Salé
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- For the Canadian figure skater, see Jamie Salé. For the Finnish Union of Sex Workers, see Salli.
Salé (Amazigh: Sla, Arabic: سلا) (from the Berber word asla, meaning "rock") is the twin city to Rabat, capital of Morocco. Today it is home to around 600,000 people, mostly impoverished factory workers. It was once a self-contained, self-ruled Republic with international scope, situated on the mouth of the Bou Regreg river on the Atlantic coast. The city's name is sometimes transliterated as Salli.
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[edit] History
Salé was apparently colonised by the Phoenicians at approximately the same time that Chellah, across the Bou Regreg to the south. Researchers know a considerable amount about the Chellah[1] colony, probably because of the good state of preservation of the Chellah site.
In Pirate Utopias, Peter Lamborn Wilson says:
- "Salé ... dates back at least to Carthaginian times (around 7th century BC). The Romans called the place Sala Colonia, part of their province of Mauritania Tingitane. Pliny the Elder mentions it (as a desert town infested with elephants!). The Vandals captured the area in the 5th century AD and left behind a number of blonde, blue-eyed Berbers. The Arabs (7th century) kept the old name and believed it derived from "Sala" (sic., his name is actually Salah), son of Ham, son of Noah; they said that Salé was the first city ever built by the Berbers."[2]
In about 1630 Salé became a haven for Moriscos-turned-Barbary pirates. Salé pirates roamed the seas as far as the shores of the Americas, bringing back loot and slaves. The character Robinson Crusoe, in Daniel Defoe's novel by the same name, spends time in captivity of the local pirates and at last sails off to liberty from the mouth of the Salé river.
Salé has played a rich and important part in Moroccan history. The first demonstrations for independence against the French, for example, sparked off in Salé. A good number of government officials, decision makers and royal advisors of both France and Morocco were from Salé. Salé people, the Slawis, have always had a "tribal" sense of belonging, a sense of pride which developed into a feeling of superiority towards the "berranis", i.e. Outsiders.
[edit] Modern city
Modern Salé is a highly polluted, badly planned, rapidly expanding town, because of rural exodus. The city is now a large "dormitory town" with little or no real community life. Most of its influential and wealthy inhabitants have departed to live in Rabat on the other side of the river. Physical remnants of Salé's historical heritage are totally decrepit, pollution is prevailing and insecurity is high. However, both its geographical situation and its "melting pot" aspect make it a town with a lot of potential that so far remains untapped by the local authorities.
Water supply and wastewater collection in Sale is irregular, with poorer and illegal housing units suffering the highest costs and most acute scarcities.[3] Much of the city relies upon communal standpipes, which are often shut down, depriving some neighbourhoods of safe drinking water.[3] entirely for indefinite periods of time. Nevertheless, Salé is more fortunate than inland Moroccan locations, where water scarcity is even more acute.[3]
In Salé, some of the textile factories such as Fruit of the Loom are sweatshops, employing women and girls of all ages for far less than the official minimum wage of 6.60 dirham/hour. Women and girls line up at the door and roughly two hundred are let in where they work for two hours and are paid 10 dirham for their efforts. That equates to roughly 1 U.S. dollar or 50 U.S. cents/hour. The A.S.S is the football club of the city, and the president is Abderrahmane Chokri.[citation needed]
The film Black Hawk Down was partially filmed in Salé, in particular the wide angle aerial shots with helicopters flying down the coastline.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ C. Michael Hogan, Chellah, The Megalithic Portal, ed. Andy Burnham
- ^ Wilson, Peter (1995). Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. Autonomedia. ISBN 1570271585.
- ^ a b c Guillaume Benoit and Aline Comeau, A Sustainable Future for the Mediterranean (2005) 640 pages
