The five centuries of Spanish colonial history have to be studied at the planetary scale for the massive impact they have on the present world. Yet, the part of this history on the African continent in the Rif, Equatorial Guinea, and the Western Sahara is often downplayed. In this text, Inma Naïma Zanoguera describes the past and present relations between Spain and the Western Sahara, in particular through the perspectives of the Sahrawi diaspora.
In the past fifty years, Spain has arguably succeeded in minimizing its role as one of Africa’s colonizers, at least until very recently. One reason could be that other European countries have defaulted to Spain’s often inefficient economic system, resulting in a non-linear path to economic and social modernity to contest Spain’s status as a “proper” white, European nation. This has made it difficult to conceptualize its role in the African continent, especially given its geographic, cultural, and perceived racial proximity to their southern neighbors. We may also find a reason in that unlike France or Britain, and despite decades of occupation, Spain’s economic gains from its African colonies have been somewhat limited. In fact, Spain’s African colonialism has been dubbed a “poor man’s colonialism” by Moroccan historian Mimoun Aziza (2003), due to the distinct haphazardness that characterized its execution. Spain’s interest in entering the African colonialist race came in the wake of a series of grave territorial losses in the Americas, only a few years before the great “disaster” that preceded the emancipation of Cuba. By the time of the Berlin conferences of 1884, only a few years before Cuban independence, the morale of the Spanish imperial project was decreasing on par with its opportunities to continue profiting from Cuban exports, while the social and political climate in the metropole was in a state of profound unrest. During the infamous partition of Africa, Spain accepted the violent undertaking of what would become the “Spanish” Sahara (now the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, or simply the Western Sahara), as well as “Spanish” Guinea (now Equatorial Guinea). Then, between 1885 and 1975, Spain established different forms of direct and indirect rule over these two countries, in addition to the colonial enclaves of Sidi Ifni, Ceuta, and Melilla (which remain under Spanish sovereignty today) in Morocco.