Abstract
For nearly 1,500 years, Sahrawi nomads of Western Sahara respected the camel; camels were essential to life in the desert environment, constituting both the main means of production and exchange and the keystone of Sahrawi cultural identity. The capacity to adapt to drought is crucial for the resilience of nomadic populations, which are particularly susceptible to its repeated occurrence. Knowledge of coping strategies is transmitted and embedded deeply within nomads’ cultural institutions. In 1975, the Moroccan army occupied the Sahrawi’s traditional nomadic territory, decimating camel herds and forcing most Sahrawi into refugee camps in Algeria where the Sahrawi became wholly dependent on foreign aid for their sustenance. However, with the signing of a ceasefire agreement in the early 1990s, the Sahrawi recovered part of their nomadic territory and the right to move within it, while at the same time, new flows of capital entered the camps. Refugees began to recover camel husbandry as a livelihood strategy and the camel re-emerged as a potent symbol as refugees and the Polisario Front (the Sahrawi’s political representative) struggle to assert their newfound national identity, regain access to all of their traditional territory and reaffirm their shared nomadic cultural heritage.
Highlights
For the past several decades, scholars and development organizations have increasingly focused on nomadic populations in part because, across the globe, their cultures and socio-ecological systems are threatened by the creation of political boundaries, forced sedentarization and resource depletion and in part because they have become aware of the complexity and efficacy of such systems in relation to resource management in harsh environmental conditions (Keenan 2003; Gauthier-Pilters 1961; Chatty 2005)
We address refugees’ agency towards recovering camel husbandry, the conditions that permitted this process to occur and come to fruition, as well as the transformations in camel husbandry that are emerging, focusing on the case of Sahrawi refugees living in camps near Tindouf, in western Algeriab
The case illustrates both how refugees struggle to recover their livelihoods in contexts of forced displacement and sedentarization in refugee camps and how this struggle is informed by pre-exile modes of subsistence and cultural values
Summary
For the past several decades, scholars and development organizations have increasingly focused on nomadic populations in part because, across the globe, their cultures and socio-ecological systems are threatened by the creation of political boundaries, forced sedentarization and resource depletion and in part because they have become aware of the complexity and efficacy of such systems in relation to resource management in harsh environmental conditions (Keenan 2003; Gauthier-Pilters 1961; Chatty 2005). Once in camps, as conditions permit, refugees struggle to reassert their agency, develop productive activities and revitalize the associated knowledge and practices In the process, these are adapted to new environmental, social, cultural, political and economic contexts (Golooba-Mutebi and Tollman 2004; Jacobsen 2002; Horst 2006a). At the beginning of the 1990s, a co-occurrence of factors (renewed access to territory, military demobilization and increased access to cash through pensions, remittances and aid) created conditions for the redevelopment of productive activities, trade and the emergence of an informal economy in the camps themselves In continuity with their nomadic past, some refugees gained access to camels and resumed camel husbandry. After presenting the current context in the ‘Background’ section, in this paper, we: (1) describe how the Sahrawi became refugees and lost their herds; (2) discuss the historical, social, economic, cultural and ecological processes that facilitated the recovery of camel husbandry among Sahrawi refugees; (3) characterize contemporary camel husbandry and its importance within Sahrawi refugee camps; (4) discuss the changes that occurred in camel husbandry in the process and (5) analyse the contemporary role of camels in Sahrawi cultural and political identity
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