In the first issue of Vindicacion feminista, a Spanish feminist magazine which made its appearance in July 1976, Soledad Balaguer recounts her talks with Saharan women within the Polisario Front and discusses the role of women within the liberation struggle. Vindicacion feminista is published monthly in Spanish and is available from Roger de Flor. 96, 2o, 2a, Barcelona 13, Spain. This article has been translated from the Spanish.
A few weeks ago my friends from the Polisario Front told me that the first Saharan woman had died in combat on the front lines. They didn't tell me many details. She had been in one of the front line guerrilla fights in the struggle against the Moroccans. "She died with a rifle in her hand, in the field of honour". The communique ended with the following words which are always used by the Polisario Front: "We well obtain our freedom by the gun". I believe this is the end of a vital first stage in the Saharan women's fight. Until now they have been struggling for total equality with the men of their village. Now they have it: women are dying; they too are fighting. This is the culmination of a revolutionary process which has raised a two-sided battle - one for the freedom of a village, the other the struggle for women's liberation.
A Dignified Role
If any women have been subjugated for centuries, it is the Arab woman. The mere existence of harems and the impossibility for any woman to show her face unless it was before her lord and master, are enough to show just how severe the slavery of women had been. This was not the case, however, in the Berber tribes who form the majority of the population of the Sahara desert. The Saharan woman has always maintained a position which is almost comparable to that of European women. It goes without saying that the Saharauis do not cover their faces with veils, and, unlike many of their neighbours, are considered socially as responsible human beings. In Mauritania, for example, no woman is allowed to take care of the cattle (the most revered possession), whereas it is perfectly normal for Saharan women to do this. The tribes group themselves according to their kinship, but this is determined sometimes by the woman's family, sometimes by that of the man. For the most part Saharan families are monogamous. According to some people, this is because the Berbers are supposed to have descended from the ancient Egyptians, and became nomads after Christianity spread through these lands. Others say that monogamy came about because of the harsh life style of the desert, which is not suited to men having several wives - specially since this implies increased numbers of children and the difficulty of nourishing them all. Even though the Berbers practise Islam which in fact permits polygamy, the woman will usually demand a clause in the marriage contract which prohibits the man from taking another woman. The family structure of the Saharan tribes is much broader than the typical European family. It greatly simplified marriage relationships and the bringing-up of children. The children are brought up all together amongst the various members of a family, - a patriarch with his sons and the sons of his sons and the brothers of the sons and their sons, etc. This implies two big advantages: first that the Saharan woman doesn't have what we could call "maternal syndrome", which makes us Europeans feel guilty when we don't spend the whole day with our children, because we are made to believe we are "bad mothers". The most important question for the Saharans is that the child is well looked after by someone capable of doing this, whether it be a sister, friend or neighbour. The children for their part, being able to live in a broad communal family, do not demand the constant attention and love specifically of their mother . Relationships are more natural and less structured than in Europe, and this makes for happy expressive children without problems.
In the second place, this same broad family structure detraumatises the process of divorce. At present the Sahariin law states that only the man may divorce his wife, but in fact a woman may leave her husband and go live with her parents together with her children without being prosecuted. When a woman decides not to go back to her husband, the man will usually decide to divorce her without any legal penalty, on a mutual agreement that the marriage breaks down when the couple no longer gets on well. The children do not go through any traumatic experience since they are accustomed to a communal family life as already described: their environment hardly changes with the loss of the father of the household (normally the children stay with their mother) - there is no sudden loss of a vital element in their lives since the father is merely one member of the tribal family.
However, not everything in the garden is rosy for the Saharan woman. She usually has to remain silent unless the man allows her to speak; she never eats with the men and in fact she leads a life in which there is almost total sexual segregation. Women do certain tasks together, men do other tasks, and these are not usually mixed if they overlap in daily life. The fight for liberation was essentially conducted by the men. But very soon the women became extremely active too. And they began to build up a magnificent basis for subversion.
Baking Cakes and Talking Politics
Since Spain took the Sahara as a colony at the beginning of this century, the Saharans considered that this was something which the Spaniards had no right to do since it was their land, their country. But the fatalism which is typical of the Islamic culture led them to accept colonization as an inevitable evil which only God could deliver them from. "It seemed as though we were condemned to live with the Spanish, powerless to do anything to change the situation", a militant of the Front told me when we were talking in Algiers after a meeting of thousands of Algerian women to encourage them to join the struggle. Nevertheless, the objective conditions of colonization - which meant that many Saharans were obliged to live in the interior of the country while the colonizers exploited the riches to be found in the coastal regions - the discrimination between Saharans and colonizers, the lack of work which forced many to immigrate while numerous Spaniards occupied positions where they received salaries greatly superior to the norm, the lack of education which could have been useful to them as people of the 20th century - all this contributed to the emerging consciousness of a Saharan nation who say how, in the whole of the African continent, the land was returning to the hands of those who had always lived there. The cession of the zone of Tarfaya in the north of the country, to Morocco in order to stop Morocco taking the garrisons of Ceuta and Melilla was the first spark to the fire. Tarfaya was clearly Saharan, and could never be Moroccan. As a counter-measure, the Spanish government declared the territory of Sahara a Spanish province. From this moment two institutions for elementary education were set up - in Aaiun and Villa Cisneros - so that the new "provincianos" (provincialists) could go to school, just like their compatriots in the peninsula. 1967 and 1968 went by. The atmosphere in the "province" was not at all what was desired, to the point where the government declared all information about the Sahara "confidential". In 1970 a "spontaneous" demonstration in favour of staying part of Spain ended in several deaths: Saharan nationalists opposed the demonstration; there was gunfire... Many people were arrested, some of whom have never been heard of since. The next day a clandestine organization was set up which was to become the Polisario Front.
The day after the repression, the wives of the nationalists also started their campaign. Little by little women began to meet other women of their street or district. They came together under the guise of baking cakes or having parties for the children. Once gathered together the women talked of daily problems: low pay, high prices, sick children, medical assistance which didn't work, sex discrimination in schools... Finally without realizing it, the same women stumbled upon the idea that things could be different if they took control of their own lives From there to becoming part of the nationalist cause was only a small step. Back in their own houses, the women began talking with their husbands, many of whom worked with Spaniards. Gradually the same idea spread among the men too, who in turn talked of it with their colleagues. They realized that everyone was sharing the same ideas, and this gave strength to their convictions... the spot of oil was spreading.
Soon the organization took a more serious form. There were cells - unions for different workers. The women organized themselves in special women's unions and soon came to run things themselves. Demonstrations were held to demand water, schools, higher salaries, entirely organized by and for women. The nationalist slogans painted on the walls of El Aaiun and the distribution of underground propaganda were done almost entirely by women. This was for two reasons: firstly because it seems that women were more respected and less maltreated, and secondly because most of them were housewives, which meant that they could not be fired from a job, thus bringing misery on the family.
After the first armed action of the Polisario Front - an attack on a fort in the desert in 1973 - things began to change. The repression was much more rigorous, the actions too.
When the tripartite agreement was signed, the Moroccan troops went into some towns whose entire population consisted of old people, women and children. I have it on good evidence that the genocide was appalling. One of the leaders of the Polisario Front, Ahmed Baba Muske, former ambassador of Mauritania to the United Nations, told me that in a single night in El Aaiun, five hundred women were taken out of their houses to be subjected to interrogation. At the slightest suspicion of nationalist activity, they were savagely tortured or killed. Many of them were beheaded, raped, savagely tortured, killed, exposed naked in front of Moroccan soldiers. Many of their children were killed, in the same way in front of their very eyes. Other older ones were imprisoned, and taken off to unknown places.
"We are Privileged: the Revolution in the Village Guarantees the Feminist Revolution"
Today the Saharan woman accounts for 50% of the revolution, since she fully participates «long with her male comrades in the revolutionary process. She is in charge of most of the organization of the camps in the liberated zones, i.e. zones not captured by the Moroccans - which house more than 100,000 people at the moment. The refugee camps have reception committees for those coming with health and culture programmes etc. - and it is women who take charge of all this. In addition, it is they who do the consciousness raising for the liberation cause in the villages, and they are constantly traveling to different areas of Algeria - organizing meetings to obtain material help from the Algerians for their struggle. There have been villages which have given a quarter of their harvest. Finally, every woman and every child over the age of 10 years, has to have military training and fight on the front side by side with their male comrades.
These women are totally aware of the fact that they must wage their fight on two levels: on the one hand the liberation of their own village; on the other, their own liberation as an oppressed class, their women's and feminist liberation. In speaking to some of the militants of the Polisario Front, I was amazed at the clarity with which they expressed their ideas. When I asked them what we, Spanish women could do for them, the reply was:
"You should continue your own struggle for your own liberation as women. This is the best help you can give us. We too are helping you while we are fighting for our own liberation. We are aware that we are fighting for the freedom and the mutual support of all the women in the world. In a sense we are privileged because we have a revolution which is accelerating the process, which enables us to improve our situation in a way that would never have been possible otherwise."
I think I understood this better when I saw that these women gathered together with their comrades of the Front, and sat down at the same table together, ate together and talked animatedly. The time of eating separately and only speaking with the man's permission was past. And it will never return. Another of the recent conquests is the abolition of the dowry - real sign of bondage.
The Democratic Republic of the Sahara seems to be able to conduct a revolution made for everyone. Women represent exactly 50% of the struggle. At all of the struggle. At all levels.