From phosphate to sand gardens

“We are like ants. And ants collect seeds from this and that plant, and from this and that plant…”. The Saharawi people describe their way of life and relationship with their territory, Western Sahara, in this way. Director Mohamed Sleiman Labat was born there. It is on this relationship that his documentary Desert PHOSfate¹ (2023) reflects, starting from the fusion of the title between “phosphate” and “fate”. How much does History, with a capital H, impact the life of a people? And how much can the micro-history of a people change the fortunes of that very History?

Three chapters, no apparent connection: Sleiman Labat’s documentary has the rhythm of a sandstorm, rising and falling with the wind that affects every grain and constantly changes it. In the middle, the one-minute blackout shows what happens when dealing with temperatures above 50 degrees. Before and after, the description of the rhythms of the desert through movements, voices, and sounds, in which people tell their story and recount their changes: from nomad to refugee and now farmer, to get out of the phosphate “curse” through the creation of sand gardens.

Who are the Saharawis? And what is their history?

The Saharawi are indigenous nomadic communities originating in Western Sahara, a territory in northwest Africa located between Mauritania, Morocco and Algeria, opposite the Canary Islands. They speak Hassanya, an oral language derived from Arabic and Amazigh². One part of the Saharawi people lives in Western Sahara and the other part is in refugee camps in southern Algeria.

Mohamed Sleiman Labat is a visual artist, filmmaker and writer who was born and raised in the Sahrawi refugee camps in the Hamada desert, southwest Algeria. Here, he founded the artistic experimentation space Motif Art Studio, built entirely from discarded materials, in response to the destructive floods that hit the camps in 2015. His work explores the multifaceted political, environmental and social issues affecting his community.

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After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Western Sahara became a Spanish colony for about a century, until 1975 when the Spanish withdrawal coincided with the invasion of the territory by Mauritania and Morocco, opposed by the Saharawi resistance movement. Thousands of people had to flee and seek refuge in Algeria, where specific Sahrawi refugee camps were built in the Hamada desert: this is where my parents met and I was born. I did my early schooling in the camps and university in the city. As soon as I finished my studies, I returned to the desert and founded Motif Art Studio, a small space for artistic creation and experimentation in the southwest of Algeria. Today I travel a lot internationally for my exhibitions and my work, but I always return there, to my community and my family. 

Why did you decide to tell the story of your people in a documentary? 

I would like to decolonise the desert: it is so big that I don’t think I will ever be able to capture its full story, but I try to tell what I know, based on where I am. For those who experience it, the desert is anything but a lifeless place, as it has always been portrayed, even by Western literature. Many literary accounts and terminologies describe it as “land of nothingness, no man’s land” and these terms imply a seemingly empty territory, which can be colonised, used, exploited and conquered…so much so that it “belongs to no one”! But the desert plays such an important role in the global ecosystem that, without it, the world would not function! 

Every year, sandstorms from the desert transport millions of tonnes of dust rich in phosphorous particles. This dust travels thousands of kilometres to naturally fertilise forests and distant lands. 

NASA atmospheric scans show that about 27 million tonnes of Sahara dust end up in Amazonia³, and that is exactly how Amazonia gets its nutrients: from Sahara dust. We can say that Amazonia depends on the Sahara to survive.  

In DESERT PHOSfate there is, not surprisingly, reference to the extraction of phosphate, a mineral that is essential for agriculture all over the world as it is used for the production of fertilisers, and the exploitation of the natural resources of the Western Sahara, where large deposits of phosphate are found. But that is not all: there is also a narrative of something new that, in a small way, is emerging and could have an impact on a large scale. What has happened? And what is changing?

Phosphate mining, first by the Spanish and then by the Moroccans, was the cause of the displacement of the Saharawi people from their homeland. The various colonial occupations came to Western Sahara mainly for the phosphate deposits and other riches. Morocco has also built a 2700 km long sand wall, known as the Wall of Shame⁴, around these lucrative deposits, leading to the expulsion of the Saharawi nomadic communities from its territory and dividing Western Sahara and its inhabitants in two. Sulaiman Labat, my father, recounts in the documentary his earliest childhood memories of walking in that area: he witnessed much of that history first-hand. 

Phosphate extraction still takes place today: it is shipped to various parts of the world for use in agricultural industries. This happens without the consent of the Saharawi people who own the land, are displaced in refugee camps and depend on international food aid. It is a huge paradox. What is surprising, however, is that the Saharawis are starting to farm without the processed phosphorus, using basic local materials, knowledge and sources.

And what new agricultural and gardening practices are emerging?

Saharawi families in the refugee camps are creating small-scale vegetable gardens and Saharawi agricultural engineer Taleb Brahim is the leading figure in the development of these gardens. The gardens are scattered throughout the camps and also vary in size, from a couple of metres to tens of metres. Taleb Brahim and his team at the Algaada Centre for Small-Scale Farming Research⁵  are working to develop different solutions to the physical obstacles in vegetable gardens. The latest cultivation model adopted is that of sandophonic gardens, or sand gardens: a model that uses sand as a cultivation substrate, designed to help conserve huge amounts of water. The sand is contained in a plastic film to prevent the sandy desert from absorbing water and the system is equipped with a drainage system that helps the water drip outside into a bucket to be collected and sucked up, as in a circular system. We lose neither water nor nutrients. And with sandophonic gardens, you can have fresh vegetables and fruit.  

In the documentary, you also talk about a very particular rhythm with which you cultivate, walk and interact in the desert. What is it? 

To decolonise not only the desert but also my methodology of making the film, I based its chapters on certain rhythms I observed in the daily life of the Saharawi people. Everything happens here at a slower pace, or rather at illogical rhythms that seem to correspond to the rhythm of life in the desert. There is the rhythm with which camels walk or with which people perform the tea ceremony.  The most interesting, for me, to discover was the pace at which the elderly talk and converse. They seem to take their time to communicate, to repeat themselves and to share some of the stories they tell. It is illogical but poetic. The oral narratives of the Saharawi people are also rich in wisdom and profound expressions. They have a great capacity to sum up powerful experiences in simple but profound expressions. I was struck, for example, by the way, Menaha Mahmud, one of the characters in the film, spoke to me about the relationship between nomadism and the land or the environment: for the Saharawi, being nomadic represented a “sustainable” way of life, thanks to which they could connect with the land and celebrate it, without exploiting it as in the colonialist vision. In saying this, however, he never used the word “sustainability” or any terminology of environmental discourse but made this incredible analogy: the Saharawi people are like ants gathering their food from small and limited sources, taking only what they need. 

Being nomads brought, therefore, a special relationship with the desert-space. In what sense? 

Thanks to my research, I am retracing the nomadic life of the Saharawi: when nomads moved from one place to another, they created memories and celebrated those places and landscapes in poems and stories. Over time, their relationship with the landscape became so strong that they began to humanise its characteristics and several landscapes and geographical features were named after parts of the human body. At one time, the Saharawis called certain land “head”, “mouth”, “ribs”, “legs”, “eyes”, “back”, and “feet”. Humanising a harsh landscape, they treated it as a living being. This is still today a very human way of relating to the earth, one that does not just aim to exploit and use it, but just wants to be part of it, live in it and return to it when it dies: Mother Earth. 

Do you think that telling the life stories of a people like the Saharawis can help change History with a capital H? 

The more I delve into the history of my people, the more I realise how important it is to bring out the stories that have animated them.

Micro-narratives have the potential to challenge meta-narratives.

Stories have the power to change the course of history. All human culture is the result of many types of stories that we have created and told over the centuries. So it is probably the most powerful tool humanity has ever created. I cannot claim that DESERT PHOSPHATE is the story that will change the world, but it is one story among many untold desert stories that deserve to be heard. 

 

1. A 58-minute documentary, released in 2023 and part of the PHOSfate Artistic Research Project together with Pekka Niskanen, a Finnish media artist. The project, subsidised by the Kone Foundation, concerns phosphates and their effects on two very different environments: the Baltic Sea and the Western Sahara and involved the two artists in an artistic residency in Finland. ↩︎
2. Amazigh encompasses language varieties spoken by more than 30 million people in various parts of North Africa, from Morocco to Libya, from Mali to Niger. Until not long ago, usage was exclusively oral. In 2011, the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM) was established in Rabat, while since 2003, the language has been integrated into the curriculum of schools nationwide. See Mountassir, A. E., (2017). Metodo di tachelhit. Lingua amazigh (berbera) del sud del Marocco. ↩︎
3. Yu, H., Chin, M., Yuan, T., Bian, H., Remer, L. A., Prospero, J. M., Omar, A., Winker, D. M., Yang, Y., Zhang, Y., Zhang, Z., & Zhao, C. (2015). The fertilizing role of African dust in the Amazon rainforest: A first multiyear assessment based on data from Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations. In Geophysical Research Letters, 42(6), 1984–1991. https://doi.org/10.1002/2015gl063040. ↩︎
4. Between 1980 and 1987, Morocco decided to build defensive walls to cordon off the most economically important areas and then weld the different defensive bastions together to form a single wall that is now a defensive structure made up of bunkers, ditches, barbed wire and anti-personnel mines. ↩︎
5. https://www.algaadacentre.com/. ↩︎