CEUTA
There is an alternative to Morocco. Two hundred and sixty miles west of Oran, tucked in at the foot of the mountains at the point where two continents almost meet, is a low-slung town occupying a narrow isthmus between two peaks. Neither part of Morocco nor Algeria, it belongs to one of the less well-known African countries - Spain.
The heavily fortified town of Ceuta has been Spanish sovereign territory since 1580. It’s one of two Spanish towns barnacled onto the coast of Morocco, ensuring that the transition from Africa to Europe is not as clean as one might romantically like it to be. It’s reachable by a combination of ferries, and I duly find myself spending my last night in the Dark Continent at a Parador hotel drinking Rioja and eating jamon serrano. Very confusing.
Day Ninety-Nine
CEUTA TO GIBRALTA
In my experience, hotel brochures, especially of the aspiringly glossy variety, always feature a room spectacularly better than the one you’re in and a swimming pool you can never find. In the case of the Hotel La Muralla, Ceuta, I do find the pool, which is similar in every respect to its photo except that the one in the photo has water in it. The brochure is gushingly enthusiastic about Ceuta’s history. In fact, I can’t imagine why I’ve never heard of the place.
‘Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Visigoths, Portuguese and Spanish successively took control of the ancient city.’
Good harbours, like the one I entered last night, so close to the Mediterranean gateway, meant trade, security and wealth. Under its Arab rulers Ceuta had all three, but couldn’t hold onto them against the determined and expansionist Portuguese. In 1415 they conquered Ceuta and took their prize seriously enough to build a powerful fortification, La Muralla (City Wall). It remains in place, solid and imperturbable, and I enjoy a good walk around the sturdy, elegantly angled walls, crenellated and studded with barbican towers, which slide down into the clear green waters of a moat. Felipe II united Portugal and Spain and in 1580 Ceuta became a possession of the Spanish crown, and has remained so ever since. Though it has the look and feel of a European city, the central square is nevertheless called the Plaza de Africa. It contains a small church dedicated to Our Lady of Africa and a monument commemorating the Spanish invasion of Morocco in 1859.
In the gardens of this quiet square, sitting on the grass or pacing the neat hedge-lined paths that radiate from the monument, are a number of young men. All Africans, they range from tall loose-limbed Blacks to paler Arabs, some in Western dress and others in flowing robes. They look like me; a little awkward, strangers in a foreign land.
I ask one of them where he’s from. His English is not so good, and he prefers to talk in French. He’s from Mali, on the other side of the Sahara, and has made his way here to try to find work in Spain and once in Spain, any of the European Union countries. He points out an Algerian, a group of Mauritanians. They’re here to pick up scraps of information, about who’s going where and how, about deals, about boats crossing the Strait, about how they can take the final step on their long journeys. They’ve come to the Plaza de Africa because they want to get out of Africa.
I ask how they survive in Ceuta. Most of them, it turns out, are in a holding centre run by the Spanish authorities on behalf of the European Union, where they are given food and accommodation until they can be found work in Europe.
Later in the day we visit the centre, a bright, freshly painted, concrete encampment up in the hills, surrounded by a grove of mournfully swaying eucalyptus trees. Here in the Centro de Estancia Temporal de Imigrantes are gathered 335 men, 42 women and 13 children, waiting for permits and, in some cases, asylum papers to enable them to get work ‘up in the Peninsula’, as they call Spain and Portugal.
The place is newly opened and is clean, orderly and antiseptic; an institution in which no-one has anything wrong with them, like a hospital in which all the patients are well or a jail in which everyone is free. It’s full of Africans but unlike any African village I’ve ever seen.
Despite an educational programme, offering language tuition and some job training, most of the inmates stand around or pace the compound with an air of displaced restlessness.
The director is a decent man, who takes some pride in the fact that fifty-nine of them have been found work in the previous six months, but most of those I talk to dispute that. A Nigerian in a Cardinals baseball shirt has been here five months. His journey sounds like ours in reverse. Up through Mali and Senegal and Western Sahara to Morocco. As Moroccan government policy is to send all immigrants back, I ask him how he got through.
‘On a Zodiac (a small rubber dinghy) across the sea.’ He adds bitterly, ‘I thought they were taking me to Europe.’
Another Nigerian has come across the desert, 1000 miles or more. He nods bleakly and repeats the word ‘desert’ as if at some infinitely painful memory.
He made it to Ceuta as a stowaway on a ship from Morocco. It cost money, though not as much as the $1500 a Mauritanian paid to make the same journey. The stories tumble out, and the resentment too.
‘Ten months! Ten months we have been here!’ shouts a woman with hair in braids. She has left her children behind in Sierra Leone.
‘Help us! Tell the world!’ shouts a young man as we leave.
On a clear day the hopeful immigrants in Ceuta could see the green hills of Spain with the naked eye. They could certainly see the man-made forest of wind turbines running over the crest of the hills, propellers spinning on top of giant white stalks. If they had a strong enough telescope they could see telescopes looking back at them from the hills above the town of Tarifa. Tourists come here to be thrilled by the prospect of the sheer rock walls of Morocco, and the sight of the Strait of Gibraltar, no wider than a Swiss lake. They buy postcards and take photographs of the 9-mile distance between them and Africa.
For some it might jog memories of unsettling newspaper photographs of couples sunbathing on a Spanish beach beside the huddled body of someone who drowned trying to get to Europe. What the tourists will not know is that some evenings, hundreds of Africans will set out to cross the Strait and land a half-mile away from where they’re standing. They will have paid a lot of money to risk their lives, travelling in unlit boats, without lifejackets or maps of any kind, across one of the busiest and most unpredictable stretches of water in the world. Some will never make it. Over 3000 have died attempting the crossing in the last three years.
There is heat still left in the afternoon as I reach the Spanish mainland and walk along the beach at Tarifa with Belinda Whaley-Braithwaite, a traveller herself, who rode from here to Paris on a horse called Dragon and wrote a book about it. Now she and her husband live most of the year in a pretty house with six guest rooms a mile or so across the fields.
The beaches are long and full of fine white sand, and in the creamy blue-black breakers kite-flyers, surfers, swimmers and fishermen try to stay out of each other’s way.
Then we come across a red and blue striped fishing boat, no more than 20 feet long, broken and embedded in the sand. It looks quite picturesque, until you realise why it is here and who it has brought.
‘Sometimes they can be up to 700 in a night, and the police may only catch 200, so the rest are in the countryside. If they’re Moroccan there’s an agreement, so they’ll be sent back, but the people who’ve come from Chad or Senegal …’
‘From Black Africa?’
‘Black Africa, yes, there isn’t the same agreement, so they’re quite happy to be caught.’
Belinda, perhaps being something of an adventurer herself, talks with a sort of shocked admiration for what they go through. Boats the size of the one we’re looking at may have forty bodies in them, including pregnant women who want their children to be born in Europe. Other boats never make it to the shore, leaving their charges to swim in over the reef. Unscrupulous skippers lie to them, telling them they’re a hundred yards from land when in fact they’re still half a mile out.