Encounters with lions

With such a title, one might think that I were writing about a safari. The reality is more prosaic. Living in the city of Sefrou, Morocco, the small town of Ifrane lay close by, but higher up in the Middle Atlas mountains. Ifrane was initially a creation of the French. During the Protectorate, the French administration expropriated land and began to build a garden town, then in fashion in Europe. When the original plans changed, the French simply built a retreat. At an altitude of 5,500 ft., Ifrane receives frequent winter snowfalls and nearby higher areas have enough relief and snow to satisfy the needs of skiers who are willing to be satisfied by modest facilities and short runs.

In the summer, the temperature in Ifrane never reaches that of the torrid plains surrounding Meknes and Fes. With easy access from those large cities, Ifrane became a counterpart of the Himalayan hill town, filled with European style chalets, country homes, and even a royal palace. With Atlas cedars replacing the Deodar-filled mountainsides of the Indian subcontinent’s summer retreats, Ifrane, with its cool, fresh, cedar-scented air might be mistaken for an Indian hill town in miniature.

Today, Ifrane serves as the administrative capital of an eponymous province, and hosts an English-language university, Al-Akhawayn, to boot, but when I first went there, less than a dozen years after independence, Ifrane was more of a sleepy hamlet, its tall and grand chalet-style houses mostly shuttered. Only on the rare visit of the king, Hassan II, did the place jump to life. Commerce and tourists passed through Ifrane on the main road north and south, but I never saw people on the streets. Ifrane had been built for a culture that had gone home, and the new Moroccan elites were slow to integrate it into the new culture that was emerging in postcolonial Morocco. The rich bought houses but didn’t use them. Mountains were for the monkeys and the shepherds.

Sefrou had no direct road connection to Ifrane, despite its proximity, and I only visited the place perhaps a half-dozen times between 1968 and 1977. Nothing seemed to change over the period, and the town appeared to be mothballed, despite the presence of some summer camps for children.

On one or two occasions, I took photos of the sculpted lion, prominently situated in a large open park-like area. When I asked about it, I remember being told that German prisoners of war had created it. Ifrane did have a penitentiary for war prisoners during the war so the story was plausible, and it was related to me more than once. In the Lonely Planet Guide to Morocco, for instance, one finds that:

“Ifrane’s landmark is the stone lion that sits on a patch of grass near the Hôtel Chamonix. It was carved by a German soldier during WWII, when Ifrane was used briefly as a prisoner-of-war camp, in exchange for the prisoner’s freedom – or so the story goes – and commemorates the last wild Atlas lion, which was shot near here in the early 1920s. Having your picture taken with the lion is something of a ritual for Moroccan day trippers.”

Sometimes the lion is attributed to Italian prisoners, too, but the reality is that a French artist and sculpture, Henri-Jean Moreau created it before the war, sometime in the 1930s. Moreau, a minor but not untalented artist, came to Morocco from his native northern French city of Libourne in 1925, and his paintings still fetch good prices at auctions.

Returning to northwest Africa and lions, the reader may remember my writing about them in an earlier post, Trout Fishing in America, where an 18th century English sailor, held captive as a slave in the time of Moulay Ismaïl, describes what to do when one meets a lion on the road.

The lion has been adopted as the official animal of Morocco, though the last one recorded seen was shot by a French hunter in the 1940s, and nowhere near Ifrane, contrary to what the Lonely Planet guide says. Barbary lions are now considered to be extinct in Morocco as well as in all North Africa, but as a symbol they still have meaning. The national soccer team bears the name, Atlas Lions, and the King has lions on his coat of arms. One version of a popular adage has it that the Tunisian is a woman, the Algerian is a man, and the Moroccan is a lion, but the Moroccans have another proverb that may be more apt and universal that I have always liked: “Everyone is a lion in his own forest.”

On the other hand, the sultan Abd er-Rahman offered a lion and lioness as a present to President Martin Van Buren of the US in 1839. The gift presented a serious problem for the consular officials in Tangier, who tried to refuse, but were finally forced to accept the animals for fear of offending the sultan. In those days, the American government was serious about the rule that presidents could not receive gifts from foreign rulers. The lions were temporarily housed in the Legation in Tangier, and their story ended in 1840 in the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where the hapless beasts were sold at auction for $375.

Lions once ranged widely across Africa, southeast Europe, and large parts of Asia. Today, they are extinct through most of their former range, and their numbers are dwindling quickly in Africa, where several populations are endangered or on the edge of extinction.

The lion’s regal appearance and its sobriquet, King of the Beasts, have fascinated humans for centuries. My high school symbol was the rampant lion, reminiscent of medieval heraldry and British royal traditions, but lions make good publicity, too.

In my travels, admittedly limited, lions have appeared in sculptured forms in many places from the steps of the New York Public Library to those of the palace of Alexander the Great in Persepolis.

Despite Islamic injunctions against representation of animals and people, sculptured lions appear from the Alhambra in Spain to the Ali Qapu palace pavilion in Isfahan and beyond.

In Europe and America lions are ubiquitous, often gracing formal gardens and public buildings.

Sadly, lions may be a beast for another time, which is the way I begin to see myself these days, and it isn’t hard to imagine a world without them—or me, though I think that the lions would certainly be the greater loss. There has been talk of reintroducing lions to the wild in Morocco, but it strikes me as doubtful that such an effort will ever be made. There are too many people, and there is too little wild. People make bad neighbors. Ask any bear in the Pyrenees these days!

Footnote: December 6, 2022

The Atlas Lions are alive

Well, the Moroccan national team has notched a notable triumph. Morocco earned a well-deserved win over a strong opponent and will move on in the World Cup. Moroccans everywhere are celebrating. They are the first team from an Arab country and, only the fourth country from Africa, to reach this milestone. They will now play the world’s elite. I wish them luck.