Context
« Tanger »
Gilbert Buti
Transit town, transit port – Hercules, exhausted, stopped here for a while. Sandwiched between two major maritime places on the north coast of Morocco, Tangier lies on the Strait of Gibraltar, 12 kilometres east of Cape Spartel where the Atlantic begins and where Plato placed Atlantis. Tangier or Tandja – Arabic form of Tinjis, the Berber-based word used by the Romans – has long been coveted because of its strategic position.
The Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Portuguese, Spanish and the English have all controlled the town at some point since it was founded in the 7th century BC. During the Roman Empire, known as Tangi, it was the capital of Mauritania Tingitane. Controlled by the Muslims in 707, Tandja became an Arab base during the conquest of Spain in 711. However its trading role between North Africa and Al-Andalus declined later as Ceuta grew more important.
Attacked several times by the Portuguese, notably by Henry the Navigator in 1437, Tangier was then under their control for more than 200 years. In 1671 the town passed briefly under the control of the English, who needed a Mediterranean base for their fleet (towers, ramparts and almost half as many soldiers as the 3,000 inhabitants). The European occupation, the town’s geographical location and its predominantly military population all hindered the development of the urban structures and institutions found in Morocco’s inland cities.
In 1684, "the Rif army" drove out the English and in 1700, the bombardment by Louis XIV’s ships and galleys was not followed by a new European occupation. The city, rebuilt and populated by people coming down from the Central Rif, managed to avoid being controlled by the Ottoman sultans, who found they needed the local authorities to run the city but who, at the same time, limited the European presence.
In the 1830s, the English got involved with Tangier when they wanted to put an end to Moroccan pirates (especially active in Salé on the Atlantic coast), and then, after bombarding the city once again in 1844, the French signed the "peace of Tangier", committing Morocco to driving Abd el-Kader out of its territory. Tangier’s commercial role grew, and by the mid nineteenth century 20% of Morocco's export trade passed through the port, which also became the main embarkation point for pilgrims going to Mecca. Of 5,000 inhabitants in 1810, the population rose to about 20,000 by 1878, a fifth of whom were Jews and about 4,000 Europeans.This growth and openness to the rest of the world were accompanied by new structures, a health service, schools and newspapers.
In the early twentieth century Tangier was at the center of international tensions. In 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm II tore up agreements made the previous year between France and Morocco. In 1912 its strategic position gave the city a special status: quite separate from Morocco, Tangiers and its surrounding area formed the "Tangier international zone” (a status suspended between 1940 and 1945 when Franco's Spain took advantage of the European war to bring Tangier under its protectorate). As an international zone, Tangier attracted immigrants from Morocco and developed its financial activities (85 banks in 1950 compared with four in 1900), though not its industry or port activity since nothing was produced in the area behind the town and it had no real economic policy. Despite being separate from the rest of Morocco, Tangier took part in that country’s struggle for independence, and in 1947 Mohammed V chose the town as his base to claim Morocco’s right to independence. In 1956 the loss of its international status and the subsequent loss of its financial autonomy had a serious impact on the economy of the city which was facing rapid population growth: 293,000 inhabitants in 1982 against 700,000 in 2008. Tourism is a new resource for "the pearl of the Strait of Gibraltar", but Tangier became Morocco’s second industrial city when Renault set up a car plant, relations with the Málaga and Algeciras were developed and when, in the tax-free export zone, it opened Tangier-Med, a combined port, industrial and logistics platform later renamed Medhub. In 2009 construction of Tanger-Med 2 began, creating a world center for container shipping and a port of the first order, serving both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic (20% of global container shipping).
Bibliography:
J.-L. Miège, Le Maroc et l’Europe, 1830-1894, 4 volumes, Paris 1961-1963
A. El Gharaoui, La terre et l'homme dans la Péninsule Tingitane, 2 volumes, Rabat, 1981
Un Bendaoud, et Mohammed Maniar (éd.), Tanger 1800-1956. Contribution à l'histoire récente du Maroc, Rabat et Tanger 1991.
Mansour, Mohamed El, « Tandja », Encyclopédie de l'Islam, deuxième édition, 2012.
