Post on a blog of El País

Thanks to my dear Sahrawi colleague, the academic and writer Bahia M.H. Awah, we have a nice blog post in “Y.. ¿dónde queda el Sáhara?” of El País, coordinated by Sukina Aali-Taleb. As we read on the blog itself, this space tries to “show the richness of the Sahrawi culture”. They describe this culture as a “culture born of oral storytelling, beautiful desert landscapes, nomadic lives and attachment to the land, its Arab, Berber and Muslim origins, its unique customs and the relationship with Spain that goes back more than a century” (own translation).

In his new post, Bahia M.H. Awah recalls his visit to Basel at the end of June 2024, where he attended our congress “Spanish in Africa in past, present and future”. He takes the opportunity to put in writing a main idea of his communication titled “Cómo llegó la lengua de García Lorca al Sahara Occidental y a los saharauis”, which he presented at the congress in Basel. It reads as follows: 

“The language of García Lorca and Eduardo Galeno is not the language of the colonizer, it is the language of the people, and that is why the Sahrawi State and its people consider it a linguistic heritage of the Hispanic culture which has coexisted with the Saharawi for almost a century.” 

[“La lengua de García Lorca y de Eduardo Galeno no es del colonizador, es la lengua de los pueblos, y es por lo que el Estado Saharaui y su pueblo la consideran un patrimonio lingüístico heredado de la cultura hispana que ha convivido con la saharaui durante casi un siglo”] 

Thank you very much, Bahia, for being a part of our congress and for continuing to fight for the visibility of Western Sahara as part of the Spanish-speaking world!