It was nightfall on a September evening in 1937 when Fatma’s family realized she was missing. The teenage girl had set out from their farm for the market in Bir Jdid, a small town about 30 miles outside of Casablanca, Morocco, early in the day and had not returned. Her father, Mohamed, abandoned his fields to try to find his daughter, following her trail to Casablanca, where he searched the streets for any sign of her for days on end. But the girl was nowhere to be found. In a last, desperate attempt, he made his way to the gate of Bousbir, the massive, walled brothel district that lured thousands of thrill-seekers — and hundreds of unwitting girls and women — into its winding alleyways and covered courtyards each year.
It was there, in a brothel at 26 Rue de Marrakchia, that Mohamed found his daughter. Fatma threw herself at her father’s feet, sobbing uncontrollably and begging for his forgiveness. She hurriedly explained she had met a woman at the market who said she knew her father. The woman, who introduced herself as Zena, had warmly invited Fatma to come stay with her in Casablanca for a few days, and, naively, the girl accepted. In reality, Zena was a brothel madam and, when they arrived in Casablanca, the girl was whisked away to Bousbir and locked in the brothel where her father found her.
But before Fatma could tell her father the rest of the story, the madam burst in, realizing that the man was not a client, and began threatening to call the police to lock him up for invading her brothel. Terrified of the colonial police and of what would become of the rest of his family if he were arrested, the father of four was forced to leave his daughter in the brothel district where she was trapped alongside hundreds of other women and girls. It was there that Fatma became prostitute number 4921.
Illiterate, far from home and out of his depth, Mohamed sought out a scrivener to write a letter begging for Fatma’s release. I am just a “poor, defenseless peasant,” he wrote, before pleading for her freedom from the overseers who controlled every element of life in the dense warren of Bousbir: the French colonial authorities.
Under French rule, thousands of women and girls like Fatma were imprisoned inside Bousbir, the largest red-light district in Africa, which the colonial authorities had built in 1914 as a way to control the supposed hygiene and health of sex workers and their clients through daily genital examinations for sexually transmitted diseases. In reality, Bousbir became a place of social control, where police acting with little oversight could send or hold women and girls and force them to sell sex on the mere suspicion that they had been soliciting.
Many families so feared the colonial police or the shame and stigma that came with having a prostitute in the family that they made no attempts to free their wives and daughters once they had landed in Bousbir. But others, like Mohamed, tried for years, writing letter after letter appealing to the colonial authorities to release their loved ones. These letters, preserved in the French archives, give a rich insight into the system that made Bousbir the massive attraction it was for foreigners, and the hellscape it was for Moroccan women, girls and their families.
The name “Bousbir” came from Prosper Ferrieu, a French consul who owned a tract of land on the edge of Casablanca with a few brothels on it in the era before colonization. In 1914, two years into the French Protectorate, officials built a walled district on Ferrieu’s land, greatly expanding the footprint of the red-light district. (Prosper’s name was transliterated to “Brosbir,” then “Bousbir,” and the name stuck.) The district was part of the redesign of Casablanca by French architects like Henri Prost, who sought to modernize the city with wide avenues and modern sewers for the French residents, while walling off the Moroccan medina. Bousbir’s creation was part of this colonial logic: health and order for Europeans, containment and surveillance for Moroccans. There was one gate that led in and out of the district; it was guarded around the clock by French soldiers.
Bousbir became a massive attraction, not just for the Casablanca locals (and the French soldiers based there), but for tourists who came from across Europe to dabble in orientalist fantasies. Some 1,000 to 1,500 visitors came a day in the 1930s, European men and women, sightseers and clients. The French administration leaned into this; the official leaflet produced by the French tourist office in Morocco included detailed instructions on how to get to the brothel district. There was even a regular bus service. Postcards of topless women lounging on rugs and throw cushions under the arched pavilions of Bousbir circulated around the world. They were so abundant that now, almost a century later, you can still find these postbox odalisques in the flea markets of Paris and Rome.
But most of those beauties, who so titillated the imagination of the sex tourists who frequented Bousbir over the several decades it was open, were either lured to Bousbir unwittingly or forced there by the colonial authorities with little recourse for ever leaving.
Beginning in 1912 in Morocco, and earlier in Algeria and Tunisia, the French colonial state oversaw a tightly regulated system of sex work. Any woman who sold sex had to be listed on a state register and was officially categorized as a “fille soumise,” or submissive girl. In Morocco alone, up to 5,000 women were registered by 1952. Once a woman was put on the registry, leaving sex work became nearly impossible.
Mohamed’s letters to the French authorities help paint a picture of how easily a young woman could fall into the system. Brothel madams — often former prostitutes themselves, stuck in the system but aged out of sex work — would go on the hunt for new recruits in smaller towns and villages. They’d look for girls and young women who appeared thin or dirty, and sidle up to them in the crowds that gathered around musicians and snake charmers, where they’d tell them they could offer a better life with plenty of food and a warm place to sleep. In one of Mohamed’s letters, he describes how Zena had approached his daughter and manipulated her naivete and illiteracy: “My daughter trusted the invitation from this woman and agreed to travel to Casablanca with her, but was stunned to find that she had entered the red-light district without realizing (not being familiar with Casablanca), and then this woman Zena immediately undertook the necessary steps to get my daughter ‘the card.’”
Being “put on the card” was the polite term for being registered as a sex worker, as local police gave brothel workers like Fatma identity cards to carry that noted where the woman lived, outlined rules she had to follow (including not being able to leave the brothel without permission) and recorded her weekly health checks. These checks involved painful and invasive genital inspections using a speculum, supposedly to prevent the spread of disease among clients. In reality, they not only spread disease but stripped the women of dignity and freedom.
As Mohamed noted, it didn’t take much for a madam to get a girl registered: “This formality seems to have been incredibly easy, meaning that against my wishes my daughter began to lead a life of debauchery for this woman’s gain.” All the madams had to do was take the girl to a brothel, fill out paperwork with the local police to “put her on the card,” falsely sign the form that said that she was joining the brothel voluntarily and the girl was under her control by French law. Though girls were supposed to be at least 17 to enter Bousbir, so few people in the countryside had identity documents that it was easy for madams to recruit girls as young as 12 and simply lie about their ages.
In the brothels, the madams controlled the flow of money. They would take a cut of the fees paid by clients, but they also charged the girls under their roof inflated prices for rent, food and clothing. If they didn’t make their quotas for client visits or selling trays of tea, they would be fined. After almost two years under Zena’s roof, working full time selling sex, Fatma was told that in fact she had a debt of 500 francs that must be paid before she could be released. This extortionate practice made it extremely lucrative for madams to add more recruits to the enterprise, and the system of tricking the particularly vulnerable continued unabated.
But this was not the only way that girls and women ended up in Bousbir. They could also be arrested and sent there by French police against their will.
In France’s obsessive system of regulating sex work, the task of determining who was selling sex — and ensuring that she was tightly controlled — fell largely to the colonial police. French police were constantly patrolling areas where women supposedly sold sex illegally, that is, without being registered in the French system. They carried out constant surveillance of women’s sexuality on the street, in movie theaters, restaurants, bars and hotels, and could even arrest a woman in her home if there were rumours that she had lots of male guests. No proof was required: If police merely suspected that a woman was selling sex illegally, she could be arrested. After three arrests, a woman would be forced to register as a prostitute and sent to a brothel. A study of the red-light district in 1951 found that just over a quarter of all the sex workers in Bousbir had been sent there by French police. The lack of identity papers meant this included girls who were just 12 years old.
Girls and women could be arrested even if they were virgins. In Casablanca in 1935, two sisters, Fatima and Izza, were arrested in the Hotel du Palais because they were suspected of selling sex. They were both taken to the police station, where they underwent forced pelvic exams. According to the chief of police, Izza was “recognized as a virgin, let go immediately and not entered into the register.” But it would only have been clear that she was a virgin when the speculum was inserted in her body, damaging her hymen — and her future marriage prospects. But at least Izza was allowed to return home. Her sister Fatima was “recognized as being ill” with sexually transmitted diseases “and kept for treatment” in the dispensary in Bousbir, where she was forced to become prostitute number 4694. She worked there against her will for over two years. Her father wrote letters to the French authorities in Casablanca, just like Mohamed, to try to free her.
Her father begged them to reconsider imprisoning Fatima. After his first attempt was rejected, the desperate man tried again, explaining that his daughter had been “arrested by mistake.” In his second letter, he wrote that she had a well-paid job working as a maid, and even included a letter from her employer, a European man who promised that he would rehire her if she was released. To try to show that his daughter was respectable, he provided details about how one of his neighbours had asked to marry her, writing that “I have accepted this joyous proposal.” He went on to explain that in his excitement, “I went to visit the adoul [a public official, similar to a notary] with her future husband and they took note.” But he quickly found himself blocked again by French bureaucracy, since “to write the marriage papers, the notaries need to see the bride to be able to describe her face,” the method used before identity photographs were common. This was not possible because Fatima was stuck in Bousbir.
Throughout his attempts, Fatima’s father was steadfast that this was all a mistake, but that his daughter would soon be back on the right path. This letter was cleanly typed and written in formal, polite French. Unable to read or write, he would have paid someone who lived nearby to translate and type it up for him, but signed it himself with an inky fingerprint. He spent more than two years campaigning for her freedom while the French colonial authorities refused to allow Fatima to leave Bousbir.
It is no wonder that Fatima tried to escape twice within this two-year period, putting more faith in her own way of fighting for her freedom than in the French authorities’ ability to be persuaded by her father’s letters. The colonial archives contain records after her two arrests by French police that noted that she had been sent back on both occasions.
Over the decades, records show that scores of women tried to escape Bousbir. Because women registered as selling sex were not allowed to leave their brothels without permission — not only that of their madam but also, in the case of Bousbir, of the sadistic overseeing physician who administered health checks and performed medical experiments on his patients — those who were found outside of the brothel were targeted by the police and promptly returned. Sometimes they would escape alone, other times in groups. In 1950, 20 women were stopped by French police for trying to escape Bousbir and forced to return. In another incident, the regular police patrols in Casablanca arrested 12 women suspected of selling sex; it turned out that seven of them were women who had just fled Bousbir. These women were arrested because even though they had managed to get out of the red-light district that imprisoned them, they still had to turn to selling sex as the only option to find money to travel elsewhere.
In November 1935, a 23-year-old woman named Aicha tried to escape Bousbir for the first time. She had been arrested for allegedly selling sex in the Hotel du Bresil in Casablanca and brought to Bousbir, but she refused to accept her fate quietly. Her first two attempts, in November and December 1935, failed. Desperate to leave, she tried changing her last name to avoid detection and even married a man who worked as a nurse in the hospital to show that she could start a new life. None of it worked. After three years of selling sex against her will, she tried escaping for a third time in October 1938.
On that day in October, she asked for a few hours’ leave to visit her mother, but once she left Bousbir, Aicha went directly to the Dar el Makhzen, the Moroccan royal court. This was one of the few areas where there were Moroccans with any influence, although these bureaucrats were still subservient to the colonial state. She begged them to do anything within their power to help free her from the colonial sex work system, making a complaint that “even though I am married and despite my husband’s objections and the proof that he has provided, the police commissioner took me by force to the red-light district.” With a firmness of resolve, she wrote, “I ask for the makhzen [the government] to intervene to free me from this place of debauchery.”
Frustratingly, the colonial archives provide no evidence as to whether this complaint was successful or whether she was sent back to Bousbir. There is no paperwork showing that Aicha tried to escape a fourth time; hopefully, this is because she was freed from the brothel, and not because she simply lost hope.
Requesting to be unregistered was a process that took years and was very rarely successful. One woman, Messouda, was on the sex work register as number 118 for 15 years, making money from managing a hotel that was most likely a brothel, the Hotel Luisitania. “I voluntarily signed up for the sex work register in Casablanca more than 15 years ago, but since then I have never had to undergo any health visits nor sold sex myself,” she explained in her letter to the local authorities. “Since this date, as a hotel landlord, I’ve had several different furnished hotels and I am currently the owner of a building at 24 Rue de Mogador, where I’ve installed the Hotel Lusitania. I had completely forgotten that I was still on the sex work register, until the police recently reminded me. Please may I kindly request that you remove me from it?”
Messouda was told that this would only be possible if she sold the business that she had spent years building up, even though it was her only livelihood. She did this a week later. Even then, she was still only able to get the colonial authorities to listen to her case after hiring a French lawyer to write a strongly worded letter on her behalf. Finally, at 9 a.m. on Sept. 28, 1936, a committee of three French men voted that she should be removed from the register. After 15 years, Messouda was no longer prostitute number 118. But successes like this were the minority. Very few women ever managed to leave the colonial prison of Bousbir, which was finally closed in 1955 after pressure from the Moroccan nationalist movement. Only then were the 675 women still living there finally allowed to leave. The trail fades away along with their presence in Bousbir, for the archives are silent on what came after the dismantling of the red-light district. We can only conjecture from the fact that sex work became illegal on independence: It would have been difficult for the women either to reintegrate into their communities or to keep selling sex.
What is left of Bousbir? Visitors to the district in Casablanca today will find that it is chillingly unchanged. There is still only one gate into this area of Mers Sultan in central Casablanca, just as when it was designed in the 1910s. Walking through the eerily quiet streets of this residential neighbourhood, you’ll notice two things. Firstly, the architecture is still almost identical to the colonial postcards produced a century ago. You can see the same central marketplace, the same neo-Orientalist arches designed by French architects, and the same backgrounds as the famous picture postcards. Secondly, if you look up at the street signs on the wall, you’ll notice that the names of the streets have been sloppily painted over in an attempt to hide the old names. Rue Tazia, Rue Marrakchia, Rue Meknessia: all of these streets were named after women from different Moroccan cities — Taza, Marrakech, Meknes — who lived and worked there. They hint at the history of this haunted part of Casablanca, and reveal the efforts to pretend that this is just a distant memory. Traces of the women are still there, obscured but easy to find if you know where to look, just like the collection of letters sitting in the French colonial archive. The women’s own voices remain inaccessible; for the most part, their lives, at least the parts spent in Bousbir, can only be reconstructed from how they were described by their fathers, their husbands or colonial bureaucrats. And of how they coped after they were freed, nothing is known at all.
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