Joanna Allan’s new book Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.

From Introduction: The Helm

There is a consensus [ . . . ] among humanities and social science scholars interested in fairer ways to transition to renewable energy, firstly of the need to learn from the world’s Indigenous populations, and secondly on the root of the problem: corporate-led solar and wind factories are replicating the capitalist, extractivist logics of fossil fuels. Linked to this, our very understanding of energy emerged from the industrial revolution and the colonialism it fueled. However, I argue in this book that there is another factor that has determined the historical trajectory of energy injustices: climate and weather imaginaries, and therefore sun and particularly wind imaginaries, were at the center of the colonial project from the outset, pre-industrial revolution. 

[ . . . ]

In this book, I aim not only to show precisely how changing wind imaginaries shaped (and were shaped by) colonial (energy) projects in Western Sahara, but also to explore alternative Indigenous Saharawi wind imaginaries, what role these have played in resisting colonialism, and how these may positively shape Western Sahara’s energy future. (12-13)

From Chapter 1, The Sea without Water: Navigators, Traders, and Wind Pathologies in Western Sahara

Nothing but calm, green waters pawing at the shore behind him, Gil Eannes of Lagos stood in his wet boots, whitened with sea salt, and surveyed the sandy horizon for signs of life. He recalled the reception at court—as stormy as the weather—upon returning from the previous year’s voyage. Last time, the winds betrayed him. They forced his boat to one of the Canaries, north-west of his desired destination, and not even the capture of a few Indigenous islanders could placate his sponsor, the Portuguese prince.¹ The Infant Henry had freshly promised Eannes glory and wealth should this current expedition be successful. “Make the voyage from which, by grace of God, you cannot fail to derive honor and profit,” the pious Prince, in his hair shirt, had ordered.² Now, Eannes had completed his mission to pass Cape Boujdour, a feat widely considered impossible and one that expanded the European navigable world forever. But how to prove it to the Infant? 

The moist coast mists resurrected the tangled-up, brain-shaped moss. It unfurled its curling fronds, which turned from a dead brown to a radiant green—ends blushing sunset pink—and softened in texture.³ St Mary’s Rose,the most resilient of plants, thrived in deserts. Able to curl into a dry ball to protect itself when conditions were unfavorable and bloom out again when rain came, and possessing no need to anchor roots, the moss would survive the journey back to Sagres and prove that its carrier had trod the desert beyond Boujdour. Eannes scooped up the specimen and packed it carefully into a small wooden barrel.

For centuries, Cape Boujdour marked the geo-epistemological border of Western knowledge of Africa. Medieval Europeans saw the headland as the end of the world, the place where ships and their crews disappeared forever. Its name deriving from Abu Khatar, Arabic for father of danger, Cape Boujdour was a source of fear, ferocious legends, and speculation for sailors. Inland, the Sahara Desert was just as hostile as the dangerous cape, impassable to all. Fifteenth-century mariners, in the age when Europeans tried in earnest to pass the promontory, believed that “beyond this Cape there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants: nor is the land less sandy than the deserts of Libya, where there is no water, no tree, no green herb- and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return.”⁴ 

The land of modern-day Western Sahara and its coastline were understood together as one great no-man’s-land. Ghislaine Lydon argues that the long-term consequence of this European-imagined great barrier is the flawed division of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa into diametrically, culturally, and racially opposed Africans, between which the supposed border—the Sahara—has become an understudied blind spot.⁵ But in the Middle Ages, this part of the world was infamous, potentially promising a sea route to the East Indies, and, on land, access to a legendary “River of Gold.”⁶ 

It was not until 1434 that Gil Eannes, a squire of Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, rounded the terrible Cape Boujdour and made it back to tell the tale.⁷ Chronicler Gomes Eannes de Azurara recorded this feat and other Portuguese exploits in “Guinea.”⁸ Guinea was the collective name for the lands south of Morocco, which was unknown to Europeans up to this time. Azurara’s texts were the first to focus on the experiences of Europeans in Africa south of Cape Boujdour. These texts also documented the start of the transatlantic slave trade.⁹ David Hughes has described this abhorrent trade as “the first intercontinental energy market.”¹⁰ Hughes argues that Spanish enslavers in Trinidad “invented fuel” by way of exploiting human labor on the island’s plantations, since fuel is energy that is stored in a measurable, transportable, and salable form.¹¹ Later, charts Hughes, eighteenth-century Spanish colonists in Trinidad proposed a “solar colony” in which cacao, pulled up by the sun, would enrich Spain.¹² He shows that solar energy and fuel more widely have a history tangled up with colonialism and enslavement.

But the history of European colonialism is also tied up with the wind. Seafarers of the Age of Sail had to learn which winds and currents could take them to their desired destination. In the fifteenth century, the so-called Atlantic Mediterranean, roughly comprising the seas, winds, and currents of the coasts of Morocco, Western Sahara, the Canary Islands, and the Azores, became a nursery for would-be imperialists.¹³ Off Western Sahara’s coast, Portuguese sailors learned to seek out the trade winds in order to travel in the desired direction.¹⁴ This movement, known as the Volta do mar, was a vital step in the history of navigation and enabled further European exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the resulting imperial pursuits.

It was also the terrible northwest African winds and currents that forced European ships onto reefs and made Cape Boujdour impassable for so long. This cape was a hotspot for wrecks throughout the Age of Sail. Several Portuguese navigators that attempted to follow Eannes’s route soon after him were unable to land due to “contrary winds” and “tempests.”¹⁵ For the Portuguese that made it into the desert, the inland weather was just as worthy of chronicle. Azurara noted, for example, the fascinating findings of Joao Fernandes. Fernandes was a curious fellow among his countrymen in that he was uninterested in capturing booty and enslaving Africans but urged his prince to be left in the Sahara for several months, where he hoped to learn the ways of the Indigenous peoples. An Arabic speaker, he lived for seven months with the inland nomads, where “the heats of [the] land [were] very great,”¹⁶ and was amazed that “those Moors with whom he travelled guided themselves by the winds alone, as is done on the sea, and by . . . birds.”¹⁷

While Fernandes marveled at Indigenous uses of wind inland, his compatriots, under instruction from the Infant Henry, meticulously recorded weather patterns off Cape Boujdour and beyond. Consequently, Portugal developed a priceless inventory of northwest African winds, tides, and currents, which it was notoriously reluctant to share with other European powers.¹⁸ Wind was the key to the imperial race. (23-25)

Notes

1. Azurara, Discovery and Conquest.
2. Knight, “Gil Eannes Passes the Point.”
3. What Azurara calls ­Roses of Saint Maria are most likely the moss that ­today is commonly known as ­Rose of Jericho; Monod, Les Rosas de Sancta.
4. Azurara, Discovery and Conquest, 31.
5. Lydon, “Writing Trans-­Saharan History,” 46.
6. Prob­ably a reference to Senegal River, which flowed into the gold-­producing Malian empire, although one province of Spanish Sahara was also ­later named River of Gold.
7. Branche, “Inscribing Contact,” 9.
8. Azurara, Discovery and Conquest, 6–19.
9. Blackmore, Moorings.
10. Hughes, Energy without Conscience, 144.
11. Hughes, 30.
12. Hughes, 11.
13. Fernández-­Armesto, Before Columbus, 152.
14. Fernández-­Armesto, 161.
15. See several examples in Azurara, Discovery and Conquest.
16. Azurara, 95.
17. Azurara, 94. On the use of birds for navigation, Flores Morales detailed in 1949 how Saharawis observed bird flight paths in order to find ­water sources; Flores Morales, “Tipos y costumbres,” 407–8.
18. Cartwright, “Prince Henry the Navigator.”

Joanna Allan is associate professor in global development at Northumbria University, UK.

Buy the book today at wvupress.com.