Historical Dictionary of Western Sahara Third ... - Scarecrow Press

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INTRODUCTION • xlvii Spain and Portugal, two of the primary seafaring and imperial powers of the time. Lured to the northwest coast of Africa by the (fictional) promise of great riches, both Madrid and Lisbon strove over the next century (that is, from the 1400s to the early 1500s) to establish themselves in the area, although they restricted themselves to small trading enclaves along the coast. Known as “counters,” these outposts were highly vulnerable to raids by either rival European powers or Saharawi tribes angry with the presence of outsiders. In 1476, for example, Diego García de Herrera founded a trading center known as Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña, the exact location of which is still not known to historians and which functioned only for about a decade when, in 1485, it was abandoned until 1496, when it was re-established in an especially contentious era of Spanish-Portuguese rivalry. But the Portuguese fleet sacked Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña two years later, and, discouraged, Spain soon relinquished all of its concessions along the African coast except for Santa Cruz itself, which it still hoped to resuscitate. Even a reopening of Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña, though, was to prove short-lived, as the post was conquered and looted in 1524, this time by a Saharawi raiding party led by the Beni Hassan and the increasingly powerful Reguibat and Arosien tribal confederations. Madrid finally gave up all attempts to seek any kind of commercial or strategic advantage on the Western Saharan coast, and departed the region for the next 350 years. In contrast to these halting and incomplete European attempts to establish a presence in the Sahara, the early Moroccan sultans made substantial efforts to do so in the 16th century. Their occasional expeditions to Western Sahara (and areas that encompassed modern-day southern Morocco, Mauritania, and northern Mali), though, did not succeed in securing the fealty of many Saharawi tribes, although the makhzen (as the sultan’s government was known) cemented many ties with some of the Tekna tribes who straddled the Moroccan-Western Saharan frontier. But the numerically predominant tribal confederation in Western Sahara, the Reguibat, as well as most of the other groups, never accepted the authority of the sultan in any way, much less accept (as did the Ait Oussa, a branch of the Tekna) the appointment by the sultan of caids (governors) to oversee their affairs and to collect taxes. Freed of any real contact with either the European powers or with surrounding countries and territories, the Saharawi people developed their institutions in nearly complete isolation from the 1500s to the latter part of
xlviii • INTRODUCTION the 19th century. Nomadic animal husbandry and a barter-based commerce continued to be the norm, although the pace of inter-tribal warfare picked up considerably by the middle 1600s as the Beni Hassan renewed their campaigns against the Berbers. This instability culminated in the 1644–74 Char Bobha (Thirty Years’ War), in which the Beni Hassan finally vanquished the Berbers and extended the already existing Moorish Saharawi social structure. Located far from any commercial center and with its vast fishing grounds almost completely unexploited by the native inhabitants, Western Sahara seemed destined to stay out of the view of foreigners, as the territory’s scorching interior and hazardous coastline strongly discouraged travel. Life for the Western Saharans might have gone on indefinitely as before, but things were to change drastically in the 1880s. THE SPANISH OCCUPATION Its influence flagging in the Americas, and desirous of securing a foothold in Africa, a continent which by the late 19th century was becoming the target of aggressive colonization by the other European powers, Spain in 1884 declared a “protectorate” over most of Western Sahara. This step, however, appeared to be more significant than it really was at first, since only the coastal settlement of Dakhla (which Spain called Villa Cisneros) was occupied immediately, and was administered by a “politico-military governor” residing in the nearby Canary Islands, cost factors being too intimidating to justify any further forays into the hinterland. The meagerness of the new Spanish presence in Dakhla did not keep it from being regularly attacked by the Saharawis, though, and successive Spanish administrators—notably, Francisco Bens Argandoña—did reach a modus vivendi with various tribes to protect Madrid’s outpost. This included a temporary arrangement with the great Saharawi anticolonial leader, Cheikh Ma el-Ainin, who was later to offer the Spanish (and the French in Morocco and Mauritania) determined resistance and who was only defeated at the hands of the French army in 1910. It was pressure from France, more than any other factor, that obliged Madrid to finally move into the Western Saharan interior starting in about 1915, since Ma el-Ainin’s activities against the Paris government often used nominally Spanish territory as a base of operations. There
Page 1 and 2: Historical Dictionary of Western Sa
Page 3 and 4: Editor’s Foreword While nearly al
Page 5 and 6: Preface As was the case in the seco
Page 7 and 8: Reader’s Notes The Western Sahara
Page 9 and 10: Acronyms and Abbreviations AMD Alli
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Page 13 and 14: Chronology c. 5000 BC Beginning of
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