You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to my colleague

Jeremy Harding, who has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on Morocco's Secret Prisons.

It's a review of Tasma Mert, 18 years in Morocco's secret prison by Aziz Bin-Bein, translated by Lulu Norman,

which Jeremy describes as an intimate memoir that nonetheless forces us beyond the prison gates to consider a century of turmoil in Morocco.

Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His books include small wars, small mercies,

journeys in Africa's disputed nations, and border vigils, keeping migrants out of the rich world.

Hello Jeremy, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hi, Tom. Good to talk to you.

I was going to say that we

should begin with the author of the book as he's been being been and why he spent 18 years imprisoned in

that truly horrific place for his alleged part in a coup attempt in 1970. But to begin to try to make sense

of that, we probably need to go back earlier in the reign of King Hassan the second of Morocco

to an earlier alleged coup attempt in 1963, which is where you begin your piece. Yeah, that's right.

The moment that Hassan came to power after his father's death in 61 and was crowned king of Morocco,

the kingdom was facing two ways in some sense.

There was a strong wish to kind of retain contacts with France

and increasingly with the United States,

which had been not cemented exactly, but forged early on during the 1940s

and even before the Second World War ended.

But at the same time, there was this interest in liberation, independence, the end of colonial rule,

and King Hassan's father, to some extent, to a great extent, embodied in Morocco this wish to decolonize.

He had fought his way, as it were, through the French protectorate, always objecting to it, never happy in anywhere way at all with the colonial situation, to the

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