In June 2026, Hespress — Morocco’s leading digital news source — published a headline that read: “Murder Case Haunts An African In Al-Darwa.” No nationality was mentioned or geographic detail. Just “an African”, as though Morocco were not itself on the continent.

The framing was not unique to Hespress. Others followed suit and covered the same incident under headlines such as: “The Royal Gendarmerie Arrests An African Immigrant On Suspicion Of Killing An Elderly Man In Darwa.” When major outlets standardize this language, they normalize a quiet act of exclusion through the positioning of Sub-Saharan migrants as the continent’s representatives while implicitly placing Morocco outside it. One wouldn’t know that Morocco is in Africa by reading these headlines.

The incident in Al-Darwa was one of dozens of crime reports published that month. Moroccan police were in the middle of a broad crackdown on organized crime, drug trafficking and individual incidents that filled local news feeds daily. None of the others identified suspects by continental origin. When the accused was Moroccan, he was simply a man from a city or a neighborhood. When the accused was Sub-Saharan, he became “an African.”

This is not a question of laws or institutions. Morocco has no apartheid-style legal framework; its citizens, regardless of skin color, navigate the same economic pressures and bureaucratic frustrations. The problem is discursive. It lives in the language and discourse newsrooms choose, and in the categories they reach for without thinking.

But there is an important distinction to make: Arguing that Morocco’s media has a language problem is not the same as arguing that the country practices systemic racism. However, language shapes perception, and perception shapes behavior. The events of 2026 have made this dynamic difficult to ignore.

Historical roots and the origins of black Othering

The reflex to other black Africans in the Maghreb did not begin with digital media. It has deep roots, but does not apply to Western conceptions of race, where the term carries a specific legal and institutional history. The American framework of white supremacy and the European colonial taxonomy of races do not translate directly to Morocco. Here, racial attitudes are entangled with ethnicity, religion, language and centuries of civilizational overlap — making them harder to name, but no less real.

Before the Arab conquest of North Africa, the indigenous Amazigh (or Berbers) organized themselves along tribal lines. As historian Chouki El Hamel documents in Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam, some Amazigh communities held explicit prejudices against black Africans through enforcing restrictions on land ownership and intermarriage. 

When Arab settlers arrived in the 7th century, they brought their own racial hierarchies. Influential scholars of the period entrenched these views: 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldun associated dark skin with savagery, and 14th-century scholar Ibn Battuta’s accounts of Mali carried similar contempt. A loose but durable hierarchy — Arab, Amazigh and everyone else — took shape, which French colonial authorities later exploited through divide-and-rule policies such as the Berber Decree.

After independence, Moroccan nationalists pursued Arabization. This policy sought to consolidate a single Arab-Moroccan identity through educational reforms in a multiethnic country. The project largely failed due to the reluctance among elites to embrace Morocco’s Africanness fully. The impulse behind it persists in nuanced forms, though. One of those forms is the language of the press.

The AFCON fallout

The 2026 Africa Cup of Nations final between Morocco and Senegal brought these tensions into sharp relief. The disputed match — settled by a procedural ruling that many Moroccan fans considered unjust — triggered reactions that went beyond standard football hooliganism. Sub-Saharan-owned businesses were attacked, verbal abuse escalated, and social media became a forum for explicitly racist commentary. The violence was the work of a minority, but the discourse it unleashed revealed how quickly racial resentment could be mobilized when given a trigger. A search through social media in the weeks that followed reveals the scale of the reaction. 

Social media platforms like Reddit threads filled with rhetoric that went far beyond football grievances. The algorithms did their magic, and many were piling into the comments in a frenzy of hate speech targeting Sub-Saharan migrants who were attacked and labeled as criminals, religious outsiders, and threats to public safety. The AFCON fallout did not create new prejudices; rather, it permitted existing ones to speak openly.

The reality paradox 

The paradox is stark. Diplomatically, Morocco has spent the past decade positioning itself as a leader on the continent. Since rejoining the African Union in 2017, it has pursued economic, financial and religious cooperation across Sub-Saharan Africa. Through investing in infrastructure, banking and religious training programs, Moroccan soft power extended southward.

The kingdom has deliberately distinguished itself from the openly hostile rhetoric toward migrants in neighboring Tunisia, where President Kais Saied’s 2023 remarks about Sub-Saharan migrants cast them as demographic threats. In the same week as the Hespress headline, footage emerged from Tunisia of a sexual assault on a pregnant Sub-Saharan migrant, which drew domestic outrage. Many would see this as a coincidence, of course, but it’s hard to deny that this is where unchecked dehumanization and casual othering can eventually lead.

Morocco’s record is different. Its 2014 migration policy regularized tens of thousands of undocumented migrants, a rare step in the region. But a country that aspires to continental leadership cannot simultaneously permit its most widely read newsrooms to treat “African” as a synonym for foreign. The dissonance between the Foreign Ministry’s pan-African ambitions and Hespress’s headline is just embarrassing. And worse, it is strategically corrosive.

Days after the Al-Darwa incident, Moroccan police arrested a citizen for online hate speech against a Sub-Saharan migrant. In contrast, this story received minimal coverage compared to the original crime report. The asymmetry is telling: the alleged crime committed by a migrant warranted national headlines with racial markers, but the hate crime committed against one barely registered.

An outcome of careless language

There is no evidence that Hespress or any Moroccan parasitic news outlet is out to promote racism. The framing is more likely a habit than a strategy. It is not even consistent: The same outlets sometimes use nationality or more precise descriptors in other reports, which cancels any allegations that deliberate editorial policy is at work.

Perhaps this is a strategy. But intent is not the issue; the effect is. Comment sections beneath such articles fill reliably with dehumanizing rhetoric. Social media groups amplify the framing further, layering onto the word “African” a set of associations — criminality, religious otherness, sexual threat — that bear no relationship to the individuals described, but that are legitimized with repetition.

The term “African,” deployed this way, does particular discursive work. It does not simply mean “black.” It compresses multiple forms of othering into a single label. And in the context of Morocco and the Maghreb region generally speaking, it selectively implies foreignness, non-Muslim identity and danger all at once. That compression is what makes it so effective as a vehicle for prejudice.

And to put this in real-life context, when Morocco’s most recent national protests erupted, demonstrators did not call for deportations or raise ethnic grievances. The Gen Z’s concerns were inflation, corruption and opportunity. The country’s future human capital, in other words, is not demanding the exclusion that its media language performs.

Morocco is a multiethnic nation on a multiethnic continent. Its history includes colonial manipulation and inherited prejudice, but also coexistence and a diplomatic vision that takes African solidarity seriously. The gap between that vision and the casual othering of a leading newspaper headline is not just a journalistic failure. Arguably, it is a contradiction that, if left unexamined, feeds the very attitudes Morocco’s own policies are working to overcome.

At a moment when economic anxiety driven by inflation and organized crime dominates public life, careless racial framing offers a convenient scapegoat. It channels real frustration toward people who had nothing to do with its causes. Ironically, Morocco’s top newspaper is failing to fulfill the profession’s basic responsibility: to report the world accurately. As a consequence, they’re doing their readers a disservice. 

[Casey Herrmann edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.