Time for another installment of Even ____ Knows the Western Sahara Deserves Independence. Today we have two winners, Casablanca and my Arabic class DVD.
I watched Casablanca in my class about World War II today. The opening credits are superimposed over a map of Africa. The movie itself takes place in Morocco. Below Morocco on the map, the Western Sahara is clearly demarcated as a separate territory.
The movie was filmed in 1942, 14 years before the first wave of African decolonization and 33 years before the Madrid Accords and Spain. Casablanca’s director, Michael Curtiz, could have been a Greater Moroccan ideologue and it still wouldn’t have made sense to take away Western Sahara’s borders at the time. So while the map isn’t a powerful pro-Sahrawi statement, it recalls a time when everyone who knew where Spanish Sahara was accepted it as a territory separate from Morocco.
The more legitimate, but less famous winner today is the DVD included with my Arabic textbook. The DVD contains some Arab weather reports, including one that can't be more than a few years old. In one, a forecast on the entire Middle East-North African community, there’s a demarcation line between Western Sahara and Morocco.
I hope today’s winners are proud. I’m proud of them for making sure people don’t stop asking about that parallelogram on the west African coast.