El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed
co-founder and general-secretary of the Polisario (1948-1976)
El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed (also known as El Uali, El-Wali, Luali or Lulei; Arabic: الوالي مصطفى السيد; 1948 – 9 June 1976) was a Sahrawi nationalist leader, co-founder and second Secretary-General of the Polisario Front.
Youth and background
El-Ouali was born in 1948 in a Sahrawi nomad encampment somewhere on the hammada desert plains in eastern Spanish Sahara or northern Mauritania; some sources give his place of birth as Bir Lehlou, a location that is symbolic for the Polisario Front, for being the place of the proclamation of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). His parents were poor and his father disabled, 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 in 1962, and then to the Islamic Institute in Taroudannt in 1966 with impressive results, being awarded scholarships to attend university in Rabat in 1970. There he studied law and 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 was the first alumnus in the history of Moroccan universities on achieving a punctuation of 19 out of 20 in Constitutional law. He travelled to Europe for the only time in his life about this time, visiting Amsterdam in the Netherlands & Paris in France.
El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed was associated with Ila al-Amam, a clandestine Marxist group that took a position explicitly in favor of Sahrawi self-determination.
Polisario Front
El-Ouali grew increasingly disturbed by the oppressive Spanish colonial rule over what was then known as Spanish Sahara, and although never involved with the Harakat Tahrir, news of the Zemla Intifada made a deep impression on him.
“El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed” enters the record as co-founder and general-secretary of the Polisario (1948-1976). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what El-Ouali, Mustapha and Sayed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q285662. VIAF identifies the subject as 52972522. The Library of Congress control number is n79127468. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1976, 1960 and 1962.
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