My Beauty Best Teacher

Image courtesy of Freedom to Create

Aziza Brahim was in exile even before she was born. In 1976, her heavily pregnant mother fled to a refugee camp in Tindouf when Morocco annexed the land where she lived. Azizas family comes from El Aaiun, the capital of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara. Aziza never met her father, who stayed behind in the occupied city.At the age of 11, she received a scholarship to study in Cuba but left school when she turned 18 to pursue a musical career. Aziza has never forgotten her roots and she returned to the camps, not as a 19-year-old musical ingnue, but as a voice for the Saharawis, a people fighting for independence.
Aziza embodies the new voice of the Saharawis. Her songs evoke exile, the right to freedom and human rights. She dedicates all her songs to her peoples struggle. Her song titles are evocative: Peace, Son of the Clouds, The Battle of Guelta, Memory of the Tank, and Return, a tribute to the Saharawis pursuit of self-determination and independence. She has been nominated for an album of her songs, Mi Canto.

‘I Want a Dawn!’ is Mustapha's first published collection of short stories and writings, published during his three year imprisonment on charges of offending the Moroccan flag. A secondary school supervisor by profession, Mustapha's writing has been largely banned in Western Saharan territory since 2005, following his open support of the right of Saharawis to demonstrate and oppose the Moroccan occupation.
50,000 copies of ‘I Want a Dawn!’ were published by the Ministry of Culture of the Saharawi government-in-exile, and sold to refugees in various camps. Mustapha remains in prison and is a popular figure in civil society. His short stories are often read in public at cultural events.

In the following interview, Radhi S. Bachir talks about Western Sahara [mp3], which the delegation of Saharawis to the World Social Forum calls ‘the last colony of Africa.’ He says Western Sahara is the only territory on the continent that had not been truly decolonised and where people have not been able to exercise their right to self-determination.