Sara Green - BA History (International)

Marginal Voices: Collectivising Sahrawi memory in conveying a shared trauma of ‘hidden’ human rights violations in the Western Sahara

The Sahrawi are a pastoralist nomad group that historically inhabit the Western Sahara
desert, and since decolonisation from Spain have largely been forcibly displaced into the
Eastern desert regions of Algeria, following an invasion and occupation by Moroccan
forces in violation of international law. This research highlights the prolific human rights
abuses that Sahrawi exiles have been systematically subjected to, and how this trauma
is conceptualised in popular cultural sources. The prolonged deadlock between Moroccan
and Saharawi interests has produced increasing international apathy towards exiled
communities. In response to this apathy, a conscious construction of ‘collective memory’
has served to memorialise these ‘hidden’ abuses and reunify what is a spatially and
culturally fragmented society. This will be explored through innovations in traditional
Sahrawi poetic and musical forms, adapted to amplify political concerns and process the
collective traumas of separation and forced disappearances. The amplification of these
marginal voices serve to contribute to the possibility of a more considered, ‘bottom
upwards’ decolonial process for ‘Africa’s last colony’.