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.
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.
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.
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.
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Western Sahara and Algeria, at national rather than community level — 14 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
6 dishes
Barley couscous with camel meat and whatever vegetables the ration or the market has provided, steamed in a pot over a fire. In the Tindouf camps it is cooked for gatherings on a scale that feeds fifty.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
also Lahm bel roz
Camel simmered slowly with onion and spices and served over rice from the shared platter. The camel is the desert's wealth, and killing one is a statement about the occasion.
Serves 8 · 3 hours
also Khubz al-raml, Taguella
Unleavened dough buried in hot sand under a fire and dug out cooked, the bread of people travelling with no oven. Beaten free of sand, broken up and eaten with sauce or milk.
Serves 4 · 1 hour
A sheep killed and roasted on the arrival of an honoured visitor. The liver is grilled first and offered immediately; the rest follows over several hours.
Serves 10 · 4 hours
Sardines or bream from one of the richest fishing banks on earth, split, salted and grilled over charcoal on the Atlantic shore. The coast's wealth is fish, whoever ends up holding it.
Serves 4 · 30 minutes
also Atay
Three glasses, poured in sequence over an hour or more: bitter as life, sweet as love, gentle as death. Refusing to stay for all three is the closest thing to an insult available.
Serves 3 rounds for 4 · 1 hour or more
8 dishes
also Seksu, Kesksu
Steamed semolina under a vegetable and lamb broth, eaten on Fridays and at every family occasion. UNESCO listed it in 2020 as shared heritage of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania, after the four countries filed jointly rather than fight over it.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
also Chakhchoukha Biskria
Torn flatbread soaked in a tomato and lamb stew, from the Aurès and Biskra. The bread is made specifically to be shredded, and the dish is the centrepiece of large family gatherings across the east.
Serves 6 · 2 hours 30 minutes
also Mahjouba
Thin semolina crêpes folded around a slow-cooked tomato, onion and pepper filling, griddled and sold from carts and hole-in-the-wall counters all over Algiers, especially through Ramadan.
Serves Makes 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
also Brik algérien, Bourek annabi
Cigars of dioul pastry filled with minced meat, onion and egg and fried crisp, the first thing on the Algerian table at every iftar.
Serves Makes about 20 · 1 hour
Hand-cut steamed noodles in a pale cinnamon and turnip broth with chicken, made in Algiers and Tlemcen for the Prophet's birthday and for Eid. The whiteness of the sauce is the point: no tomato is allowed near it.
Serves 6 · 2 hours
also Olive tagine, Chicken with olives
Chicken and meatballs braised in a white lemon and olive sauce with carrots and mushrooms, the Algerois wedding dish, quite different from the Moroccan tagine.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 45 minutes
Lamb soup thickened with freekeh, green wheat harvested young and roasted. It breaks the fast in Algerian households every night of Ramadan, and the smell of it carries down whole streets at sunset.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
also Atay, Thé à la menthe
Green tea with spearmint and a great deal of sugar, poured from height to raise a head of foam. Refusing the second glass is possible; refusing the first is not.
Serves 4 glasses · 15 minutes
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.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources