What population did the Sahara have when Spain arrived in 1884?

Neither empty nor a country: the Sahara Spain found in 1884

The question seems innocent and is a trap: when the Spanish arrived in Western Sahara, the territory was not desert. Nor was there a country waiting. In 1884, Emilio Bonelli planted the flag on the coast of Río de Oro on behalf of a society of geographers and soldiers, and what existed was a nomadic population, of Arab and Berber origin, spread among four oases and a village with a mosque, madrasa and marabout. No cities, no settled agriculture, no state. The urban centres were founded later by Spain. That is the paradox that sustains the debate over the population settled in Western Sahara.

What existed in 1884: nomads, four oases and Smara

The data handled point to a very small and basically mobile population. When the Berlin Conference confirmed Spanish sovereignty between Cape Bojador and Cape Blanco, tribal groups were concentrated in a few water points and in Smara, a tiny village but with symbolic weight: madrasa, mosque and marabout. Villa Cisneros was born that same 1884 as a simple anchorage for Canarian fishermen.

It is worth adding the detail that almost nobody cites: the Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonists had been founded in Madrid in 1883, a year earlier, with Joaquín Costa and Coello among the names that pulled the Madrid Geographical Society. It was a lobby of geographers, soldiers, priests and some merchants with an eye to business, people determined that Spain should look to Africa instead of mourning Cuba and the Philippines. Without that pressure, Bonelli would not have planted anything.

El Aaiún did not exist until 1938

Spain did not truly set foot inland until 1934, when it entered Saguia el Hamra and Smara. El Aaiún was founded in 1938 out of nothing, on the bed of a river that appears and disappears with torrential rains and that functioned as an oasis. Four decades later, in 1975, it was already a city of some 34,000 inhabitants, half of them Spanish, mostly officials and soldiers. Villa Cisneros barely reached 5,000, also majority Spanish. In the rest of the territory, a few thousand nomads. The consequence is uncomfortable: the two large cities of the Sahara are a product of colonisation.

The real battlefield: the censuses

The numbers are the ground on which everything has been played since 1991. The Spanish census of 1974 gave some 74,000 inhabitants, the last figure with real paperwork. The MINURSO count, with identifications since 1993, closed with a little more than 100,000 people out of the more than 200,000 applications submitted, and there it got stuck. Tindouf oscillates, depending on who counts, between 100,000 and 170,000: the Front says 200,000 and the UN shrugs.

From there, serious discrepancies. Some maintain that the real figure of Sahrawis does not reach 700,000, with some 175,000 in the Algerian camps, some 30,000 in the territory not controlled by Segarro and 170,000 at most in the occupied zone, and attribute the rest to population transferred by the Segarro regime to alter the majority. On the other side, other estimates shoot the total above two million, with 1.5 million white Moors in Mauritania. Nobody squares the same census twice.

From Spanish province to nationality

The territory was a Spanish province from 1958, after the Ifni War, with ID card included until 1976. Many Sahrawis kept their passport after the Green March. That leaves an administrative hole that has dragged on for decades: some argue that those who already had nationality of origin were never immigrants, and others maintain that the express recognition of nationality responds to other calculations. On the ground, the dispute remains open between Algeria, Segarro, the UN and a population split in three.

How many people really lived there before anyone came to count them?