations have been given for the loss of belongings or vehicles in the incident.

Tarfaya's association with Aéropostale began in 1927. The airmail carrier, based in Toulouse, France, was founded by French industrialist Pierre-Georges Latécoère, who envisioned an air route connecting France to its French colonies in Africa. Latécoère firmly believed in the future of aviation as a means of commercial transportation and communication between people.

The nearby Cape Juby airfield was an important refueling and stopover station for Aéropostale. Author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was named its station manager in 1927. There he remained for 18 months, on occasion negotiating with the rebellious Moorish tribes to release his imprisoned pilots, as he wrote in his first novel, Southern Mail.

On 28 September 2004 a museum opened in honour of the memory of Aéropostale, Saint-Exupéry and its pilots, supported notably by the city of Toulouse and French aircraft maker Airbus. The museum was inaugurated by renowned aviation journalist Bernard Chabbert, whose father was also part of Aéropostale's history.

Tarfaya: the city that inspired The Little Prince

Tarfaya: the city that inspired The Little Prince

Throughout the world, The Little Prince is considered one of the most read books. It has been translated into more than two hundred languages, and has been considered by critics as the most read book after the Quran and the Bible.

Most readers know of the story and the writer, but they seldom know that the writer was inspired by Trafaya, the little city in the south of Morocco that stands on two oceans; the Atlantic Ocean and the ocean of the desert.

In 1927, Antoine de Saint-Exupery arrived to Tarfaya as a representative of the air postal company he worked for. Between 1927 and 1929, Exupery spent eighteen months in the heart of the Sahara. The time he spent in the desert inspired the French poet to write his famous literary work a year before his death in 1943.

During his stay in the desert of Tarfaya, Saint-Exupery built good relations with the people of the region and its natural elements. He received inspiration from the nights, the stars, the moon, the dunes, the weather and the beauty of the Sahara. The nature of the Sahara positively impacted the poetic mind and the literary imagination of the pilot and watered his creative skills to write.

“The Little Prince is a poetic tale, self-illustrated in watercolors, in which a pilot stranded in the desert meets a young prince that has fallen to Earth from a tiny asteroid. The story is philosophical and includes societal criticism, remarking on the strangeness of the adult world.”

Philosophically speaking, The Little Prince stands for the little child and the little philosopher inside every human being who never stops asking questions about life, being and living, and who always chases answers and solutions to our existential dilemma on earth as humans.

We keep growing up, changing ages, stages, places on the road of living, but many of us seem to be unsatisfied with the answers we get from adults about the meaning of life. This is what pushes us continuously to enrich our experience and to build our knowledge, identities and personalities.

Saint-Exupery did not write his novel while he was in Tarfaya. He waited for nearly fourteen years for his memories and imagination to settle into his mind and flourish. Fourteen years was enough to produce a great piece of art and to attract a great number of readers all over the world and in all languages.

The desert, the stars, the dunes, the snakes and the search for the sheep and a well inside the desert are elements that are well exploited, literarily and poetically, by the writer in The Little Prince.

On page forty-eight, the snake declares, “this is the desert. There are no people in the desert. The earth is large”. Then the the Little Prince clearly claims his love of the desert in page sixty-two when he said, “I have always loved the desert. One sits on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, and hears nothing. Yet, through the silence something throbs, and gleams”.

Of course, this is the context of inspiration and creativity that poets search and strive for. Many poets long to be in the middle of nowhere, where they hear nothing and have the opportunity to listen to their inner voices of writing and creating.

“All men love the stars”, The Little Prince answered, “but they are not the same thing for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others, they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For businessman, they were wealth. But all these stars are silent.”

According to Mr Mrabih Rabo Sadat Chbahto, president of Tarfaya’s Friends Association, “Saint-Exupery has been inspired by Trafaya and by the period of time he spent in our city. For us, The Little Prince would never be written if Saint-Exupery hadn’t been here. The desert, the stars, the ocean, the sand dunes and the wisdom of the people of the desert have inspired the writer and this can be seen by the readers of the Little Prince”.

Tarfaya has not forgotten its writer and every year the city organizes the festival of The Little Prince on the ocean. It is an opportunity to meet the family of Saint-Exupery, and to converse with his national and international readers and famous literary critics who come to Tarfaya to celebrate Saint- Exupery. People come from all over the world to praise the pilot, poet, writer and man who wrote The Little Prince, and most importantly to discover the city that inspired this world renowned story.

Tamellalte, the Forgotten Town – Short Story

Tamellalte, the Forgotten Town – Short Story

That time, I woke up early. I had looked at the sky. And then I looked at the other side of the river through the window. I was looking at buses and cars that were interrupted by the bray of a donkey going by. It was a cold day but with breezy weather. It was still an hour and half left until breakfast time. My mother had already woken up and she managed, as usual, to go to the orchards to bring the herbs for the sheep and cows. My little brother was still sleeping. He was laughing at my face even though he was asleep. He never looked at the window to the other world. Luckily, he was not tall enough to do so; but he would be able to very soon. I made no noise that might make him up. He was there until the sun burnt his face then he would wake up. As I had finished praying, my mother came out in her traditional dress, scythe in one hand and a piece of case in the other. It was a very nice morning. The vapor from amalal (the traditional kitchens) was scattered over the whole town; the smell of broth could be tested everywhere. People came out of their houses one by one like squirrels. Most of them, if not all, went to Igran (orchards); there life would be.

As I accompanied my mother to the orchards, a very deep attractive silence appealed to me to go ahead and goroaming across the orchards. But there was a furious sound of barking. It was of dogs. Dogs my mother feared too much. In fact our region was of countless dogs, but let them be. No way. I remembered her meticulous advice that she told me once. “Look my son; life is of difficulties; everybody has his raison d’être which he is made to fulfill but enemies and dogs are always barking at him. So never ever gaze at barking dogs; they are less mighty once you neglect them, however numerous they are.” I could not understand why she feared dogs and at the same time inspired me with encouragement and confidence.

Once my mother dispersed, got into the orchard, and hid behind the tall corn, I went to the river side. On my way to the river, I came across four girl-students but did not talk to them. They kept gazing at me. They were shivering from the cold. They were crossing the deep dark river, but they were happy. The school was six kilometres from their hometown. I could not control my anger after witnessing that scene of young girls crossing the lethal deep river of Draa. Abruptly I came back to the orchard. I sat under a date palm. I tried to contemplate the advice of my mother; I thought of it fastidiously and for a long time…. She was right. Dogs. She meant perhaps the ones with did not bark sound but that would bite at any occasion.

Tamellalte was bitten. I was really obsessed in my mind with many problems facing it. Tamellalte was really a forgotten town. I could not do more than confess that we had not yet been treated as human beings. WE WERE FORGOTTEN. I always asked some questions which drove me crazy; they should be answered however. What was the problem with those innocent students crossing the river? Why were we not able to have the infrastructure like those on the other side of which my little brother was not aware? Why the mitigating, undermining, neglecting, forgetting and dehumanising of us? Were those pregnant women who were in labour and were taken on mule-back doomed to death just because they were on the other side –the forgotten side- where technology and means of transportation were of negligible importance? I would never forget the woman who wanted to give birth to a child, was in labour, and went to the hospital on her feet; at the end, a nurse told her that she was not in labour and accordingly not about to give birth; she left the hospital, felt giddy and gave birth luckily in the house of a woman she had been acquainted with before.

Who was to blame? Of course, the one who was not a part of the problem could be a part of the solution. We wanted to feel that we were human. Who would change our status quo? Was it my mother who still believed that we were born to be so? Or was it the leader of the region who outsmarted and flattered people and described them as generous, benign, patient, and the like? I could not swallow at ease what I had been told that some girl-students on their way to the school were blackmailed and racially taunted as well as sexually harassed by the gangs. The other scapegoat was the one who came to celebrate the Eid (a religious holiday) with his family; he unfortunately was stoned and laid sick for three weeks. Circa 2000, Tamellalte did not have a concrete bridge; they had a bridge made of the logs of date palms. Once there was flood, the whole town would be isolated.

Out of the blue, my mother arrived from the orchard with a heavy load of herbs. She could read wrath in my face. She asked about what made me pale. I said “Dogs mom,” “Dogs mom,” “Dogs mom.” “But I did not hear their bark,” said my mother. You were made to hear them mom and because you were forgotten and in a forgotten town.