Between Publics and Privates: The Regeneration of Sahrawi Female Militancy

Figure 1 shows the entrance to the main headquarters of the National Organization of Sahrawi Women (NOSW). The NOSW is one of the four munaẓamat al-jamahiria (organizations of the masses) found in refugee camps near the Southern Algerian city of Tindouf, where the Sahrawi national liberation movement—known as the Polisario Front—has organized into the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) since 1976. The Polisario Front claims national sovereignty over the Western Sahara, a territory still pending formal decolonization from Spain and under Moroccan occupation since 1975.

Figure 1.

The National Organization of Sahrawi Women. Photograph by the author, 2011.

The sign over the door displays the NOSW’s logo with an image that situates women at the heart of Sahrawi nationalism: the profile of a woman’s face dressed with a milḥafah (customary female dress) in the colors of the Sahrawi flag: red, white, green, and black. Symbolically merging woman and nation into a single image, the logo conveys the way in which the female figure of the Sahrawi munaḍila has come to stand for the unity and the political determination of the Sahrawi nation as a whole. The word munaḍila translates from Modern Standard Arabic into “female militant,” yet it carries a broader meaning and is used almost interchangeably with mukafiḥa (fighter) or thawria (revolutionary).

I think of the Sahrawi munaḍila as the most photogenic female figure of Sahrawi nationalism. Representing a “new” and “modern” female subject and evoking, to borrow Lila Abu-Lughod’s expression, a woman “remade,”¹ her valiant and industrious figure recalls a generation of women who were trained as soldiers, schooled as teachers, nurses, accountants, and propelled to create and to occupy the new spaces of the exiled SADR: neighborhood councils, provincial administrations, nurseries, schools, ministries, hospitals, theatre halls, and a new parliament. She is photogenic because the model of female empowerment she represents is pleasing to a broad spectrum of actors—Sahrawi nationalists, humanitarian workers, development aid expatriates, members of an international Left, and even those with more imperialist drives—who often have little in common other than the strong valorization they place on women’s visibility in public spaces.

Nation-state building processes are also place-making processes that tread on intimate terrains, entailing public acts of loyalty and imminent suspicions of betrayal.² The hypervisible figure of the photogenic munaḍila is constructed upon these morally charged dynamics in ways that cast shadows over the many ways of being a politically committed Sahrawi woman. As this article shows, performances of militant subjectivities demand close attention to what Doreen Massey has referred to as the “spatiality of power.”³ Far from simply containing social and political action, spatial organization is not only thoroughly gendered and subjectivizing, but it is also being continuously reconstructed through transforming social relations across time. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the SADR (mostly between 2011 and 2013), this article describes the strategic role that the NOSW’s spaces play in sustaining the hypervisibility of the Sahrawi munaḍila. The NOSW is a must-see stop in the itineraries of foreign delegations to the SADR, and its logo circulates and forms part of a much larger repertoire of discursive and iconographic representations that contribute to place women under the scrutiny of local and nonlocal actors for whom the respectability and the legitimacy of the Sahrawi nation is interpretable through discourses over and about women. However, the NOSW logo should simultaneously be read as a local form of tribute. The image of a woman’s profile dressed in a Sahrawi flag also communicates the political recognition among Sahrawi refugees that the endurance and the regeneration of their collective struggle depends upon women’s everyday labor, inside scopic spaces such as the NOSW but also in less visible spaces outside of these.

Offering an account of the physical encounters and imaginaries that constitute the NOSW and make its spaces possible—including encounters between Sahrawi women of different generations, status, and kinship groups as well as encounters...