Youth and Background
El-Ouali was born in 1948 in a Sahrawi nomad encampment somewhere on the hammada desert plains in eastern Western Sahara or northern Mauritania; some sources give his place of birth as Bir Lehlou, a location that is symbolic for Polisario, for being the place of the proclamation of the SADR. His parents were poor and his father handicapped, and with the sum of the severe drought on the Sahara that year, and the consequences of the Ifni War, the family had to abandon the traditional bedouin lifestyle of the Sahrawis, settling near Tan-Tan (nowadays southern Morocco) at the late 1950s. Some sources stated that Ouali's family was deported among others to Morocco by Spanish authorities in 1960.
He went to primary school in Tan-Tan, and then to the Islamic Institute in Taroudant with impressive results, being awarded scholarships to attend university in Rabat. There he studied Laws & Political sciences, and met other young members of the Sahrawi diaspora, who like him were affected by the radicalism sweeping Moroccan universities in the early 1970s (heavily influenced by May 1968 in France). He travelled to Europe for the only time in his life about this time, visiting Amsterdam in the Netherlands & Paris in France.
Read more about this topic: El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed
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