Ketama: Morocco’s Hash Capital
We exchange a few inconsequential words, and he invites me down the way to see his store. Once there, he ducks behind the counter and quickly puts a brick of hash on the brass scale. It weighed just over 500 grams. Straight from his hash factory, said the Moroccan, who introduces himself as Omar. “Premier qualitee.” The other two lads we’d met that afternoon were his brothers and partners. A family business.
Two hundred dirhams ($40) for the half kilo, Omar says in a businesslike manner.
Very nice, I say, trying to sound like a man to whom 500 grams of hash is no big thing. But, I tell him, I’m interested in seeing where this hash came from. Can he take me to his factory?
Omar realizes that he’s obviously talking to a connoisseur, and he agrees to take me to his factory the next morning. It’s only seven kilometers outside of Ketama, he says.
Next morning we meet Omar in front of his store. With him is the boy who urged us to have no confidence in the dope dealers at the hotel. This, he says, is Yahya, his other brother. Yahya would drive to the factory with us. Omar will ride his bicycle.
We set off, and the first six kilometers of paved road are easy. But then we turn on to a piste (dirt road) running between some eucalyptus trees. And soon the piste turns into poor track, then bad track, then no track. The Morris bounces and rattles and squeaks, trying to stay on the barely perceptible path. Yahya nonchalantly points out features to miss and paths to take, including a gravel track which leads through two slow moving streams about a foot deep. The Morris plunges, hesitates and then somehow gathers speed and rolls back onto dry, if not firm, land.
The “seven kilometers” more turns into nearly 15, and the Morris nearly founders again and again, even in first gear. Yahya keeps assuring us that it is only a little way now. Finally, we turn a sharp, soft-dirt corner and are faced with tractor ruts over two feet deep knifing through a muddy uphill patch 50 feet across. We take to our feet for “just a little walk.” This turns into a 15-minute climb up a sharp, rocky path, during which we are joined by Omar, who has had to abandon the bicycle.
Finally, we begin to see scattered tin-roofed concrete houses, and Omar says that this is Azila, his village. His house is just a bit further on. At last we come to it, a rectangular stone building with a wooden door leading to a central dirt courtyard. We are led to a long, dark room on one side of the courtyard and invited to sit on long, low cushions which run along three sides of the room. A shutter is thrown open to give a little light.
Omar disappears—to get the goods, I think—but then returns with a tea tray. First a little mint tea, then business. But to keep us interested, Yahya appears with about a kilo of hash in various sized cellophane packages which he puts on the tea tray next to the pot. The tea is hot and sweet; the conversation is polite and innocuous.
After the tea, Omar brings in a sheaf of kif branches, rubs a branch between his hands and displays a palmful of seeds.
“How much kif do you have here?” I ask.
“Thirteen hundred kilos,” he says as if talking about so much grain. In storage rooms, Omar says, on the second floor of the house.
When I inquire about the method used to make hash in Azila, Omar quickly produces a small device like a machine-shop vice from beneath a cabinet in the corner. Yahya demonstrates how the ground kif powder is placed in the vice for long periods of compression under heat in order to release the resin which makes hash what it is.
Omar says the hash-pressing machines can be purchased in Rabat, Tangiers and other large cities, and several of his neighbors have such machines. But for the most part, Omar says, he buys up the kif harvest of his neighbors, as his father and grandfather did before him. The plants are then kept in Omar’s storage rooms until the time comes to make kif or hash from them.
Then comes perhaps the most important, complex and crucial part of the whole process. The sale of kif and hash. This goes on all year long. Many of the sales, Omar says, are made by long-distance telephone calls to Tangiers, Rabat and the other big cities. And then, most often, the buyers, mostly big dealers, come to Ketama to collect their merchandise. Some even come to the house in Azila in Land Rovers.
Among his best customers, Omar says, are two Germans, an American and an English girl who comes to Azila by helicopter to pick up hash.
Their base is a large yacht anchored in the Mediterranean off of the coast of Morocco. Omar is proud of his long friendships with some of his best customers. One Irishman named Jack, he says, is an especially good friend who comes down from Tangiers quite often. According to Omar, these transactions can be made safely in Ketama and the surrounding villages because the area has a royal patent from King Hassan to grow kif and produce hash.
