Displacements of Mohammed Abdalah During His Life

Abstract

Contemporary discourse on the desert challenges colonial approaches to this landscape, yet there is a risk of remaining within an imperial theoretical framework. Departing from the dichotomy of “smooth” versus “striated” space conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this essay argues for the need to move beyond the notion of the desert as a spatial continuum. Considering the complex historical development of decolonizing Western Sahara, this paper argues for understanding the desert otherwise through a focus on three specific buildings. Mohammed Abdalah’s tent offers a model for how traditional nomadic forms of living were entangled in the process of geographical expeditions of the Spanish colonial government in the first half of the twentieth century—a form of life that vanished with the establishment of new cities and a mining company in the African colony. While the population started settling in towns, the colonial government had the project of making a profit from the rich resources of phosphate in the national and international market: the ground itself became movable. That ‘fluid movement’ was achieved by constructing the world’s longest conveyor belt, connecting the mine of Bou Craa with the port of El Aaiun, a moment in which the difference between spaces that are “smooth” and “striated” begins to blur. Finally, the construction of a fortifying wall of sand by the Moroccan army during the war with Western Sahara—a wall that still divides the contemporary territory—manifests the final iteration of the shifts of spatial understanding that have taken place, particularly since the 1980s. This essay accumulates this complex history in order to reveal how gray areas, ambiguous overlaps, and ill-defined borders configure a contemporary form of sovereignty over the desert. Highlighting the tensions between politics and geology, it argues that Western Sahara presents a case in which architecture arrests the movements and the trajectories of the nomadic paradigm.

Keywords:

• desert architecture
• Western Sahara
• critical cartography
• MINURSO
• Morocco polisario conflict

Notes

1 Francisco Hernández-Pacheco & J.M. Cordero-Torres, El Sahara Español (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1962), 59–62.

2 Samia Henni, “Against the Regime of ‘Emptiness’” in Deserts Are Not Empty (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022): 9–21.

3 Léopold Lambert, “The Desert: Introduction,” The Funambulist 44 (November–December, 2022): 22.

4 Henni, “Against the Regime of ‘Emptiness,’” 9–12.

5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury, 2017[1988]), 556.

6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 556.

7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 573. See also the chapter “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” 351–423.

8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 556.

9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 573.

10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 557. Drawing from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s critique to Cartesian extensio, Deleuze and Guattari understand space (spatium) as formed by ‘individuating differences’ and their relations. See Florian Vermeiren, “The Leibnizian Lineage of Deleuze’s Theory of the Spatium,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 15:3 (August 2021): 321–42.

11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus, 351–423. Deleuze and Guattari presented the notion of “war machine” to describe the artistic and political work of dissidents from the state. Nomadology precisely points towards that position. The interest here is that they narrate how, historically, the “war machine” was formed in direct opposition to the state—as a force that is not in the state’s domain. See also “War Machine” in Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref-9780199532919;jsessionid=29FFAAB3B7CD879AFD21DEF48E0AF426, accessed May 19, 2023.

12 Lambert, “The Desert: Introduction”: 22.

13 Manuel Lombardero Vicente, Cartografía del Africa Española (Madrid: Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias, 1945), 6.

14 Vicente, Cartografía del Africa Española, 6.

15 Vicente, Cartografía del Africa Española, 61–70. See also Manuel Lombardero Vicente, “Cartografía del Sahara Español,” África 30 (1944): 28–37.

16 Vicente, Cartografía del Africa Española, 8.

17 Vicente, Cartografía del Africa Española, 7.

18 Francisco Hernández-Pacheco, Rasgos Fisiográficos y Geológicos del Territorio de Ifni y Rasgos Fisiográficos y Geológicos del Sahara (Madrid: Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias, 1945).

19 Hernández-Pacheco, Rasgos Fisiográficos y Geológicos, 6.

20 J.M.Martínez Milán, “La larga puesta en escena de los fosfatos del Sahara Occidental, 1947–1969,” Revista de Historia Industrial 69 (2017): 177–205.

21 Ramón Capote del Villa and José Luis Barrera Morate, “El Descubridor de los Fosfato del Sáhara Occidental, el Geólogo Manuel Alía Medina,” in Ciencia y Técnica en la Universidad: Trabajos de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas, ed. Dolores Ruíz-Berdún, vol. 2 (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y las Técnicas, 2018), 133.

22 Manuel Alía Medina and José de la Viña y Villa, Investigación de Fosfatos en el Sahara Español. Document produced by the national mining research company ADARO for the Instituto Nacional de Industria [National Institute of Industry] in January, 1948. Centro de Documentación y Archivo Histórico de la Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (ASEPI), PLANELL, Caja 12, doc. P46, capítulo II, sección b.

23 J. L. Rodríguez Jiménez, Agonía, Traición, Huída: El final del Sahara español (Barcelona: Crítica, 2015), 59–60.

24 Manuel Alía Medina and José de la Viña y Villa, Investigación de Fosfatos en el Sahara Español, capítulo II, sección d y e (January, 1948).

25 Medina and de la Viña y Villa, “Conclusiones,” in Investigación de Fosfatos.

26 J. M. Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería en el Sahara Occidental: Fosfatos de Bu Craa S.A., 1969-1983,” Boletín Geológico y Minero 128:4 (April 2017): 915; and Rodríguez Jiménez, Agonía, Traición, Huída,, 60.

27 Medina and de la Viña y Villa, Chapter I in Investigación de Fosfatos en el Sahara Español.

28 Rodríguez Jiménez, Agonía, Traición, Huída, 63.

29 Lino Camprubí, Los Ingenieros de Franco (Barcelona: Crítica, 2017), 208–13.

30 Camprubí, Los Ingenieros de Franco, 31.

31 Camprubí, Los Ingenieros de Franco, 37.

32 Julio Caro Baroja, Estudios Saharianos (Madrid: CSIC, 1955), vii.

33 Baroja, introduction to Estudios Saharianos, in which the author acknowledges the limits of his study, VII-IX.

34 Joaquín Portillo, Los Saharauis y el Sahara Occidental (Almeria, Spain: Circulo Rojo, 2019), 25.

35 Osama W. Abi-Mershed, “A History of the Conflict in Western Sahara,” in Perspectives on Western Sahara: Myths, Nationalism, and Geopolitcs, eds. Anouar Boukhars and Jacques Roussellier (Roman & Littlefield, 2013), 3–27; David Suarez, “The Western Sahara and the Search for the Roots of Sahrawi National Identity,” (PhD thesis, Florida International University, FIU Electronic Thesis and Dissertations, 2016).

36 Caro Baroja, Estudios Saharianos, fig. 100.

37 Caro Baroja Estudios Saharianos, 204–10.

38 See Sophie Caratini, “Les Rgayāt: 1610–1934,” in Territoire et société (Paris: Éd. L’Harmattan, 1989), 2; Caro Baroja, Estudios Saharianos, 3–16. While firgan of the same qabila coordinated their itinerancy, this varied through the year and in different geographies, depending on trans-Saharan trades, rains, and access to grazing. See also Vivian Solana Moreno, “Regenerating Revolution: Gender and Generation in the Sahrawi Struggle for Decolonization,” (PhD, University of Toronto, 2017), 42. The movement patterns were not fixed so it becomes difficult to set up specific areas. See Julien Lafontaine Carboni and Juan Carlos Gimeno Martín, “Immobile but not Motionless: The Sahrawi Sedentarization (…),” Tabula Rasa 37 (Jan./Mar. 2021): 17–48

39 Caro Baroja, Estudios Saharianos, 196–201 (figs. 91–93), 203–10 (figs. 96–100), 229–32 (figs. 116–35).

40 and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 552.

41 J. M. Meana Palacio, “Orígenes y Desarrollo Urbano de Aaiun (1934–1975),” (PhD thesis, Universidad de la Laguna, 2015), 202.

42 Meana Palacio, “Orígenes y Desarrollo,” 198–247.

43 Meana Palacio, “Orígenes y Desarrollo,” 335.

44 Meana Palacio, “Orígenes y Desarrollo,” 328–15.

45 Presidencia del Gobierno al INI, ENMINSA, Caja 38, Expediente 280, doc. 29, E.7356.

46 Lino Camprubí, “Resource Geopolitics: Cold War Technologies, Global Fertilizers, and the Fate of Western Sahara,” Technology and Culture 56:3 (July 2015): 684–86. See also Camprubí, Los Ingenieros de Franco, 206–8.

47 Rodríguez Jiménez, Agonía, Traición, Huída, 57–65.

48 Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería,” 918.

49 Empresa Nacional Minera del Sahara (ENMINSA), “Propuesta de autorización para contratar con la firma KRUPP un sistema (…),” 1967. Centro de Documentación y Archivo Histórico de la Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (ASEPI), ENMINSA (397.4), Caja 4116, doc. 1 Anexo, 2. The belt demanded high investments, particularly in a colony whose future was uncertain. As historian Rodríguez Jiménez argues, “this can only be explained if the Spanish Government discarded the decolonization of the Sahara in the short run… and if it was convinced of, in their case, the future independence… would be accompanied by privileged relationships of Spain with the new State.” Rodríguez Jiménez, Agonía, Traición, Huída, 62.

50 ENMINSA, “Propuesta de autorización.”

51 Camprubí, “Resource Geopolitics,” 691.

52 Camprubí, “Resource Geopolitics,” 5.

53 Cf. ENMINSA, Steel-cord mockup, 1966, “Sobre el proyecto presentado por Krupp de instalacion para el transporte de mineral de fosfato por un sistema de cintas,” Centro de Documentación y Archivo Histórico de la Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (ASEPI), Caja 149, Expediente 977. See also ENMINSA, “Presupuesto y Financiación del Sistema de Cintas,” (397.4), Caja 4116, doc. 1, Anexo 3: 1–2.

54 ENMINSA, “Propuesta de carácter técnico,” (397.4), Caja 4116, doc. 1 Anexo 3, 14–19.

55 ENMINSA, “Propuesta de carácter técnico,”, 67–68. The project underwent a series of modifications during the six years following its original iteration. These delays were mainly due to financial problems (cf. J. M. Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería en el Sahara Occidental: Fosfatos de Bu Craa S.A., 1969-1983,” 915–18). Nevertheless, with the construction of a mockup in Bou-Craa, and some on-site determinations, it was decided that the line was to be stretched 3.1 kilometers in the side of the mine and 1 kilometer in the coast, and the line was to have three main straight stretches—rather than the original two—slightly modifying their angles. KRUPP, “Ensayos en una cinta transportadora de prueba en Bu-Craa,” ENMINSA (397.4), Caja 4116, doc. 1, Anexo, sección 1.8, 26 pages; and cf. Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería, 918.

56 ENMINSA, “Propuesta de carácter técnico,” , 3.

57 Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería”, 920.

58 Instituto Nacional de Industria, FOSBUCRAA, La Otra Frontera, Centro de Documentación y Archivo Histórico de la Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (ASEPI), 1975.

59 Instituto Nacional de Industria, La Otra Frontera, 00:02:23–35.

60 Instituto Nacional de Industria, FOSBUCRAA, La Otra Frontera, 00:00:17–21.

61 Cf. Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) 243 (Oct. 9, 2019): 110986–110996. Ref. BOE-A-2019-14469.

62 Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería, 921.

63 Martínez Milán, “Empresa pública y minería, 921.

64 Camprubí, “Resource Geopolitics,” 694.

65 Karine Bennafla, “Illusion cartographique au Nord, barrière de sable à l’Est: les frontières mouvantes du Sahara occidental,” L’Espace Politique 20:2 (2013): 8.

66 Bennafla, “Illusion cartographique au Nord,” 1–2.

67 Mohammed-Fadel Ould Ismaïl Ould Es-Sweyih, La République Sahraouie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 10–11.

68 Juan Soroeta Liceras, International Law and the Western Sahara Conflict (Netherlands: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2014), 79–111.

69 See Eric Jensen, Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate (London: Lynne Reinner, 2005); Secretary General of the United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General on the Situation Concerning Western Sahara, October 3rd, 2022, https://minurso.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/sg_report_october_2022_0.pdf; Cherkaoui Mohamed, Le Sahara, liens sociaux et enjeux géostratégiques (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2006), 1–55; János Besenyo et al., eds., Conflict and Peace in Western Sahara: The Role of the UN’s Peacekeeping Mission (MINURSO) (London: Routledge, 2022), 1–17.

70 Stephen Zunes, Jacob Mundy, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Resolution (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 6–20.

71 Francis Tusa, “Responses to Low Intensity Warfare: Barrier Defences in the Middle East,” The RUSI Journal 133:4 (Winter, 1988): 39–41.

72 Khadija Mohsen-Finan, “Murs de défense au Sahara occidental,” Études 400 (2004): 92-95.

73 Bennafla, “Illusion cartographique au Nord,” 14.

74 Bennafla, “Illusion cartographique au Nord,” 14.

75 Gérard Martin and Jean-Marc Pillas, Maroc-Polisario: Le mur du desert, Production Vidéo 9, Télévision Française 1h, 22mins, first broadcast Sept. 20, 1984, Archives Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), TF1 Actu, CAA8401904401 00:00:25–37.

76 Martin and Pillas, Maroc-Polisario, 00:00:20–23.

77 Bennafla, “Illusion cartographique au Nord,” 14.

78 See United Nations, Resolution 690 (1991), adopted by the Security Council on April 29, 1991; UN Security Council, The Situation Concerning Western Sahara: Report of the Secretary-General, 1990, S/21360.

79 Quoted in Jonathan Broder, “Morocco Checks Revolt with 1,500-mile Earth Wall,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 16, 1985, 5.

80 Said Saddiki, “The Sahara Wall: Status and Prospects,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 27:2 (August 2012): 199–200.

81 Hernández Pacheco and Cordero Torres, El Sahara Español, 9.

82 Hernández Pacheco and Cordero Torres, El Sahara Español, 59–62.

83 See Erik Jensen, Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate (London: Lynne Rienner, 2005); Norrie MacQueen, “Supervising intransigence: Western Sahara, 1991,” United Nations Peacekeeping in Africa Since 1960 (Oxon, England: Routledge, 2014), 233–24; as well as Ira William Zartman, “Préface,” Sahara occidental. Les enjeux d’un conflit régional, sous la direction de Mohsen-Finan Khadija, (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997), 7–8.

84 Frederik von Reumont, “Taking the Battle to Cyberspace: Delineating Borders and Mapping Identitites in Western Sahara,” in A. Strohmaier & A. Krewani, eds., Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 71–93.

85 William J. Durch, “Building on Sand: UN Peacekeeping in the Western Sahara,” International Security 17:4 (Spring, 1993): 151–71.

86 86. Remi Carayol and Laurent Gagnol, “Ces murs de sable qui surgissent au Sahara,” Le Monde diplomatique (Oct., 2021), 14.

87 Costantino Di Sante, “La ‘pacification’ italienne de la Cyrénaïque (1929–1933),” translation from Italian by Marella Nappi, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 189 (2008): 465–96.

88 Cf. Carayol and Gagnol, “Ces murs de sable,” 14–15.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alvaro Velasco Perez

Alvaro Velasco Perez is an architect via the Architectural Association (AA), where he previously studied for his Master’s in History and Critical Thinking in Architecture and received a PhD. He has collaborated in teaching positions at the AA, University of Hertfordshire, AA Summer School, Leeds Beckett, and the University of Navarra, and participated in juries through the schools. His work has been presented in various educational institutions in London, Paris, Berlin, Seville, Lisbon, Lagos, and Algiers. He is also a lecturer at the University of Navarra, Spain.