Introduction
In 2000, Saharawi poet-activist Malainin Lakhal fled for his life across the Moroccan military wall. By that time, he had already spent two periods of forced disappearance in Moroccan secret detention centres due to his work. 1 Saharawi national poet Khadijattu A’layyat Asuelm has a similar story: after suffering state-sponsored violence she was forced to leave behind her family in occupied Western Sahara and head, on foot, to the Saharawi-controlled zone of Western Sahara and then on to the Saharawi refugee camps beyond in Algeria. 2 Thankfully, both poets made it out alive (the Moroccan military wall is fortified with an estimated 7 to 10 million landmines [ San Martín and Allan 2007]) to said camps. Meanwhile, Mauritanian national poet Abd Allahi Ouled Bouna was (and still is) composing verses in solidarity with Saharawis. “The Moroccan regime regards me as its greatest enemy in Mauritania,” he says. 3 Ouled Bouna claims that the regime has made numerous attempts, over the last 20 years, to bribe him to lend his poetic tongue in support of the Moroccan position on the Western Sahara conflict. Saharawi society has a rich oral tradition, which—significantly—shares similarities with the wider Hassaniya oral tradition of neighbouring Mauritania. Thus, whilst Morocco uses the carceral system to punish Saharawis practising poetry in occupied Western Sahara, it simultaneously attempts to bribe other Hassaniya speakers to uphold poetic traditions in a way that favours the Moroccan state. It is this simultaneous two-pronged strategy of elimination and appropriation, and its relationship with the settler colonial carceral system, which interests me in this article.
Cultural appropriation or exploitation in settler colonial studies is generally understood to occur when a settler group adopts the cultural practices of the Indigenous group. Appropriation compounds the silencing of the Indigenous group thereby overlapping with cultural domination. The latter seeks to eliminate the Indigenous group by way of forced assimilation, often via a carceral system, into the dominant settler culture. In settler colonialism, the colonial state moves a settler population into the colonized land with a view to eliminating the Indigenous population. In other words, whilst “classic” colonialism involves the exploitation of colonized peoples and lands, settler colonialism is genocidal. There is ample research on settler colonial policies of cultural exploitation or appropriation and, on the other hand, on cultural domination or forced assimilation, as well as on cultural injustices and discrimination in settler colonial contexts more generally. Nevertheless, there is little discussion in the literature on how states pursue these two settler colonial strategies or processes simultaneously, and how the carceral system underpins these strategies. In this paper, I focus on the purpose and intended effect of the parallel pursuit of cultural exploitation and cultural domination. I aim to contribute to settler colonial studies by illuminating how the side-by-side enactment of such settler colonial strategies amounts to what I call cultural robbery. Cultural robbery, I argue, occurs when the settler state ensures exclusive use or possession of Indigenous cultural practices, markers and heritage. It adopts the latter as its own whilst simultaneously prohibiting—via the criminal “justice” system and linked practices of state (violent) punishment—the use and practice of the culture by the Indigenous community. I do not wish to suggest that exploitation and domination are opposing binaries. Of course, the binaries between these complex concepts are blurred, and each one facilitates the other: cultural appropriation by a colonizer always involves the erasure of the Indigenous culture to some extent. However, as I hope to further illustrate below, there are nuanced differences between settler colonial policies of cultural exploitation and cultural domination, and, I argue, that settler colonial states may use different combinations of these policies at different moments, to specific ends. By “culture,” I refer both to the meaning inferred when the noun begins with a capital, “Culture,” that is, practices linked to artistic expression, and to culture with a lowercase “c,” that is, a way of life practised by particular peoples in a specific geographical location.
My case study for this article is the Moroccan regime’s cultural robbery of the Saharawis, the Indigenous people of Western Sahara, two-thirds of which is illegally occupied by neighbouring Morocco. Western Sahara is the last colony in Africa. After almost 30 years of ceasefire, in November 2020 the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and Morocco returned to warfare over control of Western Sahara, a country on Africa’s Atlantic coast that borders Morocco, Mauritania, and Algeria. Spain colonized Western Sahara in 1884. A Saharawi pro-independence movement, known as the POLISARIO Front, emerged in the late 1960s to push for decolonisation. Whilst Spain began plans for a referendum on self-determination for the Saharawis in 1974, the following year it abandoned this plan and instead secretly negotiated the illegal Madrid Accords with Morocco and Mauritania. Through this, Western Sahara was divided between Morocco and Mauritania, whilst Spain retained rights to fish in the territory’s waters and received a third of future profits from the phosphates mine located in the capital city, El Aaiun. Morocco and Mauritania invaded Western Sahara in October 1975, using napalm on four known occasions against fleeing Saharawi civilians ( Zunes and Mundy 2010: 114). According to Morocco and Mauritania, Western Sahara was part of their respective territories ahead of Spanish colonisation. However, an International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion issued in October 1975 found this was not the case. It recommended self-determination for the Saharawis (International Court of Justice, 16 October 1975).
Upon the invasion, POLISARIO attempted to defend the territory and helped to evacuate fleeing civilian Saharawis to the southwest Algerian desert. The POLISARIO declared the refugee camps there a state-in-exile (the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic) in February 1976. Some Saharawis did not or could not flee the invading powers and remained living under occupation. As is well-documented by international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Saharawis living under occupation have endured, and continue to endure, horrendous human rights abuses.
The UN brokered a ceasefire between POLISARIO and Morocco in 1991, on the promise of a self-determination referendum on independence for the Saharawis. This referendum has still not been held. In November 2020, Saharawi citizens living in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara created a roadblock on a Moroccan-built road that traverses SADR-controlled territory into Mauritania. When the Moroccan army fired on Saharawi citizens, the SADR army returned fire, ending the three-decade-long ceasefire. Morocco’s politics and governance in occupied Western Sahara are based on settler colonial logics. As in other settler colonial contexts, incarceration is central to the Moroccan settler colonial project in occupied Western Sahara. Political orientation shapes the experience of prisoners. Pro-independence Saharawi prisoners are seen as a threat to the Moroccan state and the carceral system of control incorporates the realm of culture and arts.
In this study I draw on UN reports, human rights NGO reports, past fieldwork (2015) in occupied Western Sahara, recent fieldwork with 13 Saharawi poets, two Mauritanian poets and dozens of cultural activists in Algeria (2023), Spain (2022) and Mauritania (2022) as well as on work of other Western Sahara specialists to document parallel processes, led by the Moroccan state, of exploitation and oppression of Saharawi culture. 4 Before presenting this evidence in Section 3, I firstly discuss, in Section 1, the context of multiculturalism and its relationship to settler colonialism in Morocco and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. In Section 2, I outline my approach to issues of cultural essentialism.
1. Multiculturalism, Settler Colonialism and Defining Culture
Since at least 2011, when Morocco incorporated the Saharawi dialect of Hassaniya as an official language in its revised Constitution, the Moroccan state has incorporated occupied Western Sahara into its wider suite of multicultural policies. As Moha Ennaji notes, the meaning of multiculturalism is ambiguous ( Ennaji 2014a). In its best sense, multiculturalism is the preservation of cultures or cultural identities within a wider community, state or nation, including protecting minority rights ( Ennaji 2014a: 3–5). However, Ennaji finds that, in North Africa, there is a tendency to “promote highly unitary and homogenizing ideas of nationhood and state unity, while discouraging or even forbidding minority political mobilization.” ( Ennaji 2014a: 5)
This is also true of state discourses of mestizaje in Latin American contexts ( Baker 2021). For Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the Bolivian state’s “neoliberal” multiculturalism is better understood as a form of “internal colonialism” designed to invisibilize Indigenous struggles and to facilitate the state’s appropriation of “Indianness,” ( Cusicanqui 2015: 68) Melissa Lovell explores the entanglement of multiculturalism and settler colonialism in the Australian context. She finds that white Australia understands multiculturalism as only applicable to Australians of an “ethnic” background ( Lovell 2017). Joseph Salazar, focusing on the case of US imperialism in Hawaii ( Salazar 2014), finds that multiculturalism is inherently settler colonial in that it “is predicated on a multicultural logic of universal access to rights, distribution of resources, and supposed social equality.” ( Salazar 2014: 63) Multiculturalism can therefore, Salazar argues, be used to undermine Indigenous claims to differentiation, especially those associated with ancestral lands which, according to US multiculturalism’s logics, belong to “everyone,” not just Indigenous Hawaiians. In this way, multiculturalism’s promise of equality is used to mask settler colonial landgrabs. Likewise, a myth of Indigenous inclusivity amounts to appropriation of Hawaiian culture, history and language.
Desiree Poets (2021) focuses on multiculturalism in settler colonial Brazil, arguing that there, neoliberal multiculturalism is a form of soft conquest through the assimilation of Indigenous peoples. For Poets, assimilation is a form of elimination: multiculturalism is a settler colonial technique for managing difference, in which certain forms of Indigenous difference are recognized, but in a way that allows the state to seek a monopoly over the epistemology of Indigeneity. Elizabeth Povinelli finds that Indigeneity is often celebrated in settler colonial societies under the banner of liberal multiculturalism (2002: 161). Stephen Sheehi and Lara Sheehi, working on the Palestinian case, show that Israeli multicultural myths of “inclusivity” of “Israeli-Arabs” mask a settler colonial reality (2020: 187).
My work contributes to, and builds on, this body of literature on the settler coloniality of multiculturalism. I add to the conversation by arguing that multiculturalism can be used to facilitate cultural robbery. I chart the history of the cultural elements of Moroccan settler colonialism in occupied Western Sahara since 1975, arguing that Morocco’s initial strategy was akin to that of other settler colonial societies: elimination by way of (cultural) genocide ( Short 2016), in which Saharawi cultural markers of difference were oppressed and Saharawis were violently encouraged to assimilate to Moroccan culture. However, in the failure of this cultural genocide, and conscious of the advantages of neoliberal multiculturalism, from the mid-2000s Morocco has pursued, I argue, a settler colonial cultural robbery in the guise of multiculturalism. Beyond the Western Sahara case, this research therefore contributes to a nuanced understanding of the interaction between settler colonialism, cultural genocide, cultural appropriation, and multiculturalism.
Most studies of the cultural aspects of settler colonialism focus on cultural genocide or cultural elimination. For example, the Zionist state project erased Palestinian placenames ( Masalha 2015). On the other hand, research, in settler colonial studies, on cultural appropriation tends to offer several definitions. Rogers defines four types of cultural appropriation:
Cultural exchange: the reciprocal exchange of symbols, artefacts, rituals, genres, and/or technologies between cultures with roughly equal levels of power.
Cultural dominance: the use of elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture in a context in which the dominant culture has been imposed onto the subordinated culture, including appropriations that enact resistance.
Cultural exploitation: the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation.
Transculturation: cultural elements created from and/or by multiple cultures, such that identification of a single originating culture is problematic, for example, multiple cultural appropriations structured in the dynamics of globalization and transnational capitalism creating hybrid forms (2006).
Settler colonial studies research into cultural appropriation tends to focus on what Rogers has categorized as cultural domination and cultural exploitation in turn. Rogers’ categorizations are useful in removing the vagueness of “cultural appropriation” especially since the terminology is sometimes used to refer to the more positive ideas of transculturalization and exchange, especially outside of settler colonial contexts. However, I wish to add a layer to the analysis by asking what happens when dominance and exploitation are forcefully pursued in parallel. By doing so, I further settler colonial studies’ understanding of the possible strategies of settler colonial states in the cultural ambit.
If we focus on cultural domination and cultural exploitation enacted in parallel, what we find is closer to one dictionary definition of appropriation: “to take exclusive possession of ”( February 2022); in other words, robbery. Accusations of cultural theft in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the theft of material heritage by colonial actors. The British museums’ extensive collections of art plundered from Britain’s former colonies are famous examples ( Azoulay 2010; Hicks 2020). I am interested in directing the conversation towards the robbery of cultural practices, rather than artefacts and material objects.
2. Addressing the Perils of Cultural Essentialism
Especially given my subject position as a white, British woman researcher, any discussion of the membership criteria of what it means to be Saharawi is potentially fraught with ethical as well as epistemological questions. As Arjun Appadurai points out, ethnic identities are fluid and negotiable before being “fixed” by a nation-state or similar body with an interest in establishing borders between identities ( Appadurai 1996: 58). Nevertheless, as Irwin points out, this is a binary through which Saharawis have been forced to identify in order to participate in the UN process for decolonization ( Irwin 2019). International law protects and demands such binaries in order to exercise the right to make claims ( Irwin 2019).
One of the traps faced by those who protest cultural appropriation is the accusation of cultural essentialism. There is the risk of appearing to claim that a certain culture is “pure,” unchanged by outsight influences and is therefore somehow static and undynamic ( Rogers 2006). Another linked (because it requires the setting of boundaries, which in itself has homogenizing tendencies) “trap” is the inherent problem of policing “insiders” and “outsiders” to the culture being exploited. As James O. Young argues (2005), the entire concept of cultural appropriation requires the distinguishing of members and non-members of a culture. Who decides who is Saharawi and who is not? Whilst the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) has criteria, agreed by POLISARIO and Morocco, for deciding this with the purpose of establishing voter lists, judging the boundaries of Saharawi “cultural membership” in wider terms is perhaps an impossible, harmful and ethically problematic task. Cultures intermingle, and can develop and influence each other in dynamic, creative and organic ways without malicious exploitation or appropriation ( Arizpe et. al. 2000). One proposed solution, as Hatala (2016) and Killmister (2011) note, is to promote self-identification with a certain culture. However, and as Hatala highlights, determining cultural membership on the basis of self-identification means that “the ability of individuals to lodge claims about cultural appropriation will be weakened to the point of irrelevance,” which is especially problematic in settler colonial contexts (2016: 359).
Killmister’s (2011) favoured solution to the traps of cultural essentialism and membership is to reframe the question. She argues that there is a need to focus on the interests an individual has in attaining membership of a certain cultural group, highlighting that some individuals make fraudulent claims to membership of cultural groups in order to access benefits for which they would otherwise not qualify (2011). Following Killmister then would require, rather than attempting to (only) outline who is and who is not Saharawi according to certain nominal criteria, bearing in mind the motives of those who might fraudulently claim to be Saharawi. Whilst a well-known paid Moroccan lobbyist donning a melhfa (traditional Saharawi women’s dress) at Berlin Green Week in order to greenwash Morocco’s renewable energy developments on occupied land may be a fairly clear case of “fraudulent” claim of Saharawi cultural membership, what of the child of Moroccan settlers born and bred in Western Sahara, claiming to be Saharawi with conviction of heart, understanding “Saharawi” as its literal Arabic meaning, “of the desert”? This conviction may or may not be a result of the influence of Moroccan state hegemonic discourse, but, either way, is it “fraudulent” if it is heartfelt? In response, I wish to highlight that I am interested not in the actions and motivations of individual settlers, or descendants of settlers. Here, I consider only how the Moroccan state attempts to manipulate settlers in pursuit of its colonial policies.
3. Cultural Robbery in Occupied Western Sahara
Settler colonial studies as a field has emerged to explore the particular characteristics, processes and effects of settler colonialism, as opposed to other colonial systems. Settler colonialists, “outsiders who come to stay and establish territorialised sovereign political orders,” ( Veracini 2007: 1) seek to eliminate the Indigenous population ( Wolfe 1999: 2), whilst non-settler colonialists seek to maintain the Indigenous population in order to exploit it. Lorenzo Veracini explains the difference thus: a colonist meets an Indigenous person and says, “You, work for me.” (2011: 2) A settler colonist meets an Indigenous person and says “Go away.” ( Veracini 2011: 2) “Go away” can imply various strategies of elimination: physical elimination or displacement, erasing Indigenous cultural practices, or absorbing, assimilating or amalgamating the Indigenous population into the settler one (ibid.). In other words, classic colonial regimes attempt to perpetuate the hierarchical colonizer-colonized divide, whilst settler colonialism seeks to eliminate all colonial determinants. The ultimate fulfilment of settler colonialism is to extinguish itself by a discontinuation, or total assimilation, of Indigenous claims and subjectivities ( Veracini 2007). Veracini unpacks this claim by saying that settler-colonists “repress, co-opt, and extinguish Indigenous alterities, and productively manage ethnic diversity. By the end of this trajectory, they claim to be no longer settler colonial.” (2011: 3)
Morocco’s approach in Western Sahara is typical of settler colonialism. Its settler colonist approach to eliminating the Saharawi population has had two overlapping periods: first, oppression, then later, assimilation. It should be noted that the instances of settler colonialism in the realm of culture explored here are part of wider settler colonial strategies, which are not within the scope of the article but which I briefly outline here for context. Since its 1975 invasion, Morocco has moved a settler population into occupied Western Sahara, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. At the time of writing, there is no reliable data on the proportion of settlers to Indigenous Saharawis in the territory, but the consensus is that Saharawis now represent a minority of the population vis-a-vis Moroccan settlers. The initial invasion of Western Sahara involved “extensive attacks against civilian populations and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war.” ( Zunes and Mundy 2010: 114) The early years of the occupation saw the targeting of pregnant and nursing mothers and the latter’s infants ( Allan 2019: 158–159). Forced sterilization of some (suspected) pro-independence activists began in 1975 and continues (ibid.: 156–159, 182). Gendered forms of torture are the norm. I have argued elsewhere that such forms of torture are used to prevent the reproduction of the Saharawi nation, by making it harder, physically, economically, and emotionally for pro-independence activists to have children (ibid.: 178–182). Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s work on the violent targeting of pregnant women in Palestine shows that the Israeli settler colonial state directly invades the intimate spaces of pregnancy and birth. Shalhoub-Kervorkian argues that this is because such women, precisely because of their pregnant bodies, defy the mission of settler colonialism by “represent[ing] the opposite of disappearance.” (2018: np) I likewise understand the targeting of the pregnant women during the initial invasion, and the continued use of gendered torture techniques, as settler colonial. Finally, elimination was attempted culturally by way of oppression of all Saharawi identity markers.
Nevertheless, genocide was not achieved and complete cultural oppression has not worked due to long-lasting Saharawi (cultural) resistance ( Stephan and Mundy 2006; Lakhal 2015; Allan 2019). Morocco is therefore increasingly attempting elimination via assimilation. But this is a curious assimilation. The state attempts to assimilate Saharawis into Moroccan culture by force, whilst simultaneously assimilating Moroccans into Saharawi culture. That way, “Saharawi” can be marketed as just one more provincial identity within a greater, united Moroccan nation ( Deubel Flynn 2012). Multiculturalism facilitates cultural robbery.
This part of the article contains long narrative sections, but these are necessary to bring together evidence of simultaneous cultural oppression and appropriation in order, first, to show that this is a state strategy rather than an occasional unfortunate occurrence, and secondly, since as Wolfe has famously argued, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event (1999), such documentation is necessary in order to illuminate how structures of settler colonialism are built and maintained in the case of Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara (Steinman 2016: 220–221). I group this documentation into different facets of Moroccan state cultural policy: adoption of the identity marker “Saharawi” by Moroccan settlers; the proliferation of Moroccan “Hassaniya” cultural festivals; education; language; clothing; the use of foreign corporations as allies; and nomadic practices.
In occupied Western Sahara, the very word Saharawi is appropriated. Since at least 2015, some settlers refer to themselves to foreign tourists as “Saharawi,” on the basis that they live in “Moroccan Sahara,” or were born there. July Blalack found, whilst attending a 2017 Moroccan state-sponsored “Hassaniya” cultural festival in southern Morocco, that many Moroccans insist that “Saharawi” only has a literal meaning (“Saharawi” in Arabic is literally “of the desert,” although, as Blalack points out, in Arabic as well as English the term is most commonly used as I use it in the paper i.e. to refer to ethnic Saharawis), and should therefore only be used to describe any person living in the Sahara desert ( Blalack 2017). The Moroccan state’s attempts to encourage Moroccan settlers to name themselves “Saharawis” took a literal turn during the referendum registration process in the 1990s. This was a political manoeuvre to specifically manipulate the referendum on independence. The detailed 1995 Human Rights Watch report on the referendum registration process, Keeping it Secret: The United Nations Operation in the Western Sahara, explains how the Moroccan state arranged for 100,000 Moroccans to register as Saharawis for the vote on independence. Meanwhile, ethnic Saharawis (as well as UN staff, some of whom were too frightened to talk to Human Rights Watch, others of whom claim to have been dismissed for whistle-blowing) were threatened and intimated in order to dissuade them from registering, physically blocked from the voter identification centre entrance, or harassed inside the UN voter identification centre where Moroccan authorities controversially insisted on a presence (1995).
Although, according to the report, it was easy to distinguish ethnic Saharawis from Moroccans (on the basis of five evaluation criteria, which are detailed in the Human Rights Watch report), as each applicant had to be separately interviewed and had the right of appeal should their application be rejected, this Moroccan state manoeuvre of posing Moroccans as Saharawis blocked the still unrealized referendum process for years on end ( Human Rights Watch 1995). In 2000, the UN abandoned the registration process, although the UN Operation charged with carrying out this process (MINURSO) remains in the territory to monitor the now non-existent ceasefire. In this example, settler state-sponsored cultural appropriation took on a very literal face with a specific political goal: halting the practice of Saharawi self-determination by stalling the referendum.
Saharawis’ history, knowledge and culture is transmitted via poetry and song. The Moroccan state has tried to, first, erase, then later appropriate this tradition. Tara Deubel notes the story of Sidati Essalami, a renowned “master” Saharawi poet, who has attempted the grand project of recording Saharawi oral poetry and histories (2012). His story is emblematic of Moroccan state policy in the initial years of its occupation in Western Sahara, which was to erase all that was Saharawi, including Saharawi cultural heritage. Moroccan police twice (1975 and 1987) seized the contents of Essalami’s library. In the 1987 incident, as Deubel has reported, police ransacked 72 manuscripts written on goat and gazelle skin, 18 volumes of 1410 poems written over two decades and audio cassettes of several thousand radio broadcasts in the Hassaniya language recorded over 25 years (2012). Essalami was imprisoned, and, according to the testimony of his fellow inmate Fatma Aayache, regularly tortured whilst in custody ( Aayache 23 June 2007). An extended quotation of the aforementioned poet Khadijattu A’layyat Asuelm illustrates the centrality of the carceral system—in her case in the shape of state-sponsored threats and harassment—to these settler colonial cultural policies. Here she describes her 1999 forced exit from occupied Western Sahara and her experiences as a poet under occupation:
I went on foot alone in the middle of the night; I traversed the 30 kilometers to the Berm, infiltrated it, and crossed another 15 kilometers. In the morning, I was hiding, and at night, I was moving. I travelled for two nights before arriving at the area of Rahbet Garet Etmar, which is a part of the liberated territories under the control of the People’s Liberation Army. Following that, I encountered a Saharawi bedouin who led me to the second military region in Tifariti, from where I travelled to the camps [. . .] [P]oetry is a talent. And I discovered in myself this talent that Allah bestowed upon me so long ago. I’ve been rhyming words since I was a little child, and ever since, I’ve thought of it as a magic wand I could use whenever and however I wanted to strike the invading enemy [. . .] There [in the occupied territory], I was always subjected to police harassment. When I wrote a poem there, the police would always harass me and ask who wrote it. If they found out that I had encouraged young people to participate in protests or that I had written poems honoring a political prisoner who had been released and urging everyone to fight the occupation, they would also harass me. Thank God, I no longer experience any of those forms of harassment; it’s as if I can breathe out a sigh of relief. 5
These crimes against Saharawi culture have set the pattern since 1975. As Sidati Essalami’s case in particular shows, prisons have been central to the Moroccan settler colonial project including in the realm of culture. However, in the last two decades a new parallel strategy has emerged: to foster the adoption of all that might be seen as Saharawi among Moroccan settler communities, and amongst ethnic Moroccans in Morocco-proper.
Deubel’s research highlights the substantial, recent investments made by Morocco in “Hassaniya” cultural festivals in southern Morocco, where performers wear traditional Saharawi clothing and recite poetry in the Hassaniya dialect (2012). The state appropriates cultural heritage, finds Deubel, to promote a unified, postcolonial national identity of diverse but inclusive cultures and ethnic identities. Cultural appropriation serves the state’s version of multiculturalism. National belonging is emphasized at “Hassaniya” cultural events via Moroccan flags, the presence of government delegates and collective prayer ( Deubel Flynn 2012). However, Deubel also notes that, although part of a longer tradition that publicly celebrates Moroccan Berber identity, these specifically “Hassaniya” cultural festivals are a recent phenomenon. The largest festival, held annually in Tantan (south Morocco), began in 2003 ( Deubel Flynn 2012).
As Boum (2007) has noted, the post-independence Moroccan state has tried to counter French colonial divisions of Morocco’s Arab and Berber populations by vigorously attempting to create a nation of inclusive identities by cultural means. Since independence, Moroccanness has been defined by referring to a culture derived from African, Arab, Berber, Islamic and Jewish elements. Boum also links Morocco’s brand of multiculturalism to an attempt to defend the monarchy from opposing Berber political forces. When several Berber leaders were associated with two coup d’etat attempts in 1971 and 1972, “instead of using force to subdue their cultural challenges, the state utilized a method of structural violence making the inclusive homogenization symbolic instead of physical.” ( Boum 2007: 215) Similarly, Jonathan Wyrtzen argues that, through the multicultural programme launched by the 2011 Moroccan Constitution, the Moroccan monarchy successfully subdued the political potential of the Moroccan Arab Spring moment (2014: 27). Violeta Ruano Posada (2019: 4) shows that, since the end of the first Western Sahara war in 1991, the Moroccan state has gradually exploited Saharawi culture in a similar fashion. The state appropriates Saharawi culture as a tool to subdue opposition. Ruano Posada provides examples such as the Festival of Hassani Poetry in Dakhla, the Festival International Rawafid Azawane in Al Aaiun, and the Boujdour Festival. In southern Morocco, lands once dominated by Saharawis, she includes the Taragalte Festival in M’Hamid El Ghizlane and the Moussem Festival in Tan Tan, which was listed in the UNESCO list of Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005 as part of Morocco’s national cultural heritage (2019).
Research by a team at Cornell Law School and the University of Caen Basse-Normandie notes that the aforementioned festivals lead to censorship of Saharawi culture, denying it even the name “Saharawi,” instead calling it “Hassaniya.” This research evaluates these festivals, along with the recent, state-sponsored Museum of the Sahara, a music institute and Centre for Saharan studies, all of which have the alleged aim of promoting “Hassaniya” culture, as being “in reality aimed at exploiting a simplified, ‘folklorized’ and decontextualized version of Sahrawi culture in order to better control it and reduce it to an asset of Morocco’s tourism industry.” (2015: 22) Just as Brazil has done with museums dedicated to the history of Indigenous communities in what Poets (2021) calls an “epistemological settling,” the Moroccan state presents, in such cultural events, “its” “Hassaniya” population to the wider Moroccan nation and to tourists as well as attempting to hold a monopoly over knowledge about this population.
The findings of the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights back up the view of the Cornell Law School and the University of Caen Basse-Normandie research teams. Focusing on cultural events sponsored by the Moroccan state in occupied Western Sahara, the Rapporteur found that a disproportionate amount of funding was spent on inviting performers from outside of Western Sahara, that musicians were screened by a committee that could request lyrics changes, or block musicians from performing, should they be deemed inappropriate, and that some cultural practitioners were not allowed to participate ( Shaheed 2012). Most ironically, she reported that, during the 2011 Sea and Desert festival of “Hassaniya” culture (a repeat event aimed at tourists featuring windsurfing and international musicians) in occupied Dakhla, violence erupted involving the burning of 70 Saharawi homes (2012). She also found that some cultural associations experience difficulties in registering despite submitting all the necessary documentation (2012). Saharawis participating in cultural events with material that challenges Moroccan discourse on occupied Western Sahara as its “southern provinces” can be assaulted, imprisoned or even disappeared ( Human Rights Clinic of Cornell Law School 2015; Lakhal 2015). 6 In other words, whilst the Moroccan state practices large-scale cultural appropriation by sponsoring “Moroccan Hassaniya” cultural festivals, in parallel it precludes Saharawis from participating in festivals that purportedly celebrate their own culture and carry out a violent oppression of those Saharawis that dare to organize their own events or initiatives.
Education is vital for a community’s cultural transmission. The education system in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara oppresses this transmission and Saharawi identity markers more generally ( Lakhal 2015). 7 As the UN Special Rapporteur notes, in schools in occupied Western Sahara, Saharawis do not study their own culture and history, but only the official history of Morocco (2012). The Cornell/Caen Basse-Normandie team notes that history lessons present Saharawis as an “uncivilized” people, “in need of aid from Morocco,” thereby employing the civilizing mission discourse that was used to justify European colonialism (2015: 18). The Moroccan state’s colonial education programme reflects pedagogical norms in other settler colonial contexts. Krebs and Olwan argue that the schooling system was (and is) integral to the process of “cultural genocide” in the part of Turtle Island also known as Canada (2012: 146). Rogers also describes a similar process through which the United States forcibly assimilated Indigenous children through the boarding school system by imposing the dominant US culture on them (2006: 480). Some Saharawi children report dropping out of school due to bullying for speaking Hassaniya. Teachers have told children that they sound like “camels” when they speak Hassaniya (Human Rights Clinic of Cornell Law School 2015: 18). To belittle another’s culture has been a tactic typical of cultural genocide in other contexts. For example, the Chinese state attempts to persuade its population that Tibetan culture is antiquated and unworthy of survival ( Davidson 2012). Saharawi children are punished, often violently, for speaking Hassaniya in school (Human Rights Clinic of Cornell Law School 2015: 23–24). Such policies are indicative of cultural and ethnic discrimination designed to humiliate its Saharawi child victims, and therefore to encourage the latter to self-repress their own culture.
It is impossible to find Hassaniya dictionaries, or written publications in Hassaniya, for sale in occupied Western Sahara, and state-sponsored CDs of Saharawi music are reportedly gifted to visiting delegates as a mark of Morocco’s claim to Saharawi culture, but are not made available to the public (Human Rights Clinic of Cornell Law School 2015). And yet in 2011 Morocco introduced Hassaniya into Article 5 of its reformed Constitution, describing it as an “integral part of the united Moroccan cultural identity.” ( Kingdom of Morocco 2011) In other words, whilst the Moroccan state co-opts the Hassaniya dialect as part of its national multicultural image, it simultaneously attempts to sever it from Saharawi mouths. This way, Saharawis are slowly eliminated (via the loss of their cultural heritage in so far as it is expressed through their Hassaniya tongue), and, to speed up the process of cultural genocide, the cultural specificity of what it means to be Saharawi (e.g. to speak Hassaniya rather than Moroccan darija) is erased by promoting Hassaniya as a Moroccan language. This is multiculturalism at the service of settler colonialism. Not only does the inclusion of Hassaniya in the Constitution further the erasure of Saharawis, but the regime also uses this constitutional amendment to improve its external image. As Madani et. al. highlight, the nod to protecting “Hassani culture” and language makes the 2011 Constitution seem more “open.” ( Madani et al. 2012: 18) Similarly, as Ennaji points out with regards to the Amazigh language’s upgrade to official language in the 2011 Constitution, “this move will polish the image of the monarchy inside and outside Morocco, and give it the opportunity to consolidate power and authority over the country.” ( Ennaji 2014b: 105) Thus, cultural robbery is threaded into the Moroccan king’s “reform” project, which emerged following the 2011 Moroccan Arab Spring precisely with this new Constitution.
As Peter Baker points out, settler colonial theory has been used widely to analyze how settlers transform the use of the land in a way that excludes Indigenous populations ( Baker 2021: 2). For Baker, settler colonialism is fundamentally about “transformation of the land” in order to “annihilate Indigenous populations in their own territories whilst at the same time making it a new ‘home’ for the settlers themselves.” ( Baker 2021: 4) “Transforming the land” means not only dispossessing an Indigenous population of their land, but also dispossessing their ecological, social, and political relationship to that land ( Baker 2021: 7). Similarly, Morocco’s settler colonialist approach seeks to make impossible the Saharawi nomadic cultural-ecological way of life. Since knowledge and culture in any society is derived from one’s relationship with the environment around one, making nomadism impossible is an attempt to gradually extinguish Saharawi identity.
Oppressing nomadism has involved, especially during the first war, the mass slaughter of nomads’ camels to deprive them (and POLISARIO) of a key resource ( Volpato and Howard 2014). Allegedly, when nomads living in POLISARIO-controlled Western Sahara have approached the military wall, Moroccan soldiers have killed herds of their camels (Gregoire 30 December 2020). The millions of landmines scattered across the territory threaten nomads and their animals, causing several deaths every year (San Martín 2007). As the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights has noted, these mines jeopardize the traditional life of nomads, and Saharawi victims of mine accidents face difficulties in accessing police reports in order to claim compensation ( Shaheed 2012). Since 2010, Morocco has prohibited the pitching of Saharawi āḫīām (traditional tents) in the desert. Around the same time (2010), the Moroccan army implemented a ban on entering the roughly 50 km squared Um Draiga region, which is composed of particularly rich and fertile grazing lands (Human Rights Clinic of Cornell Law School 2015). Natural resource exploitation, including via large, industrial greenhouses as well as wind farms, further shrinks grazing lands. Since mobility is crucial to the health of the camels, the reduced grazing lands threaten the survival of nomadic pastoralism. 8 Likewise, industrial-sized greenhouses, mostly owned by the Moroccan Royal Family and French conglomerates, drain non-renewable water reserves ( Western Sahara Resource Watch 2012), thereby jeopardizing nomadism. The Moroccan-built military wall has a similar effect. The wall cuts across several wadis, starving downstream sections (in the liberated territory) of moisture, leading to a resulting decline in vegetation and habitat ( Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic 2021). Martin Crook and Damien Short’s concept of ecocide-genocide is applicable here (2021). Crook and Short describe ecologically-induced genocide as “any ecologically destructive practise, or process, that forcibly controls Indigenous and place-based peoples’ interaction with, ejects them from or prejudices or precludes the enjoyment of, their land and the local ecosystems.” (2021: 167) Morocco’s ecologically destructive forms of resource exploitation and military exploitation can be understood as a form of ecocide-genocide in that they (intentionally) endanger nomadism.
As with all other examples in this section, whilst attempting to make nomadism impossible for Saharawis, Morocco simultaneously appropriates nomadic culture. Volpato and Howard have chronicled, with useful detail, the extent to which the heritage of camel pastoralism is embedded within the Saharawi nationalist imaginary, and used by POLISARIO as well as Sahrawis living in occupied Western Sahara as a border marker with Moroccans, who are allegedly relatively ignorant of camel pastoralism, husbandry and health (2014). Saharawis use camels, and camel milk (which is reportedly served to ex-political prisoners when they emerge from Moroccan-run jails) as a symbol of ethnic and national identity (Volpato 2014). As Volpato and Howard show, especially since 2008 or 2009, Morocco has attempted to reposition Saharawi nomadic heritage as its own, through state aid for camel husbandry, free medicines and vaccines, funding for epidemiological studies, large events held in “Moroccan Sahara” celebrating the heritage of nomadic pastoralism (this goes hand-in-hand with an increasing use of the Saharawi ḫaīma as a symbol of Moroccan heritage), and the promotion amongst Moroccan settlers of the consumption of camel meat and milk, as well as the export of the latter abroad (2014). Morocco’s efforts in this regard are carried out within its multicultural framework: in the words of Volpato and Howard, “a struggle to ideologically appropriate Sahrawi nomadic cultural heritage continues between Moroccan authorities and the POLISARIO, with the former aiming to incorporate it as a specific ethnic/tribal heritage within Moroccan national culture.” (ibid.: 19) Although what is stolen is not a tangible object, these settler colonial policies nevertheless constitute robbery. The settler state robs Saharawis of their ability to live as nomads, whilst simultaneously appropriating nomadic heritage as its own.
Conclusion
As Audra Simpson puts it, settler colonialism homogenizes heterogeneity ( 2014). This is an ample description of the effect of Moroccan policies of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism aims to erase Saharawis through a refusal to recognize difference and through dispossession. As in other settler colonial contexts, Moroccan multiculturalism is designed to deny the Indigenous Saharawi population not only political sovereignty but also their very existence.
Taking a settler colonial approach to Western Sahara studies is, surprisingly given the large settler population in occupied Western Sahara relative to the Indigenous population, not common. This study shows that understanding Western Sahara within a settler colonial framework allows us to interpret Saharawi experiences as a result of a systematic and structural settler colonial project by the Moroccan state. With regards to settler colonial strategies of state-sponsored multiculturalism, focusing on the case of Western Sahara shows us the powerful erasing effect of enacting cultural exploitation and cultural domination in parallel. Cultural domination involves forced assimilation by way of a carceral system. Cultural exploitation involves the adoption of (certain elements of) a subordinate culture for consumption by members of the dominant culture. The two together amount to what I have called cultural robbery. I have shown how Saharawis are prevented from practising and representing their cultural practices, traditions and identities whilst the settler population is encouraged to appropriate the same. In the case of occupied Western Sahara, the breadth of Moroccan state policies that realise cultural exploitation and simultaneously cultural oppression implies that cultural robbery is a state strategy. This strategy is nuanced and dynamic, with changing weight on cultural assimilation, oppression and appropriation at different times, with various short and long-term political and economic goals. The strategy has moved from the genocidal, violent oppression of Saharawi identity markers in the years of the first war (1975–1991), to a blunt attempt at cultural appropriation, which fooled no one, during the voter registration process of the early 1990s, to the folklorization of an appropriated “Saharan-Hassaniya” cultural heritage to attract tourists since 2003, and to a vigorous “multiculturalization” process—strengthened in the 2011 Moroccan Constitution in order to further promote Mohammed VI’s image as a democratizing monarch—through which Saharawi culture becomes the variously named “Hassaniya culture”, “Saharan-Hassani” or “Moroccan Saharan” culture, one of several Moroccan minority cultures which ethnic Saharawis themselves are punished and/or prevented from practising under the ever-present threat of punishment, imprisonment and violence. This parallel oppression and appropriation amounts to robbery. By erasing the difference on which Indigenous and anti-colonial struggles are staked, multiculturalism facilitates cultural robbery in the service of the settler colonial state.