Western Sahara's culture: Hassaniya verse and a Spanish that outlived Spanish rule

Which languages the Sahrawis speak and write

Hassaniya is the everyday language. The Wikipedia account of the culture of Western Sahara calls it the Ḥassānīya dialect of Arabic, also spoken in northern Mauritania, and the Sahrawi Republic's embassy to Ethiopia and the African Union describes a dialect formed from Arabic, Berber, African and Spanish influences. Modern Standard Arabic is the official language. Article 3 of the constitution adopted by the 14th Congress of the Polisario Front, which sat from 16 to 20 December 2015, states that the official national language shall be Arabic, and the English text names no second one. The CIA World Factbook, as the Wikipedia account of the Sahrawi Republic cites it, gives Hassaniya and Moroccan Arabic as the territory's common languages.

How Spanish outlasted Spanish rule

Spain held the territory from 1884 to 1976. Over those nine decades Spanish became one of its main spoken languages, by the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara, because Sahrawis needed it to deal with Spanish officials, who modelled the territory's institutions on Spain's own. The Spaniards were few. A Spanish census in 1974 counted about 20,000 Spanish residents beside some 74,000 Sahrawis.

The language stayed after the withdrawal of 1976, and the account of Western Sahara credits education exchanges and host programmes that take Sahrawi children to Spain and Cuba. One of them is Vacaciones en Paz, Vacations in Peace, an annual summer programme created in 1988 and organised by the Union of Sahrawi Youth, UJSARIO, together with 300 other associations across Spain. In that account's revision of 15 October 2026 the programme takes 7,000 to 10,000 children aged 8 to 12 out of the refugee camps each summer to live with Spanish families, and some go back to the same household year after year for as long as they are eligible.

The Instituto Cervantes estimated in its report of 2022, El español: una lengua viva, that around 20,000 Sahrawis have a limited command of Spanish. The Wikipedia account of the Sahrawi Republic calls Spanish the preferred second language and a de facto working language, and gives the state's motto as Libertad, Democracia, Unidad and its anthem as ¡Oh, hijos del Sahara! beside their Arabic forms. The constitution's English text of 2015 does not mention Spanish.

What Hassaniya carries

Much of Sahrawi culture is oral. The embassy describes stories, fables, poems and songs handed down in Hassaniya and often exchanged during the tea ceremony. Poetry was traditionally performed and passed on by mouth, the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara records, with younger poets serving apprenticeships to more experienced ones, and the internet now carries much of it between and within generations.

UNESCO lists Hassanie oral traditions, beside poetry contests, music and camel and horse-breeding competitions, among the expressions of the Moussem of Tan-Tan, an annual gathering in southwest Morocco that brings together more than thirty tribes of the Sahara's nomadic peoples. The element was proclaimed for Morocco in 2005 and inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

Who the Sahrawis are and who counts them

The Sahrawis are a nomadic or Bedouin people of mixed Arab and Berber descent, in the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara, and in Morocco they are also called Southerners or Southern Berbers. Most claim descent from the Beni Hassan, an Arab tribe, and the sources date its arrival differently: the account of the territory places its migration across the desert in the 11th century, the account of the culture of Western Sahara in the 14th. Britannica, in its revision of 18 September 2026, records Ṣanhajāh Amazigh peoples in this part of the Sahara by medieval times, and Arabic-speaking Muslim Bedouins dominating them from about 1000 CE.

Their range was wider than the territory. The Sahrawi Republic's embassy calls it Trab el-Bidhan, reaching from the Wad Noun in southern Morocco to the banks of the Senegal River, and records that Spanish colonisers called the Sahrawis the Sons of the Clouds after their habit of following the rain to fresh pasture. Before the International Court of Justice in 1975, Mauritania named the 'Aroussiyeen, the Oulad Deleim, the Oulad Bu-Sba', the Ahil Barik-Allah and the Regheibat among the main tribes of the territory.

Every count of the Sahrawis carries political weight, because the electorate for the referendum the United Nations mission has prepared since 1991 is drawn from them. Morocco and the Polisario Front agreed in the late 1980s to register voters from the Spanish census of 1974, which the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara judges likely to be low. The same account records that settlers from Morocco are thought to outnumber the Sahrawis indigenous to the territory. For the refugee camps each party publishes its own figure, and the table attributes every count to whoever published it.

How the tribes organised Sahrawi life

How the tribes governed themselves

The International Court of Justice described that society in its advisory opinion of 16 October 1975. When Spain colonised the territory, most of its sparse population were nomads who crossed the desert on fairly regular routes set by the seasons and by the wells and water-holes open to them. Pasture was held in common. A perennial water-hole belonged to the tribe that had put it into use, though others could draw from it under customs on priority and on how much water they took, and many tribes had recognised burial grounds that were rallying points for them and their allies. Authority lay with a sheikh, subject to the assent of the Juma'a, an assembly of the tribe's leading members, and each tribe applied its own customary law together with Koranic law.

Spanish rule left much of this in place, the Wikipedia account of Spanish Sahara records. The Sahrawis remained nomadic pastoralists with their customary assemblies, the djemaa, and a legal system of Islamic sharia and customary law, and the Spanish presence was limited to a few small towns where trade with the nomads took place. Slavery was still prevalent, and the Spanish ignored it to keep good relations with the nomads. The end of raiding between tribes brought prosperity to some, the Oulad Tidrarin among them, while the Oulad Delim kept up their martial traditions in the Tropas Nómadas. Money replaced barter. El Aaiún was founded in 1940, after a significant aquifer was found.

Drought and policy moved people into towns. Matthew Porges, of the social anthropology department at the University of St Andrews, writes in Forced Migration Review that catastrophic droughts in the colonial period brought rapid, though temporary, urbanisation around the Spanish-controlled cities, and Spain later forced some nomads to settle. Morocco's census of 1 September 2024 counted 92.4% of the people of the Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra region and 80.4% of those of Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab as urban.

What women held in the tent and the tribe

Spanish writing and refugee studies have given a great deal of attention to the role of women in Sahrawi society, the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara notes. By that account Sahrawi women could inherit property and live independently of their fathers, brothers and husbands, and marriage, in a culture that values monogamy, was how alliances were made inside a tribe and with others. When the men were away at war or trading, women were responsible for the camp, setting up, repairing and moving its tents and taking part in the main decisions of the tribe. Under Spanish rule they gave financial and physical support to the resistance movements of the 1930s, the 1950s and the late 1960s.

The Wikipedia account of the culture of Western Sahara describes a practice of fattening before marriage, in which girls deliberately overeat and limit physical activity for 40 days, and links it to traditional clothing that is believed to need a heavier body to look attractive.

How the refugee camps changed Sahrawi society

In 1975 a large part of the population fled the fighting to camps near Tindouf in Algeria, breaking up families and clans, the Wikipedia account of the culture records. The camps form five districts, or wilayat, named after towns in Western Sahara, with Rabouni as the seat of the Sahrawi Republic's administration. The Polisario Front, which runs them, set out to modernise camp society with a public emphasis on education, the emancipation of women and what the account of the camps calls the "eradication of tribalism".

Who learns and who governs in the camps

The Wikipedia account of the camps gives a literacy rate of about 5% when the camps were formed and 90% in 1995. The account of the culture, in its revision of August 2025, reports the Polisario Front's claim of less than 10% in 1975 and nearly 90% now. The account of the camps, revised on 28 September 2026, lists 29 preschools, 31 primary and seven secondary schools, the academic institutions named 27 February and 12 October, and technical training centres. Freedom House, in Freedom in the World 2024, records the University of Tifariti, established in 2013 in Polisario-controlled territory.

Women carried the camps through the war. From 1975 to 1991, while the men were at the front, women ran most of the camps' administration, the account of the camps records, and they still run a majority of it; the Polisario Front created the National Union of Sahrawi Women in 1994. Freedom House reported in 2024 that some Sahrawis describe life in the camps as matriarchal and that cultural norms also expect women to stay at home and run the household. Two women who had lived in the camps have claimed that women there are deprived of their fundamental rights and suffer exclusion and sexual aggression.

What the camps are built from

Most of the first buildings were of mud brick made from local materials. Porges writes that some refugees resisted more permanent materials for ideological reasons, preferring to stay ready to return to Western Sahara and a future independent state, and that making mud bricks still employs many people. Flash floods destroyed much of the camps in February 2006. Floods in October 2015 destroyed houses of sand brick, tents and food stores and affected more than 11,000 families.

How the camps stay tied to herds and families

Porges records that the Polisario Front keeps substantial camel herds and that after the war ended in 1991 it cleared mines and maintained wells for herding in the land it holds east of the berm, which it calls the Liberated Territories. The values Sahrawi refugees ascribe to their nomadic heritage, he writes, are opportunism, flexibility, social solidarity and a refusal to depend on any single source of income.

Visits between the camps and the Moroccan-administered part of the territory are virtually impossible, by the account of the camps, which records thousands of families separated for up to 30 years. In 2004 UNHCR ran an exchange of five-day family visits for a limited number of people in each direction.

How Sahrawis practise Islam and other faiths

The Sahrawis are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, like other Saharan Bedouin and Hassaniya-speaking groups, the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara records. Local religious custom, urf, draws heavily on pre-Islamic Berber and African practice and differs substantially from urban practice, and Sahrawi Islam traditionally functioned without mosques, an adaptation to life on the move.

The Sahrawi marabout Ma El Ainin built the town of Smara in 1898, five miles south of the Saguia el-Hamra, with the help of the Sultan of Morocco, by the Wikipedia account of Spanish Sahara, and urged the Saharan tribes to resist the French and Spanish; he died at Tiznit on 28 October 1910. Britannica has his followers building the town at an inland oasis between 1898 and 1902, and names its kasbah and mosque among the Muslim monuments of the territory.

The Sahrawi Republic's constitution makes Islam the state religion and a main source of law in Article 2, and in Article 44 guarantees legally resident foreigners the right to practise their religions and customs. Freedom House reported in 2024 that the Moroccan authorities generally leave religious practice alone but closely monitor the mosques.

The Association of Religion Data Archives estimated for 2020 that 99.5% of the population was Muslim and 0.15% Christian. Before Spain left there were about 20,000 Spanish Catholics in the territory, 30% of its population at the time, by the Wikipedia account of the Sahrawi Republic; in that account's revision of 1 October 2026 about 300 Catholics live in the Moroccan-administered areas, most of Spanish origin, served by the St. Francis of Assisi Cathedral in El Aaiún and the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Dakhla.

What Sahrawis wear and what they serve

The Wikipedia account of the culture names the daraa robe and, for women, the melhfa. The embassy calls the tea ceremony the heart of Sahrawi hospitality, held in woven tents or in the open: green tea leaves, fresh mint and a generous measure of sugar are boiled together over an open flame in a kettle called a barrad, and the tea is poured in an arc from pot to glass for everyone who has gathered.

Porges describes a historic reliance on herding camels, goats and sheep, and Britannica records little agriculture and an export of dried fish to the Canary Islands. In the camps, Porges writes, goats often eat plastic refuse that contaminates their milk and meat, and in 2016 the refugee Taleb Brahim began growing hydroponic barley to feed his own, as the economy article describes.

Most food in the camps arrives as aid. The World Food Programme's country page, as read in October 2026, describes almost 134,000 rations of cereals, pulses, sugar, vegetable oil and blended food handed out through 116 distribution points across the five camps, and counts 78% of Sahrawi refugees as food insecure or at risk of it. Vegetables are scarce, the account of the camps records. The sources used here name no particular Sahrawi dish; RECIPESpec is the sibling catalogue for the dishes themselves.

Where Sahrawi poetry and film are made

Poetry is composed by men and women alike, and the Wikipedia account of Western Sahara names Al Khadra Mabrook, Hadjatu Aliat Swelm and Beyibouh El Haj among its poets. It records that Sahrawi poets find it hard to be published, especially by Arabic publishers, because so much of what they write is political. Hadjatu Aliat Swelm and Hussein Moulud have written about life at Gdeim Izik, the protest camp set up in the territory on 9 October 2010 and dismantled on 8 November that year.

The FiSahara International Film Festival brings actors, directors and film industry insiders from abroad to one of the refugee camps in south-western Algeria each year for a week of screenings and concerts. The Spanish filmmakers and actors Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar have supported and attended it. In 2013 it screened more than 15 films, some of them made by refugees.

ARTifariti, the International Art and Human Rights Meeting in Western Sahara, is an annual art workshop held at Tifariti, in the land the Polisario Front calls the Liberated Zone, and in the camps. It brought graffiti to the camps. The Spanish street artist MESA painted on destroyed walls there in 2011, and the Sahrawi artist Mohamed Sayad paints on walls ruined by the floods, with Sahrawi people as his subjects.

Which days the Sahrawi Republic keeps

The constitution of 2015 sets the calendar in its fifth part. Article 142 lists four religious holidays, kept by the lunar Islamic calendar: the Islamic New Year, the birthday of the Prophet, Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan and Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice. Article 143 lists seven national holidays, and the events behind them are in the Wikipedia account of the Sahrawi Republic.

Morocco marks a different anniversary. Its king gives an annual speech on the anniversary of the Green March of 6 November 1975, in which about 350,000 Moroccans crossed into the territory, the House of Commons Library records, and in the speech of November 2021 he said that Morocco was not negotiating over its Sahara.

How sport and the press follow the dispute

The Sahrawi Republic was invited to the African Games at Brazzaville in 2015, which would have been its first appearance at a major international sporting event, but the Congolese organising committee refused to let its thirteen athletes compete, the Wikipedia account of the Republic records. It has a national football team, and its governing body, the Sahrawi Football Federation, belongs to neither FIFA nor the Confederation of African Football. On the Moroccan-administered coast, Dakhla has become a destination for kitesurfing and windsurfing, the vice-president of the regional tourism council told Médias24 in December 2023.

The press divides with the administration. Freedom House reported in 2024 that Morocco's Press Code of 2016 prohibits challenges to territorial integrity in Morocco and in the part of Western Sahara it controls, with prison terms of six months to two years for journalists, and that in Polisario-controlled territory television and radio reflect the Polisario Front's views. The Sahrawi Republic's embassy lists its own press agency, SPS, a state radio, a television channel and a government newspaper, Assahra El Horra.