Sahrawis of the Tindouf Camps
A society built in the hardest desert in Algeria and inhabited for fifty years, where camps are named after towns their residents have never seen, women run most of the institutions, and a third generation has now been born stateless.
Identity
Population: Estimated 90,000 to 170,000; the figure is itself politically contested
Location: Five camps near Tindouf in south-western Algeria: Laayoune, Awserd, Smara, Boujdour and Dakhla
Language: Hassaniya Arabic, with Spanish widely spoken and taught, unusually for the Maghreb
Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Semitic → Arabic (Hassaniya)
Traditional governance: The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic administers the camps with its own ministries, courts and elections, on territory lent by Algeria.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups — clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes — each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
The 1975 generation
Those who fled the Green March and the bombing of the retreating columns.
Camp-born generations
Two further generations born in Tindouf who have never seen the territory.
Spanish-educated returnees
Young people schooled in Cuba, Algeria or Spain who return to the camps as professionals.
Culture
Clothing: The melhfa, a single length of bright printed cloth wound around the body, worn by nearly every woman in the camps and among the most recognisable garments in Africa; the men's darraa.
Food: Rationed flour, lentils, oil and tinned fish supplemented by camel and goat where families keep them; the tea ceremony, performed with the same care on rations as it ever was on the move.
Ceremonies: The tea ceremony above all; weddings; 27 February, the SADR's proclamation day; the annual Sahara International Film Festival, held in a refugee camp with a screen in the sand.
Marriage customs: Hassaniya marriage practice, in which women's rights to divorce and to keep the tent are notably strong; camp weddings are large and mark the community's continuity.
Initiation rites: Schooling, which the camps have pursued with unusual determination: literacy rates are far above the regional average, and thousands were educated in Cuba.
Stories & Oral Literature
Camps Named for HomePolitical account
The five camps are named Laayoune, Awserd, Smara, Boujdour and Dakhla, after towns in Western Sahara. Children born in the Smara camp will tell you they are from Smara, meaning the city on the other side of the berm, which they have never entered. The naming is deliberate and it has worked: fifty years on, the connection to specific places has not dissolved.
Run by WomenSocial account
With most men at the front or abroad for much of the war, women built and administered the camps: the schools, clinics, distribution and local governance. The Sahrawi women's union is among the oldest institutions in the camps. Anthropologists have noted the result is a society with markedly higher female participation in public life than its neighbours, produced by circumstance and then defended deliberately.
Proverbs
“We carry the country in the tent.”
Nationhood maintained without territory.
“The wall is long and memory is longer.”
The 2,700-kilometre berm.
“Three glasses, fifty years.”
Patience as the community's declared strategy.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Islamic cosmology; alongside it a strongly held national narrative dating from the 1975 withdrawal, taught in the camp schools and structuring the calendar.
Beliefs: Sunni Maliki Islam, practised without the shrine network left behind in the territory; the national commemorations function with comparable force.
Ancestors: Many of the camps' dead are now buried in Algeria rather than in the Sahara, which is the demographic fact the community finds hardest.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Allah
The one God
Saints of the territory
Tombs on the other side of the berm, remembered and unreachable
27 February
Not sacred, but the proclamation day around which the camps' year is organised
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Tents and mudbrick rooms in a landscape of extreme heat and periodic flash floods, laid out in wilayas and dairas mirroring an administrative geography of the homeland.
Building techniques: Adobe brick made on site, which dissolves in the rare heavy rains; tent weaving; solar panels, now widespread, in one of the sunniest inhabited places on earth.
Village layout: Camps divided into districts named after Western Saharan regions, each with school, clinic and distribution point, on flat gravel plain with no natural water.
Artifacts
Melhfa
Textile
The wound printed cloth worn by Sahrawi women, and the community's most visible marker.
The berm
Infrastructure
A 2,700-kilometre Moroccan sand wall with minefields, dividing the territory.
FiSahara film festival
Festival
An international film festival held annually in a refugee camp.
Camp schools
Institution
Built and staffed largely by women, producing literacy rates above the regional average.
Historical Timeline
1975
Spain withdraws; Morocco's Green March; tens of thousands flee east and are bombed on the way.
1976
The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic is proclaimed on 27 February; camps are established near Tindouf.
1980s
Morocco builds the berm, sealing the territory; thousands of Sahrawi students are educated in Cuba.
1991
UN ceasefire and MINURSO deployment; the promised referendum is never held.
2020–present
The ceasefire collapses; a third generation is born in the camps.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- UNHCR: Sahrawi refugees in AlgeriaUNHCR
- MINURSO — United NationsUnited Nations
Premium & scholarly sources