The medina in Rabat is significantly smaller than the medina in many other cities. However, vendors hassled us a lot less and the prices were significantly cheaper, so we bought one or two small things as souvenirs. But while we were walking through the medina and visiting shopkeepers, we stumbled across this archway and stretch of trek:
This alleyway is now lined with shops selling rugs and teapots. A few hundred years ago, however, this was the part of the medina where slaves could be bought and sold. I was told that Christians were primarily sold in this section--particularly those people captured by pirates and during battles. I haven't read about this anywhere, so I'm basing this solely on one conversation. Regardless, the history between this country and Europe is long and very difficult. It's impossible for someone to walk into this part of the world without carrying the baggage of hundreds of years of a precarious and often violent relationship between all of our ancestors. Even though I'm individually not responsible for colonizing Morocco in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and even though the Moroccans living today did not sell me into slavery, something about our mutual history refuses to go away. Apologies or tritely dismissing the past simply doesn't solve the problems created by this relationship. Something needs to be healed. And I imagine that even as the wounds took generations to create, healing will also be the work of generations.
