Dima Africa, daily darija: im/migrant sociality, settlement, and state policy in Tangier, Morocco

During the 2018 African Nations Championship football tournament, Morocco filled new suburban stadiums around the Kingdom, boasting its capacities to host major African events. Such displays contribute to Morocco's ongoing politicking in the African Union even while Morocco walks a thin line between regularising immigrants and surveilling them. Tournament spectators blurred ostensible social-culture boundaries during matches, and its official slogan (Dima Africa) reflected a Moroccan mix of darija and French. In Tangier's Ibn Batouta Stadium, potentially antagonistic spectators from diverse social, religious, ethnic, and class positions across Central and West Africa cheered unanimously for Nigeria against Libya's national team, with constant jeering and verbal abuse targeted at the then recently exposed allegations of slave markets in Libya. Based on ethnographic research around the 2018 Championship matches in Tangier, this paper situates emergent trans-ethnic, religious, and national solidarities within emic political and social discourses in Tangier. Such discursive fabrics reveal how im/migrants' time spent waiting in Morocco potentially predicates comprehensive social bonds, including the deceptively spontaneous and eventful socialities articulated above. Understood in these contexts, waiting time is not vacuous, but productive of new forms and languages of belonging and difference with potential political consequences.