Colonialism, post-colonialism and Western Sahara: rebuilding Africa's fractured geographies
- Introduction: beyond colonial cartographies
- The coloniality of power and the fragmentation of the Sahara
- Sovereignty as a historical relationship, not a colonial invention
- The poetics of resistance: liberation as narrative
- Feminist and ecological dimensions
- Towards an African horizon
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the Future
Introduction: beyond colonial cartographies
The incompleteness of decolonisation is not just a question of borders, flags and treaties. Above all, it is a question of imagination: who tells the story, who defines belonging and who controls the symbolic cartographies of space. As Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe reminds us, colonialism was not simply the occupation of a territory, but the imposition of a necropolitics, a power over life and death intended to render certain populations expendable and susceptible to elimination. Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter expands on this diagnosis: colonialism did not merely conquer lands, but produced a category of ‘non-humans,’ condemned to live on the margins of the universal. The ‘non-human’ is a status manufactured by the dominant discourse, which hierarchises human life and legitimises domination.
Few cases in Africa illustrate this better than Western Sahara. The colonial division of North Africa by France and Spain did not merely divide the Maghreb into colonies and protectorates, but produced an artificial category, the so-called ‘Spanish Sahara,’ designed to break centuries of circulation between northern Morocco and southern Sahara. This act of cartographic violence was not neutral. It was a strategic attempt to deny Morocco its organic links to the desert, to create an empty ‘terra nullius’ that Europe could manipulate at will.
From a postcolonial point of view, the question is therefore not whether Morocco ‘annexed’ Western Sahara in 1975, but whether the colonial rupture of the 19th and 20th centuries ever had any legitimacy. To recover Western Sahara is to recover a violently fragmented history; it is to reunite the broken geographies of Africa.
The coloniality of power and the fragmentation of the Sahara
The concept of the coloniality of power developed by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is fundamental in this regard. Colonialism did not end with independence, but left behind a matrix of power, knowledge and subjectivity that continues to structure global hierarchies. In Western Sahara, the coloniality of power manifested itself as a double erasure: the erasure of Morocco's historical ties to the region and the erasure of the Sahrawi tribes' own relational forms of sovereignty. Recognising this persistent coloniality – which denies the Sahrawis their Moroccan identity – means understanding that the question of Western Sahara is not a local anomaly, but a mirror of the colonial continuities that still structure the global order.
Argentine postcolonial thinker Walter Mignolo calls this the ‘geography of the imagination’: spaces are named, categorised and mapped to serve imperial logic. The ‘Spanish Sahara’ was not a natural entity, but a discursive invention, a border drawn to fracture the Maghreb-Saharan continuum. By creating this fiction, the colonial powers sought to weaken Morocco, isolate Mauritania and secure European control of the Atlantic and Saharan routes.
From the perspective of the South, Morocco's insistence on claiming Western Sahara is not a late 20th-century invention. It is a decolonial act: a refusal to accept the permanence of colonial cartographies. It is a way of reconstituting a historical continuity broken by imperial partitions. It is also an African gesture of sovereignty that challenges the authority of Eurocentric narratives on territorial legitimacy.
Sovereignty as a historical relationship, not a colonial invention
Gurminder Bhambra, a British sociologist at the University of Sussex, in her call for ‘connected sociologies,’ reminds us that modern states cannot be understood in isolation, but are the product of long, intertwined histories. Moroccan sovereignty is a connected formation of this kind. From the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties to the Alawites, the Moroccan state was forged through trans-Saharan trade, Sufi networks and the ritual of bayʿa, the oath of allegiance that bound the Saharan tribes to the thrones of Fez and Marrakesh.
In his work on African decoloniality, Zimbabwean academic Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni insists on the need to recover suppressed forms of belonging, which he calls ‘epistemic liberation’. The Sahara was never empty. It was a relational space, where loyalty was expressed not through Westphalian borders, but through rituals, exchanges and spiritual networks. By denying these practices, colonialism imposed a Eurocentric model of sovereignty. Recognising Morocco's links with Western Sahara is therefore to provincialise Europe (in the sense of Dipesh Chakrabarty, who in Provincialising Europe advocates the decentralisation of the social sciences and history by recognising the legitimacy of the experiences of the Global South as sources of knowledge) and to affirm African forms of relational sovereignty.
The poetics of resistance: liberation as narrative
Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o famously called for the decolonisation of the mind, since colonialism begins by colonising memory. The struggle for Western Sahara is precisely a struggle for narrative: is it a story of “occupation”, as colonial discourse suggests, or a story of recovery, as Morocco maintains? Behind this battle of words lies a battle of legitimacy: who has the right to tell the story and impose its vocabulary? Morocco's recovery of the Sahara is also a recovery of the ability to name, tell and reconstruct a confiscated collective memory.
Jamaican anthropologist David Scott, in Conscripts of Modernity, argues that anti-colonial struggles should not be read as triumphant epics, but as tragic and unfinished narratives. Western Sahara is one such narrative. The Green March of 1975 was not an act of closure, but of continuation, a moment in a broader African saga of liberation. By sending 350,000 unarmed citizens carrying Korans and flags, Morocco staged a counter-narrative: sovereignty as performance, not conquest. It was not an invasion, but a poetics of return, a rewriting of memory. It embodies precisely the tragic and unfinished quality that Scott describes: not a triumphant ending, but an open narrative moment inscribed in the long duration of African decolonisation.
Feminist and ecological dimensions
Françoise Vergès, a central figure in Francophone decolonial feminism who links colonial memory, critique of patriarchy and social justice, teaches us that decolonisation cannot ignore gender and ecology. Western Sahara is not only a geopolitical issue, but also a question of who controls the ecological future of the desert.
Morocco's investment in renewable energy projects in El Aaiun and Dakhla is not a neutral economic policy, but a decolonial ecology, a refusal to allow the desert to remain an extraction zone for global capital.
We must also remember that Sahrawi women, guardians of tribal narratives and cultural practices, played a decisive role in transmitting memory and ensuring the survival of communities during the harsh colonial ordeal; their voices are inseparable from a decolonial future.
Indo-Australian postcolonial theorist and literary critic Leela Gandhi, in Postcolonial Ethics, invites us to think of sovereignty not as domination, but as ethical responsibility. From this perspective, Morocco's presence in Western Sahara should be measured by its ability to provide schools, hospitals, roads and livelihoods. Sovereignty, in this sense, is justified not only by history, but by its ethical promise: the commitment to transform colonial peripheries into spaces of life.
Towards an African horizon
To speak of sovereignty in Western Sahara is also to speak of Africa. Morocco's return to the African Union in 2017 was not only a diplomatic strategy, but also revealed a deeper truth: today, sovereignty only makes sense as part of continental integration.
The ports of Dakhla, the Noor solar farms, the motorways linking the Maghreb with West Africa... These are not nationalist projects, but African ones. They reflect what Quijano called the need to ‘link histories’ and what Bhambra describes as the need for connected futures. The Sahara is not the interior of Morocco, it is the bridge to Africa. As Frantz Fanon predicted, African independence would remain incomplete as long as the peoples of the continent failed to transform their political victories into effective unity; Western Sahara is precisely one of those places where the promise of a united Africa is being tested.
In this sense, Morocco's recovery of Western Sahara is not an act of isolation, but of continentalism. It affirms that the future of the Sahara is not to remain a colonial relic, but to become an African horizon.
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Future
The question of Western Sahara cannot be reduced to legal technicalities or UN resolutions. It is a question of postcoloniality: how formerly colonised peoples reclaim their histories, recompose their geographies, and reimagine their futures.
From Quijano's coloniality of power to Ngũgĩ's decolonisation of the mind, from Mbembe's critique of necropolitics to Wynter's redefinition of the human being, the consensus is clear: sovereignty is not just about territory. It is about restoring life, memory and possibilities.
The Green March of 1975 was such a restoration. It transformed a colonial desert into a postcolonial stage, where Morocco affirmed not only its claim, but also its way of claiming it: peaceful, popular, performative. Fifty years later, the challenge is to deepen that claim by ensuring that Western Sahara becomes a space for development, ecology, and continental integration.
Recovering Western Sahara is therefore not just a Moroccan project. It is Africa's unfinished decolonial task. To accept colonial partitions is to perpetuate necropolitics; to heal them is to embrace a politics of life. Moroccan sovereignty is therefore more than a national right: it is a continental necessity, a step towards the Africa imagined by Fanon, Mbembe and Wynter: free, relational and open to the horizon of its own future. Recovering the Sahara is refusing to live within the dead maps of colonialism; it is tracing a geography of life.