Morocco spent much of the late twentieth century looking north across the Mediterranean, toward Europe, toward the trade relationships and diplomatic alignments that connected it to the continent from which most of its foreign investment and most of its tourists came. That orientation has not disappeared. But over the past two decades, it has been supplemented by something equally deliberate: a strategic turn toward sub-Saharan Africa that has made Morocco one of the most active economic actors on the continent south of the Sahara. The numbers are significant. Moroccan companies are major investors in banking, insurance, telecommunications, and construction across West and Central Africa. Attijariwafa Bank has become one of the largest commercial banks in sub-Saharan Africa by expansion, operating in more than a dozen African countries. Maroc Telecom holds leading positions in several West African markets. The OCP Group, the state phosphate company that is one of the world's largest producers of phosphate fertilizer, has made serving African agricultural markets a central strategic priority, building a distribution and blending network designed to put affordable fertilizer closer to the farmers who need it. This is partly commercial logic, and partly something more deliberate. King Mohammed VI has made economic diplomacy in Africa a personal priority in a way that is unusual for heads of state. His visits to sub-Saharan African countries over the past decade have been consistently accompanied by substantial delegations of Moroccan business leaders and by the signing of bilateral investment and cooperation agreements. The cumulative effect has been to build relationships, and market positions, that did not exist a generation ago. Morocco's readmission to the African Union in 2017, after a three-decade absence over the dispute about Western Sahara, gave this strategy an institutional home. The Western Sahara question remains unresolved and is a genuine constraint on Morocco's diplomatic ambitions; several of its neighbors in the Sahel recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which Rabat regards as an unacceptable challenge to its territorial claims. But the AU membership has provided a framework for engagement that Morocco has used effectively. The ambition that has drawn the most international attention is the Trans-Moroccan Gas Pipeline, also known as the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline, a proposed undersea and overland link that would carry Nigerian natural gas through eleven West African countries before connecting to European markets via Morocco. If it gets built, it would be one of the largest infrastructure projects in African history. The political and financial challenges are considerable; the project has been in various stages of planning for years, and the number of countries and governments it requires to coordinate makes progress slow. But Morocco's role in anchoring it reflects the scope of what Rabat now imagines for itself. Domestically, Morocco is managing its own significant tensions. The economic growth that has made the country a regional success story is distributed unevenly. The gap between the prosperous urban corridors of Casablanca and Rabat and the rural provinces of the Rif, the High Atlas, and the south has not closed at the rate that the government's development plans projected. The 2016 Hirak Rif movement, a sustained protest against economic marginalization in the north of the country, produced a crackdown and arrests that drew criticism from human rights organizations and left an unresolved grievance beneath the surface of Moroccan politics. The country has also moved aggressively on renewable energy, with massive solar and wind installations in the Saharan south that have made Morocco one of Africa's leading clean energy producers. The Noor concentrated solar plant near Ouarzazate is among the largest solar facilities in the world. Morocco has ambitions not just to decarbonize its own grid but to export renewable electricity to Europe, which would make it an energy supplier rather than an energy importer, a transformation that would substantially reshape its geopolitical position. It is a country with real ambitions and real contradictions, navigating between its historical relationship with Europe and a new engagement with Africa, between political authoritarianism and genuine economic modernization. How those tensions resolve will shape not just Morocco's future but the broader question of what North Africa's role in the continent's emergence actually looks like.