Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure

10. Remains of the Day

Remains of the Day Marrakesh sans Mauchamp As for the handful of European businessmen and missionaries who had fled to the coast in June 1907, they soon trickled back to Marrakesh . But there, only a few weeks after their return, the news of the murdered European workers in Casablanca revived fears that their lives too were in jeopardy. The Jews were especially frightened by the two hundred or so Rahamna tribesmen who roamed the city. Meekly, the Jews removed their shoes whenever they ventured outside the mellah. The guards who had been posted by Hajj Abdeslam al-Warzazi in the aftermath of Mauchamp’s death had by this point disappeared. Despite his previous solicitude for the safety of the Europeans , Moulay Hafid warned that he might not be able to protect them if he were obliged to wage a jihad against the French. On August 9, news of the French bombardment of Casablanca reached Marrakesh. Quickly a new evacuation was arranged, and the following day at midnight the caravan departed. Its numbers included six Germans, four English, four French, and one Swiss in addition to three Jewish protégés from El-Jadida and eight Arabs who were German protégés. Accompanying them were some forty servants and muleteers and twelve soldiers provided by Moulay Hafid. Two days later, weary from eighteen-hour days in the saddle, the group arrived at Safi.1 Not until January 1908 did the British missionary Cuthbert Nairn venture back to Marrakesh. Nairn, who made his visit in secret and without official permission, disappointed the local Moroccan officials with whom he met. They thought he might bear with him official 10 242 Death letters of recognition for Moulay Hafid from the British government. For his part, Nairn criticized the town’s governor for the desecration of the European cemetery that had taken place. Having concluded that he “might be able to live quite safely in seclusion” but not do any real work, Nairn left Marrakesh after only five days. However, he wrote in a postscript, “I did not hear an uncivil word nor notice an antagonistic look neither by the way nor in the city.”2 A full year later, in January 1909, Nairn finally returned to Marrakesh in the company of Misses Macarthur and Trainer, other longtime missionaries in the city. There they founded a booming business vaccinating children against smallpox. Writing in the May 1909 bulletin of the Southern Morocco Mission, Nairn reported having vaccinated 490 persons in a matter of months, the numbers limited only by their supplies of vaccine. The November issue of the Glasgow-based missionary bulletin put out an urgent request for a doctor to join Nairn’s staff. Nairn reported seeing 2,000 patients a month pass through his dispensary and, owing to the lack of a fully-trained staff, he found himself turning away patients. By March 1910 Nairn reported record attendance for the previous year of 17,824 patients—18,000 if one included “stragglers unrecorded.” He made no secret of the reasons for his success; the large numbers were attributable to “the absence of a French doctor.”3 Nairn’s success did not go unnoticed by the French, and in August 1909, more than two years after Mauchamp’s death, Regnault in Tangier finally considered sending a replacement to Marrakesh. His chief candidates were Doctor Murat, the director of the hospital in Fez, and Guichard, the doctor in El-Jadida who had performed the postmortem on Mauchamp.4 The post was evidently a coveted one, as earlier discussion of a replacement had included French doctors from as far away as Oran and Tunis. Significantly, Jonnart, the governor general of Algeria, advised against the candidature of a Parisian-trained Muslim doctor, one Mohamed Ben Larbey. “He is known as a mediocre physician,” the governor general wrote. “Having neither professional value nor moral prestige . . . his presence in Morocco could cause prejudice against French prestige.” These arguments aside, the governor general revealed that the real reason for Ben Larbey’s rejection was political. “He is a bad spirit and sets his co-religionists against French functionaries.” Not until 1910 did Guichard take up his post in Marrakesh. He was soon joined by a French-Algerian doctor, a woman named Françoise Legey. The pharmacist Mauchamp had first requested in Remains of the Day 243 1906 did not arrive...