Morocco at war against cultural appropriation
At a time of soft power war and cultural appropriation, Morocco makes it a point to protect its tangible and intangible assets. The Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Communication has already initiated a series of measures to legally protect Morocco’s intangible heritage made up of a large number of ancestral skills, with internationally recognized instruments.
The goal of those measures is to provide safeguards to slow down any attempts at cultural appropriation of our know-how, those of our eastern neighbors in particular, the latest and grossest of which concerns the Ntaa caftan from Fez.
This rescue operation will have to go through a synergy of actions between the ministry of Crafts, the ministry of Culture, moroccan industrialists, civil society, and the Moroccan Industrial and Commercial Property Office (OMPIC). The latter has, by the way, already registered about sixty labels. The latest initiative from Minister of Culture Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid, which is equally commendable, is the launch of the first digital platform intended to promote Moroccan heritage.
Designed as a national encyclopedia, «www.culture.ma» provides access to Moroccan content in the fields of books, heritage, and music. This is a first step which consists in contributing to the process of listing Moroccan tangible and intangible heritage and to its presentation, to Moroccans and to the rest of the world, through photos, capsules, videos, and an overview of each of its elements. The goal is also to make national cultural festivals and available publications known. The platform is currently available in Arabic, but should soon give access to a section in French, English, Spanish, and Amazigh, with a view to promoting access to Moroccan culture to as many people as possible through the publication of multimedia content in the fields of arts, books, and heritage.
The platform puts online dozens of videos documenting cultural festivals, book fairs, iconic monuments, and more generally an overview of the entire tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The platform will also be a virtual library made available to the general public, making it possible to present and document major cultural events, enhance artistic energies, promote literary works, and preserve Moroccan cultural heritage, promises the Ministry of Culture.
In addition, this platform will make it possible to inform viewers about the different activities of the culture sector, with data that will be updated on a regular basis and enriched with new content, so that each visit to the platform is an interactive experience, with the possibility to discover new videos about the cultural heritage, about writers, or about the arts and know-how of Morocco.
Cultural heritage interpretation centers
Since the establishment of the National Museums Foundation , which was entrusted with the management of the national museums in 2011, the Ministry of Culture has been involved in the creation of heritage interpretation centers, as cultural, scientific, and educational institutions whose main mission is to introduce the general public to the cultural and historical heritage of Morocco, through spaces aimed at promoting local heritage in the service and development of society. These institutions seek to highlight this cultural heritage, and to ensure its protection and preservation, while alerting to its fragility and the dangers that threaten it. In this context, the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Ministry has ensured the establishment of several heritage interpretation centers within cultural spaces (archaeological sites, historic monuments, city and ancient urban fabric, and others) which undertake to present the cultural and natural heritage, and to provide visitors with scientific material enabling them to discover the richness and cultural diversity of a region…
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