The Colonial Grammar of Resistance: Taleb Sahara and the Paradox of Racialized Militancy

Morocco World

25-07-2025

In the aftermath of decolonization, Frantz Fanon warned that the greatest danger to liberation movements was the internalization of colonial logics under the guise of resistance. Today, figures like Taleb Sahara illustrate a troubling mutation of this insight: militants of identity politics who, in the name of emancipation, reproduce the very epistemologies of racism, hierarchy, and essentialism that colonial power once used to dominate the 'native.' In this essay, I argue that Taleb Sahara represents a paradigmatic case of postcolonial racialized militancy that harnesses Eurocentric morophobia to define 'identity,' while simultaneously undermining the moral and ontological legitimacy of the very subject he claims to liberate.
I. The Psychoanalytic Seduction of Purity
Taleb Sahara's rhetoric is fixated on a fantasy of racial and moral purity, one that opposes the 'civilized Sahrawi' to the allegedly 'criminal' Moroccan. Drawing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, we see here a classic mechanism of projection and scapegoating. The abject Other — in this case, the Moroccan migrant — serves to stabilize a fragile Sahrawi self-image. This maneuver constructs identity through negation: I am Sahrawi because I am not Moroccan. Such boundary-drawing is a response to postcolonial anxiety — an attempt to fix identity in the face of historical fragmentation, hybridity, and geopolitical ambiguity.
But this disavowal of the Other is a double bind. As Judith Butler reminds us, identity is never self-possessed; it is always relational, citational, and embedded in power. The Sahrawi subject, as articulated by Taleb Sahara, is only imaginable through the disarticulation of the Moroccan. This is not liberation; it is a psychic repetition of colonial race-thinking.
II. The Racial Instrumentalization of the Migrant
Taleb's claims — that Morocco 'exports criminals' to Spain as a form of hybrid warfare — echo right-wing conspiratorial narratives across the Global North. The irony is stark: in his attempt to demonize Moroccan statecraft, he borrows the exact racist discourses used by Vox, Rassemblement National, and AfD to exclude all North Africans from the European political imaginary.
Here, Taleb joins what Paul Gilroy once called 'the new raciologies' — postcolonial actors who co-opt the biopolitics of race in service of ethno-nationalist agendas. By portraying Moroccan migrants as criminal by default, he reproduces the colonial trope of the 'unassimilable native,' whose very presence threatens the integrity of the Western state. This is not an anti-colonial critique; it is racial ventriloquism.
What's more disturbing is Taleb's instrumentalization of state clemency — claiming that Moroccan prisoners pardoned near the end of their sentence are 'weaponized' as migrant criminals. He offers no data, no causality, only paranoid inference. His accusation is not just empirically hollow; it is conceptually perverse. It enacts what Edward Said called a 'travesty of liberation': deploying colonial frameworks of control and suspicion in the name of postcolonial freedom.
III. Identity as Fetish, Race as Tool
The contradiction in Taleb Sahara's position lies in the fact that while he invokes anti-colonial language — 'liberation,' 'resistance,' 'self-determination' — he does so by deploying the race card as a tactical weapon. But race, as Stuart Hall taught us, is not a stable ground on which to construct identity. It is a floating signifier, subject to the ideological work of power.
Taleb's use of race as a tool — to divide, to criminalize, to stigmatize — reintroduces the logics of colonial racial classification into the bloodstream of liberation discourse. He is not dismantling the coloniality of power; he is repurposing it with new targets. This is identity as fetish — a reified, purified ideal that occludes the messiness, plurality, and shared histories of Maghrebi peoples.
Postcolonial theorists from Achille Mbembe to Homi Bhabha have shown us that identity is always impure, always in process. To build identity on the foundation of exclusion is not only politically dangerous; it is philosophically bankrupt. It transforms difference into deviance, solidarity into suspicion.
IV. The Political Economy of Morophobia
Taleb's discourse cannot be separated from a broader European context in which morophobia — a racialized fear of Moroccans — is increasingly weaponized to shape migration policy and diplomatic alignments. His narratives are not isolated; they feed into a transnational economy of fear, one that seeks to devalue Morocco's partnerships and delegitimize its strategic role in Africa and the Mediterranean.
But here's the contradiction: while Taleb accuses Morocco of using migrants as pawns, he himself instrumentalizes migrants as political symbols. He invokes the figure of the Moroccan prisoner, stripped of name, voice, or humanity, to enact a rhetorical performance of Sahrawi purity. The migrant becomes a cipher, a blank screen onto which fantasies of contamination, crime, and geopolitical conspiracy are projected.
This is not anti-imperialism. It is a re-enactment of imperial power — now in the hands of the postcolonial militant.
V. Conclusion: The Trap of Reactive Identity
Taleb Sahara's rhetoric exemplifies the danger of what I call reactive identity politics: the construction of selfhood not through affirmative liberation, but through the negation of the Other. This is not a politics of becoming; it is a politics of boundary policing.
As Fanon once warned, 'the oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.' Taleb has taken this one step further — he believes the worst about others in order to justify his own imagined virtue. But in doing so, he resurrects the skeleton of colonial race-thinking and dresses it in the clothes of resistance.
True liberation does not require scapegoats. It requires solidarity, plurality, and the rejection of racial logics — especially when they are dressed as emancipation.