Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

The Nationalist Nomads and the Nomadic Nation: History/Memory and the refugees of Western Sahara

Randa Farah

Anthropology Department

Social Science Center

University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario

Canada

  More than three decades have passed since the refugees of Western Sahara - the last African colony (formerly Spanish Sahara) - fled the Moroccan invasion in 1975 towards the arid Algerian desert. For the refugees, the UN-sponsored referendum, which was to take place in 1992 based on the right to self-determination, has become a distant memory. Morocco’s role in obstructing the referendum has been amply documented, and its policies of occupation and annexation are bolstered by the implicit acquiescence of powerful countries, mainly Spain (the former colonial power), France and the US. Today, the echo of the conflict in the northwest corner of Africa is barely audible, a twentieth-century anti-colonial struggle whose objective of national liberation, like that of the Palestinians, remains unfulfilled in the twenty-first century.  

However, since their displacement, the Sahrawis living in refugee camps waged a remarkable struggle to develop their society and prepare for repatriation. In 1976, the Frente Polisario declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the state-in-exile which proceeded to implement a National Action Program directed at transforming the refugees into citizens capable of leading their sovereign nation-state. SADR’s national program required collective mobilization to eliminate tribalism, to wipe out illiteracy, and to establish state and civil institutions. The resolute effort to prepare refugees for a modern future nation-state necessitated the dispersal of family members: education, regarded by SADR as an important strategy required sending children to study abroad; young men left to join the army, which meant that until the cease-fire in 1991, women single-handedly cared for their families and administered the camps.

In this paper I will discuss the socio-cultural transformations and the concurrent shifts in the relationship between ‘official’ history and popular reconstructions of the past. However, the paper problematizes what is ‘official’, ‘hegemonic’ or ‘subaltern’ in the Sahrawi context. One of the issues I consider is the fact that until relatively recently, Sahrawis learned their history through an oral tradition, passed down to younger generations through narration, poetry and story telling. The paper will discuss how a nomadic culture characterized by mobility was incorporated into the national narrative based on territorial claims and centralized political institutions.

In light of the above, the paper will trace the effects of the demise of the nomadic freeg (a group of families who lived and moved together) as the ‘state’ took over its traditional functions. This implied changes in the sites where memory is reproduced and transmitted, and in the relationship between remembering and forgetting. I will question whether it is possible to conceive of a generation without memory, meaning one that has ‘forgotten’ its tribal past and looks to its national future? The policies of SADR contributed to the emergence of a forward-looking generation that anchors its collective identity on notions of citizenship and national belonging. However, neither SADR nor the refugee-citizens imagined their exile to last for decades: how will this affect collective mobilization and the reproduction of a national past?

About Randa Farah

Randa Farah is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Farah was a research associate at the Centre de Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain (CERMOC), in Amman, Jordan, where she participated in a research project on Palestinian refugees and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). She held different positions as Visiting Fellow and an associate researcher at the Refugee Studies Center (RSC) at the University of Oxford, where together with a lawyer, she taught a course titled Palestinian Refugees and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dr. Farah acquired her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto where she examines the relationship of Palestinian popular memory and identity in the context of a refugee camp in Jordan. Her current research on Western Sahara is focused on national identity, generation and gender issues. Her writings and lectures reflect her interests in the areas of memory/history and identity, conflict and displacement/ refugees, nations and nationalism, children, and humanitarian aid.