Riad Villa Blanche is a time capsule dating to the era when Edith Wharton visited Morocco. At that time, Morocco was a Protectorate of France, and Hubert Lyautey its Resident General.
Lyautey’s reign ended in 1925, and Morocco has been independent since 1956. But a reproduction of a romanticized painting of Lyautey adorns the wall of this boutique hotel in Agadir.
As a historian, I am curious to know why the man most closely associated with Morocco’s subjugation is casually placed among so many other images of Morocco in the 19-teens and 1920s.
Riad Villa Blanche seems at first glance a welcome change from the chain hotels along the beach promenade of this resort town. The hotel opened eight years ago, and its owners—French I was told by one local, a Moroccan Jew from France by another—designed it as a palatial courtyard house from another century.

The ground floor consists of a spa as well as a shishi bar and restaurant. Rich locals and savvy tourists eat there on weekend nights. Twenty-eight guest rooms line the corridors of the first and second floors, all arranged around a courtyard that opens to the sky. The corridor leading to the rooms has beamed ceilings, iron railings, and stucco lintels. The detailed designs provide a weighty sense of architectural tradition.
Preservation of the past, however, is always a problematic endeavor, and one must ask what past in particular do the owners seek to promote?
The furnishings too invite guests to step back in time. Preservation of the past, however, is always a problematic endeavor, and one must ask what past in particular do the owners seek to promote? What sells to touristic clientele today?

My room is on the second floor. There is a small salon there with an antique desk. Black and white photos line the walls of the corridor around the courtyard, images that harken back to the 1920s. There are French troops walking past the adobe walls of an unidentified medina, or precolonial old city. There is Sultan Moulay Yousef, whom the French installed as a figurehead ruler at the start of Morocco’s French Protectorate (1912-1956).

And there, the sun reflecting on its glass casing, is a reproduction of a painting of Hubert Lyautey, whom Edith Wharton so admired. She described him as a protector of colonized peoples with a “sympathetic understanding of the native prejudices and a real affection for the native character.”
In the painting, Lyautey is in full regalia. His military medals on display, he perches on a rickety bamboo chair. He throws his left arm confidently back, a proprietary gesture. There is a cup of coffee on the wooden stool before the officers. Lyautey and his companion dominate the scene, which appears to be a traditional courtyard house with tiled floor and delicately painted green wooden doors behind them.
And so, the furnishings of this hotel glamorize a problematic era in Moroccan history, to say the least. When the French set up this colonial system, they replaced one ruler for his more malleable brother, setting up a system of indirect rule. Under the pretense of partnership, the French extracted men and resources for their own devastating wars and exploitive economic endeavors. The French often exoticized Moroccans in order to maintain the premise that they required Western tutelage.
In assessing a colonial mindset, the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo coined the term “imperialist nostalgia.” This disparaging term signifies Europe’s apologetic desire to salvage an imagined and illusory precolonial culture that it destroyed through the economic and political dislocation wrought by its own intervention. In the 1920s, at the height of colonialism, the French were “longing for an irretrievably lost time.”
In Morocco, colonial administrators forced Moroccans to live in premodern medinas. Wharton boasted of the French decision to from the accoutrements of modern urbanism. “Native towns,” she wrote, “shall be kept intact, and no European building erected within them.” Although promoted as respect for local building traditions, French nostalgia highlighted the modernizing superiority of a foreign colonizer vis-à-vis backward natives.
Today, Riad Villa Blanche and other hotels in Morocco suggest that “Nostalgia for Imperialism” has replaced “imperialist nostalgia” as a dominant cultural discourse. Tourism is a new form of foreign intervention. Western expats remodel courtyard houses, pimp them out to create luxury restaurants and hotels. They adorn them with the visual trappings of the colonial era, thus becoming a nostalgic paean to imperial domination.

This humiliation of Moroccans—whether deliberate or subconscious—is evidenced in the scantily clad photo of an adolescent Amazigh woman from the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. The photo was in my room, facing the bed, a 10” X 15” sepia-toned image. The young woman wore an old style headband with coins, a stark contrast with her long French-style pearl necklace wrapped so tightly around her neck it seemed to choke her. The photographer pulled her sheer top down low enough to expose her right nipple. Her eyes looked toward some vast expanse in the distance, vacantly, or so it seemed to me.
Nostalgia for imperialism denigrates Moroccans and cheapens their past.
Nostalgia for imperialism denigrates Moroccans and cheapens their past. What message does this image send to guests at the hotel, who probably don’t stop to consider the subliminal messages sent via the art on the walls. What do the staff of the hotel think of the promotion of Lyautey and the exploitation of Moroccan woman whose life changed under his rule? In the US, a photo of a woman physically exposed—especially if she is within a racially charged social and political dynamic—would not fly. But in Morocco, at this hotel and other ones, it seems to be regarded as no more than a cute relic of the past.
Moroccans and Westerners must begin to hold up this nostalgia for imperialism under a microscope, much as they might a new and dangerous virus, and finding an antidote must be a priority.
So interesting how other cultures’ racism sticks out more than our own, because it’s not what we’re used to. I’m fascinated by the ability to be “other” and watch the local class systems everywhere I go…
True, Allison, but I am trying in this instance to Other those like me (white, Western, of a certain economic level) who Other Moroccans (perceived as not white, with all the weighty significance of the designation, not Western, and poor). It is a fraught endeavor to be sure, and I am so glad be able to converse with a larger community about it.
Your website is beautiful. I liked the entry about colonial nostalgia.
There was a controversy in Portland a while back when someone opened a bizarre “colonial” themed restaurant there. https://pdx.eater.com/2016/3/29/11325650/saffron-colonial-controversy-update-tracking-north-williams-portland
The restaurant is now – even more bizarrely – named B.O.R.C. – standing for “British Overseas Restaurant Corporation.” https://www.britishoverseasrestaurant.com/
I suppose the difficulty lies in appreciating the aesthetic (which I think does have value) and separating it from the racism. Or rather the difficulty lies in appreciating the aesthetic while not forgetting the racism.
There should be another word to express “nostalgia at a remove.” How do we understand nostalgia for something that was never the object of personal experience?
Jon, thank you for the supportive comments, and thank you too for helping me to think through the idea of “nostalgia.” I am making a list of interesting ways that time is counted and perceived. I am intrigued by your idea of “nostalgia at a remove.” Hmmm… I will be playing with this idea.
Really interesting read and I agree, “nostalgia at a remove” may say more about us. I noticed at the airport in Pune India, pictures surrounding the hall of great impressive buildings, all of which bear the characteristics of being built during British colonialism when there was a large garrison there. Certainly built by locals of course, and yes landmark historic structures of the area. It’s one thing to repurpose them but cities celebrate the important highlights of the area in their airports and featuring them there says more but what. I can only guess at all the meanings and intentions to modern locals.
Matt, thanks so much for pointing out what sounds like a fascinating case of nostalgia, one that would be interesting to put in conversation with Morocco. It is a nostalgia for an imperialist past in a glamorized form. It would be interesting to think more broadly about how colonial eras are remembered–and aspects of them also forgotten–in modern times.
Thank you for this post and for reminding us that the past is never far. I’m not familiar with Rosaldo’s work and need to read it. Data from the World Bank show that tourism makes up nearly a quarter of Morocco’s “exports,” so it makes me curious about larger questions of the extent to which local peoples allow themselves to be humiliated by tourists in order to make ends meet — which could account for the tolerance of the Riad Villa Blanche’s workers. But are the tourists visiting this hotel even aware of the history that’s on display? I suspect that if Americans visited a comparable hotel in Manila and saw a portrait of Taft, the history would be lost on them.
Mark, you are so right about a greater need for tourists eager to see the historic sites of Morocco to make themselves aware of the actual history that they are viewing. In part, this colonial narrative does serve the economic purposes of Moroccans and the Moroccan government. I saw a film on Royal Air Maroc that repeated many of the colonial tropes about the “timeless medinas” of Morocco, and the shots did not have any people or cars in them. Just those old stone buildings that have purportedly been there since time immemorial. Truth is that the truth is infinitely more complex…and interesting.