The real story of the Saharawis lies within rich oral traditions, where knowledge, wisdom and memory are embedded in their music, poetry and proverbs.

Decades of exile, however, have negatively impacted their oral traditions. A whole host of factors have conspired to disrupt the chain of cultural transmission between generations. Years of education outside the camps, economic pressures, TV, consumerism, and the growing dominance of technology and social media in the lives of the younger generation all play a role in this.

Today, a third generation of children are growing up more likely knowing the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Superman than their own traditional desert stories and know little about their homeland. Meanwhile, elders with real memories of life in Western Sahara are dying out and with them irreplaceable oral libraries of the past.

Conscious of this alarming trend, through our Desert Voicebox project, we have been tapping into local cultural resources like artists who can teach about traditional music and poetry, and we have been devising activities to ensure the children speak to their elders to learn about their past.

Poetry is undeniably one of the secret weapons of the Saharawi independence cause. This oral tradition has been a key ingredient to express the Saharawi cultural identity, their resistance and their national aspirations, since the early 70s.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that without poetry, especially poetry composed in Hassaniya, the Arabic dialect spoken by the Saharawi, the emergence of the independence movement in 1973, led by the Polisario Front, may never have grown to the mass scale it did. Aiming to liberate Western Sahara from hundred years of Spanish colonial rule by armed struggle, poetry was the movement's other crucial non-violent weapon. And when Spain finally withdrew but left the Saharawis facing yet another invasion and occupation of their land by
Mauritania and Morocco, poetry again galvanised the people to resist.

The Polisario’s visionary leaders understood early on that poetry could unleash the potent emotions needed to mobilise people into action. Also, as the nomadic Saharawis were barely literate at the time, poetry would have been one of the few vehicles able to reach them to transmit the message of the struggle. At large social occasions like weddings the call to arms was transmitted through poetry and through cassette recordings played in cars and taxis.

- Uld Emreizig, 19th century Bedouin poet and author. Cited in "Oral
Literature and Transmission in the Sahara" by Bahia Mahmud Awah.