Living in Toronto, but made in North Africa

It’s a long, hard road from North Africa to Ryerson, but for Ryerson President Mohamed Lachemi and Provost Michael Benarroch, every bump made them who they are today. On March 20, the Ryerson leaders told their personal stories at “Made in North Africa,” an onstage discussion about their journeys from Algeria and Morocco.

Held at the George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre and moderated by former CBC Fresh Air host Mary Ito, the discussion was hosted by Ryerson’s Middle East and North Africa Studies Centre (MENA).

In 1980, Lachemi survived an earthquake that killed more than 4,000 people in the town of El Asnam, Algeria. “That 30 seconds changed my way of thinking about what I wanted to do,” he remembered. “My question in my mind was: how can I do things to save lives?”

The earthquake was the most dramatic moment in an upbringing filled with obstacles. He was born in northwestern Algeria in 1962—just two days after the end of the seven-year war that ended French colonial rule. During occupation, education opportunities were sparse, and even after occupation, the tiny village where Lachemi spent his early years had only an elementary school. For their son’s future, his parents chose to move to nearby El Asnam.

“For them, education was so important,” said Lachemi. “My parents did not have a chance to go to school. Many people here at Ryerson mention that they are the first child [in their family] to go to university. I am the first child with education in my family.”

The earthquake struck when Lachemi was 18 and studying for university. The community was so traumatized that of his 22 classmates, only Lachemi passed the national university entrance exam. He was driven to become an engineer: “After surviving the earthquake, the first question that I asked is why some structures were completely destroyed while others were in good shape. … My goal was to be an engineer to be able to design strong structures to resist those types of natural disasters.”

He graduated in civil engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Oran, Algeria. That he pursued his education in French (the common language in occupied Algeria) limited his options for graduate school—but it also brought him to Canada. “My long journey was full of obstacles and barriers, but I would say I learned lessons and turned those challenges into opportunities,” he said.

“I kept trying my best, working hard, and I would say that perseverance is the most important thing in those situations. You don’t give up. In each obstacle unfortunately I had some friends who gave up.”

Benarroch was born in Tangier, Morocco, but while his family moved to Winnipeg when he was three, they didn’t leave the culture behind. “I think that it’s embedded very deeply within me, and is a real part of me I take everywhere. Even though I grew up in Winnipeg, in the walls of that house you knew it was a Moroccan home.”

As Benarroch describes it, his parents “speak of Morocco when they were growing up as utopia.” But a rise in anti-Semitism forced his parents to move. “It became more difficult to live there. … They wanted to have opportunities for their children to be educated, and have opportunities to go to universities.”

Growing up as a Moroccan immigrant in Winnipeg was not easy. “If we would have somebody coming over to eat in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, my parents were serving couscous at the time. People now go, ‘Well, couscous—we all know that.’ You can actually go to the store and buy couscous… but you could not go buy couscous in the 1960s, nobody knew what that was. That was emblematic of the things that happened in our house that seemed very strange to our friends.”

The culture-clash is one reason why Benarroch struggled throughout high school. “To be going through an education system where potentially it meant nothing to your family or your parents. So, to come home and talk about Shakespeare with my parents—who, first of all, were just struggling to learn and read English. I think being on my own that way made it more challenging. I made it more challenging because I liked playing basketball and going to the pool-hall.”

A life-changing moment occurred in second-year university, when an economics professor called him over after a midterm exam. “I thought she was going to say I did terrible on the midterm,” Benarroch remembered. “But she said, ‘You did quite well, and I’m really impressed by the questions you ask in class, and you should seriously consider continuing in economics.’ To be honest, I don’t think a teacher had ever talked to me that way ever before. That really, really motivated me.”

Looking back, Benarroch now remembers home and family as “a safe place,” and “when you have really strong family ties, and you know your family has committed a lot to get you where you are, that can really drive you to achieve.

“I think I probably felt it was harder to be [Moroccan] as a teenager, when I was trying to be accepted into a crowd. That probably went through to my early 20s when I realized that it was a really beautiful culture, and … if I had a family or kids, that would be something really important to bring into the household.”

The Ryerson University Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Studies Centre is a collective of researchers from the Faculty of Arts devoted to the culture, history, literature, politics, and societies of the regions and their diasporic populations. For more information on the centre’s courses, resources and events, visit https://www.torontomu.ca/mena/.