A half-day’s journey south of Marrakesh, the world’s largest concentrated solar plant is being built. There, Abderazzak Amrani, a solar engineer, points to all the manufacturers who are supplying panels, turbines, mirrors, lenses and semiconductors—all the components necessary to help Morocco generate 2,000-plus megawatt solar power from its individual plants in Ouarzazate, Midelt, Laayoune, and Boujdour. The corporations are from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Investors span the globe. “But why have you not invested here?” Amrani asks, using me as a surrogate for America and American companies. Energy demands from the Africa region will be about four times that of the United States over the next two decades, according to McKinsey & Co. Why no U.S. investors indeed?
To glimpse the reboot and rise of Marrakesh is to glimpse the rise of Africa over the next century. Development, energy, infrastructure and services are all going at a mad pace. Art and culture, of course, parallel capital market growth.
The African Development Bank reports that growth prospects for 2018 and 2019 are positive in the North Africa region given the reforms undertaken in all countries since the 2010-2011 Arab Spring. Commodity prices, tax collections and an uptick in tourism are boosting government revenues. That provides relative stability. Morocco, especially, is looking strong, according to the development bank, after scoring a GDP of 4.1% last year and raising high expectations that its Green Morocco Plan—a sustainability and agriculture program—will pay off well into the future.
“These days a new breed of entrepreneurs, designers, chefs and fashionistas are beating the same path, but now they’re settling in and opening up an exciting crop of galleries, gardens, restaurants and riads merging 21st century ideas with medieval craftsmanship and Medina know-how,” writes London’s Telegraph of Marrakesh.
Paul Bowles, the celebrated expat author, composer and translator, was enthralled by Morocco. He wrote, “Marrakesh is a city of great distances, flat as a table. When the wind blows, the pink dust of the plain sweeps into the sky, obscuring the sun, and the whole city, painted with a wash made of the pink earth on which it rests, glows red in the cataclysmic light. At night, from a car window, it looks not unlike one of our Western cities: long miles of street lights stretching in straight lines across the plain. Only by day you see that most of these lights illumine nothing more than empty reaches of palm garden and desert.”
That was a half-century ago. Today those empty reaches are filled with urban sprawl. Even the winding and nail-biting drive through the Atlas Mountains, which forces more than 300 turns, is getting a makeover. Construction crews are at nearly every bend fixing roads and barriers. Smoother tracks for trucks and vans means cargo can move more efficiently from Marrakesh to the interior of the continent. Morocco is “the door to the continent of Africa,” after all. Just nine miles separate it from Spain (and thus Europe, across the Strait of Gibraltar) And Casablanca is considered Morocco’s hub of finance and business where a more modern urban landscape can be found. The Casablanca Finance City Authority, a public-private partnership that aims to position the city as a regional financial hub and premier gateway into the African markets, was formed in 2010. Rabat, the country’s capital city, also boasts a contemporary art museum, founded in 2014 by King Mohammed VI.
But Marrakesh is trying to step up and be thought of differently for business and art, diversifying away from strictly tourism. It may be known as the Red City for its fortified walls made of red sandstone that envelop the ancient sections of trade, but outside those walls it is turning green for the golf courses and also what they stand for: new money. Maybe that is why Lazraq, the museum founder and son of a multimillionaire Moroccan real estate developer, situated the Museum of African Contemporary Art in Marrakesh yet outside those red city walls.
The city’s gates are now those open plains Bowles wrote about.