On the trail of social relations in the colonial Sahara: a postcolonial reading

The Atlantic coast of the Sahara Desert was belatedly colonised by Spain. The paternalistic nature of this process and the collaboration of Sahrawi tribal leaders produced a specific type of colonial relations. The military hierarchy of colonial structures overlapped with the social stratification of Sahrawi tribes. Yet outside the upper echelons of Sahrawi authorities and Spanish military officers, daily life in the colony was defined by interactions among workers who performed the less lucrative jobs, Spanish immigrants from the Canary Islands as well as members of the indigenous population. Given their similar social status, four decades after the Spanish decolonisation (1975), we can still recognise the feelings that Sahrawi people inspire among Canarian returnees and the Sahrawis’ recollections of Canarian settlers, proving that colonial relations are never simple but ambivalent and open to new interpretations, especially when they intersect with other categories such as social class. Informed by postcolonial studies, our analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in the Canary Islands and the Sahara over the last ten years reveals the affective bond shared by colonisers and colonised at the bottom of the social hierarchy, allowing us to identify colonial memory as a cornerstone of social and cultural geography.