Africa’s Last Colony: Aeolian Aesthetics, Poetry & Energy Politics in Western Sahara with Joanna Allan - Episode 36

Rising with the Tide

After a hearty break, your hosts come back reinvigorated and ready to tackle some more topics they themselves know literally nothing about.

We travel to the lands of Western Sahara with the help of Joanna Allan, Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University, to learn about energy, poetry, and the remnants of colonialism in Africa. Of course, as critical geography studies, neo-colonialism scholars and others have repeatedly proven, colonialism never really went away. It took on different forms, sometimes less overt, sometimes under different names. But Western Sahara still stands as a living, breathing, example of colonialism. Joanna runs us through a brief history of the Saharawi people and their fight for independence, as well as Spain, Morocco and Mauritania's colonial efforts to keep the Saharawi under their boot as a colony - even today.

We learn from Joanna about oil and wind energy politics in the region, how Saharawi poetry - entrenched in their culture and livelihood - affects and resists the invasions of the land by transnational wind turbine companies, and the gender dynamics behind complex social conflicts in the lands of the Sahara. The Saharawi fight on for a free Western Sahara, where their poetry and ways of life may prosper.

You can find Joanna on Twitter - @Joanna_Allan

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Song for the episode: "Lanza un dedo al cielo" by Yslem, Hijo del Desierto