Tahar Ben Jalloun encourages links between Europe and Africa

The French writer, Tahar Ben Jalloun, is delighted by plans to build a tunnel beneath Gibraltar, which will link Europe to Africa. "Only fourteen kilometres separate Morocco from Spain. You can see the lights of Tarifa from the Hafa café in Tanger. On a clear day, you can even make out the houses. The more you look at the Spanish coast, the more the space separating the two countries and the two continents is mentally cancelled out. How then have these few kilometres become an inviolable frontier, a wall, a separation between two populations? ... To join Europe to Africa as France and Great Britain have been joined by the Channel tunnel is a dream with multiple consequences. During this period of tension and war in the Middle East, this era of migration and globalisation, it would be stupid not to try and establish a link between the two."

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