 Early morning in the Medina / Rooftops of the Medina |
 by Philip Game
The ancient port of Tangier is described by its partisans as the White Dove on the Shoulder of Africa: white cuboid buildings tumble down the slopes around a horseshoe-shaped bay.
More a predatory gull, perhaps, as it can drop a nasty mess on outsiders. Just ask Toshi, a 19-year-old backpacker from Osaka – or Samuel Pepys, the great English diarist. Pepys, who castigated Tangiers as a den of iniquity, tried to sort out the books during a brief and unprofitable interlude of British occupation in the seventeenth century.
In the twentieth century, Tangier became a laissez-faire international city with a powerful allure for the rebellious Beat generation, lured like moths from 1950s America. William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Paul Bowles all lived and worked here in varying states of inebriation and addiction.
Disembarking from the short ferry ride across the Straits of Gibraltar, I fell in with Toshi. A few days later, I moved on, unscathed, but Toshi was less fortunate…
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