Name: Why This Part of Africa is Erased on Every Map You See
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T17:02:05.000Z
Duration: 40 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Throughout your life, you've probably seen a lot of these kinds of worldwide maps displaying different kinds of global data.

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And if you paid close enough attention to all of them, you would have noticed a peculiar pattern emerging in this corner of northwestern Africa time and time again.

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That might seem rather strange to you at first, because it seems that no matter what kind of data the map being shown to you is trying to display, this territory in Africa is almost always left as blank or simply listed as no data.

Here is a map showing global GDP per capita in 2022 that shows this territory blank with no data.

Here's another map showing the share of global population with access to electricity that shows the same territory blank with no data.

Here's a map that shows global population density that still shows the same territory blank with no data.

Or how about this map that shows global per capita CO2 emissions that also shows the same territory blank with no data.

Or this map that shows worldwide daily meat consumption per person that shows the same territory blank with no data.

This this map showing global Human Development Index scores that shows the same territory blank with no data.

This map showing global prison population rates that shows the same territory blank and with no data.

This map showing the US State Department's current travel advisories that list the same territory as blank with no data.

Or this map showing net migration rates worldwide that still leaves the same territory blank and with no data.

I could really just keep going on and on here because no matter what kind of data map you're looking at, the same area in Africa is pretty much always left blank and labeled with the same simple phrase over and and over again, no data.

If you look at the territory on Google Maps, you'll see it labeled as Western Sahara, and

you will notice a conspicuous dashed line marking its northernmost border with Morocco.

But then, when you consult a list of countries who are members of the United nations, you won't find any of them under the name of Western Sahara, because Western Sahara is more of a geographic expression than it is a country.

What that dashed line across the border between Western Sahara and Morocco that's displayed in Google Maps implies is that Western Sahara is a currently disputed territory.

It's the single largest active territorial dispute that's currently ongoing in the whole of Africa, and

it's among the largest anywhere in the world.

In reality, Western Sahara is about the same size as the United kingdom, and

about 80% of it is currently under the de facto control of Morocco, who refers to all of these territories as their southern provinces, including the parts they don't actually control.

Meanwhile, the other 20% of Western Sahara's territory is basically an empty desert that's theoretically under the de facto control of an organization that refers to itself as the Polisario Front, a nationalist movement made up of Western Sahara's indigenous people known as the Sahraawis, who claim the entirety of Western Sahara's territory as their own country that they call the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic or the SADR for short.

The Polisario Front rejects Morocco's presence in Western Sahara that they regard as an illegal foreign occupation of their country.

While Morocco continues to claim the entirety of Western Sahara as their own sovereign territory, including the smaller eastern and southern territories that are currently theoretically controlled by the Polisario.

The two sides have been engaged in a violent war for their control over Western Sahara for decades, and

the territories they actually control are currently separated by a massive 2,700 kilometer long wall made out of sand and stone that carves through the desert and which contains millions of landmines within it, probably making it the longest continuous minefield that can be found anywhere in the world.

And recently the conflict between them has been heating up and it threatens to draw in foreign powers from around the world.

A long standing ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front collapsed only in 2020 and the hot war between them has resumed.

The United States, Israel and most of the Western world more heavily supports Morocco and its territorial claims to Western Sahara with while Russia, China, Iran and especially next door Algeria more heavily support the Polisario Front and their claims to Western Sahara as the Sadr, Algeria's heavy support for the Polisario Front's war effort and Morocco's increasingly close relationship with Israel have devastated relations between the two North African countries.

Despite their similar cultures and histories, the land border between them has been sealed shut for decades, ever since 1994, largely over the Western Sahara issue, while Morocco has retaliated by asserting its own support for the self determination movement of the ethnically Berber majority Kabylia region within Algeria.

Algeria severed its diplomatic relations with Morocco in 2021 and the two countries have been engaged in an increasingly escalating arms race ever since 2020, with Morocco loading up on American and Israeli weapon systems and Algeria doing the same with Russian and Chinese arms.

As the disagreement over Western Sahara's political status increasingly approaches the risk of a boiling point, the conflict involves access to enormous reserves of phosphates in Western Sahara that are critical for synthetic fertilizers.

And global agricultural supply chains, potentially rich offshore natural gas reserves, and

the future of energy trade routes to the European Union.

As Western Sahara is increasingly being viewed as a vital strategic crossroads for oil and gas pipelines from sub Saharan Africa to cross in order to reach Europe, the conflict in Western Sahara, despite not being as well covered as other major global conflicts, bears enormous repercussions for the the future.

And though an all out shooting war between Morocco and Algeria over the issue has so far been avoided, the danger has not passed so long as the Western Sahara dispute continues to remain unresolved.

And in order to understand how we got to this point here today, it's helpful to understand some of the history of the region.

First, the territory of what would eventually become known as Western Sahara was first acquired by the Spanish during the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884, when the various colonial European powers carved up the African continent between them them.

Throughout the period of Spanish colonial control that would last for nearly the next century, the territory would be known as Spanish Sahara.

While in the early 20th century Spain also established a protectorate within Morocco that consisted of a northern and southern strip of territory in modern day Morocco, while the rest of Morocco was incorporated as a French protectorate around the same time.

Most of the French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco achieved their independence in 1956 as the French were heavily occupied at the time with their attempts to violently put down the anti colonial revolt going on in their colonies, colony of Algeria right next door.

So after Morocco became freshly independent again and with their monarchy restored back to power as well, the Moroccan king sought to seize the opportunity and the momentum and claim all of the remaining Spanish possessions in western Africa around him, which at the time included the southern strip of the Spanish Morocco Protectorate that still remained the colony of Ifni.

The Spanish governed North African cities like Ceuta and Melilla and the Spanish Sahara, which were all administered by Spain at the time as separate possessions.

In 1957, the year after they achieved their independence, the Moroccans launched an attack into the southern strip of Spanish Morocco and then invaded Spanish Sahara as well on the basis that both territories had been historically Moroccan.

Spain managed to eject the Moroccans from Spanish Sahara, but

agreed to cede over the strip of southern Morocco to the Moroccans in 1958.

However, the Spanish still retained their colonial control over the city of Sidi Ifni within Morocco as an enclave for the next decade until 1969 when they finally returned back to Morocco under relentless international pressure to do so.

But they still retained their control over Spanish Sahara and the Northern cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

Meanwhile, after around a million Algerians were killed during the brutal fight for their own independence against the French since 1954, the French finally decided to cut their losses and fully withdrew from Algeria in 1962 and granted them their independence as well.

In the immediate aftermath, the border between Algeria and Morocco had never been properly defined or demarcated by the colonial French authorities.

And after achieving independence from the French, Algeria emerged as a pan Arabist socialist state that stood in stark ideological contrast with Morocco's conservative monarchist regime.

In 1963, the year after Algeria achieved their independence, the Moroccan monarchy calculated that in order to try and suppress their own domestic socialist and Pan Arab elements who threatened their continued monarchical rule, and

sensing the opportunity to take advantage of socialist Algeria's post independence chaos and previous bloodshed, they needed to press their territorial claims to Algerian provinces like Tindouf and Colomb Bashar that they claimed had also been historically Moroccan.

And so Moroccan troops launched an invasion.

This led to a conflict between them that became known as the Sand War, during which hundreds of soldiers were killed on both sides before the Organization of African Unity, the predecessor to the modern African Union, mediated a ceasefire between them that left the border completely unchanged.

And in the process, the relationship between newly independent monarchist Morocco and socialist Algeria was immediately tarnished.

And it set the tone for their confrontational relationship that has existed ever since into the present day.

Nearly a decade after the Moroccan Algerian War in 1972, the two countries finally settled their border dispute with a formal border demarcation agreement that very notably included each of their commitments to recognizing their colonial era borders in Africa as a permanent inheritance to avoid further bloodshed, something that would almost be immediately challenged within only a few short years.

Spanish Sahara was still a colony directly ruled by Spain at this point, but

international pressure was mounting on the Francoist regime in Madrid to also finally give it up.

The following year, in 1973, the Polisario Front was founded in Spanish Sahara amongst the territory's indigenous Saharawi community with the goal of waging an armed insurgency against the Spanish colonizers until they agreed to leave and to grant them their independence.

At the same time, both of the now independent states of Mauritania and Morocco on either side of Spanish Sahara claimed the entire colony as being rightfully theirs, argued that Spain should surrender the territory to them instead.

Morocco's claims to Spanish Sahara were especially vocal and it took its case to the International Court of Justice or the icj.

Morocco's legal argument was based on the fact that before the area of Spanish Sahara became a Spanish colony in the 19th century, the Moroccan Sultan had appointed tax collectors and sheikhs to the territory in order to exert authority over the territory's nomadic tribes.

Spain ultimately argued during this case that those 19th century tribes refused to be taxed by Morocco.

And the ICJ ultimately ruled against Morocco's claims to the territory in October of 1975 on the basis that Morocco never actually exercised full sovereignty over the territory in the pre colonial past.

Instead, the court ruled that the indigenous Sahrawi people of the territory were entitled to the right of self determination and therefore the right to choose their own destiny between an independent state or joining with Morocco or Mauretania.

The ICJ's decision enraged the Moroccan monarchy and on the same evening when the ICJ's decision was being announced, the Moroccan king took to his country's TV and radio and called for hundreds of thousands of volunteers to rise up and to go march into Spanish Sahara and effectively colonize it and claim the territory for Morocco with their own bodies.

In a flagrant DISREGARD for the ICJ's ruling, in November of 1975, a massive crowd of around 350,000 unarmed Moroccan settlers who had heeded their king's call marched across the border from southern Morocco into the Spanish Sahara during an event known as the Green March.

At the time, Spain's 82 year old longtime dictator Francisco Franco had just entered into a coma and was on his deathbed.

And fearing the dual instability of Franco's looming death and the power transition and a potential colonial war breaking out with Morocco over their Sahara colony, the Spanish authorities at the time decided to withdraw from the colony and they entered directly into negotiations with Morocco and Mauritania in what ended up becoming known as the Madrid Accords.

Essentially, Spain agreed to withdraw from the colony and to partition it between Morocco and Mauritania, with Morocco gaining about the northern two thirds and Mauritania gaining the southern third.

While Spain itself was supposed to retain a 30% equity stake in the most valuable asset in the colony, the lucrative phosphate mine here at Boucra.

Though Morocco would end up taking the whole mine over anyway, the territories indigenous Zaharawi people, the Polisario Front and Algeria, however, were not consulted and took no part in the negotiations.

Immediately afterward, the Polisario Front shifted their guerilla war of independence against Spain into a guerrilla war of independence against both Morocco and Mauritania instead.

While Algeria next door horrified at what Morocco had just done to the Spanish Sahara and the precedent that it could end up sett for the regions in Algeria that Morocco had also invaded and attempted to conquer only a decade previously, decided to throw their full diplomatic and military support behind the Polisario Front's insurgency.

In a show of solidarity with the Sahrawi people, The Algerians expelled 45,000 Moroccans out of their country.

And then in 1976, the Polisario Front unilaterally proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, or the sadr, based on the whole territory of what is now known as Western Sahara.

And Algeria became the very first country to recognize their independence and sovereignty, which led Morocco to sever their diplomatic relations with Algeria.

A bloody war between the Polisario Front, armed and supported by Algeria and the Mauritanian and Moroccan occupied areas in Western Sahara, began.

But Shortly afterwards, in 1979, Mauritania decided to just give up and withdrew from Western Sahara altogether, which left the remaining fine in the territory between the Moroccans and the Polisario to continue.

By 1981, the Moroccan Armed forces began adopting a new strategy of building out a series of walls and fortifications to separate their controlled areas of Western Sahara from those areas that still remained under the control of the polisario front.

By 1987, this had culminated with the completion of a truly massive continuous wall made out of sand and stone that carved across the nearly uninhabited desert that continues to separate the Moroccan controlled and administered areas in the west from the frontier in the east of the territory borders with Mauritania and Algeria.

The wall became known as simply the Berm, and

it is still to this date, the largest and longest active military wall in series of fortifications anywhere in the world.

The Moroccans filled the wall in with literally millions of landmines, which also makes it the longest continuous minefield in the world as well.

These millions of landmines make the wall almost impenetrable.

But if that wasn't enough, the Moroccans also built and continue to man observation posts at roughly five intervals across their entire side of the wall, too, complete with airfields, artillery positions and military bases that dot the area behind the wall as well, while a series of fixed and mobile radar systems throughout the wall with a 60 to 80 kilometer range permanently observe the ground in front of the wall within the Polisario controlled areas to detect any potential artillery fire and troop movements in the otherwise empty and largely uninhabited deserts.

The areas to the east of this wall within Western Sahara are often labeled on maps as being controlled or administered by the Polisario Front, but

These territories of Western Sahara to the east of the berm are uninhabited, empty desert with nothing useful.

While the Polisario Front relocated their own operational headquarters to the growing Sahrawi refugee camps that were established across the border in neighboring Algeria's Tindouf Province a long time ago.

Algeria has hosted the Polisario Front as essentially an armed militia or government in exile across the border for decades now, and

they've allowed them to continue organizing and launching attacks into Western Sahara from these camps on Algerian soil as well.

However, in order to attack the berm and the Moroccan soldiers who guard it, the Polisario's fighters would have to travel through Mauritania first before launching their attacks across the border from there into Western Sahara.

Which is why these eastern territories within Western Sahara, wedged in between the Moroccan wall in the west and the Mauritanian border in the east, aren't really so much controlled by the Polisario Front as they've been left alone as a buffer zone by the Moroccans, the Polisario fighters are left with no other choice but to cross from Mauritania into the empty, uninhabited desert on their way to the berm and their homeland that's locked away behind it, where they will be quickly spotted by Moroccan radar and aircraft as the only moving targets for hundreds of kilometers of open des, which will then make them sitting ducks for Moroccan artillery and airstrikes.

Morocco's ensuing occupation of Western Sahara, its flagrant disregard for the ICJ's ruling on the territory, its war against the indigenous Sahrawis, its construction of a massive wall with millions of landmines dividing the territory, and