Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent.In October 2016, a 31-year-old Moroccan fishmonger named Mohsen Fikri got into an altercation with police in the northern town of al-Hoceima. The police had confiscated Fikri’s swordfish, and when he tried to retrieve it from the back of a garbage truck, he was crushed to death.
The incident sparked a wave of protests known as al-Hirak al-Shaabi, or the Popular Movement, that was intended to draw attention to the lack of development and general marginalization of Morocco’s northern Rif region. Last October, a year after Fikri’s death, King Mohammed VI sacked several government ministers to signal his own frustration with these problems. But the events of this week make clear that local anger with the government in Rabat remains high, and that the grievances in the Rif resonate with Moroccans elsewhere.