People & Culture

Mauritania is a country the Sahara mostly owns. Around ninety percent of its territory lies inside the desert, and the land rises out of that flatness only twice, in the low stone plateaus of the Adrar and the Tagant, which sit at the centre of the country like two weathered tables. In the far south, the Senegal River draws a green line across the sand, a narrow valley of alluvial soil known locally as the Chemama, where the country's only reliable farmland survives. On the Atlantic edge the coast turns into something else entirely, the Banc d'Arguin, a shifting bank of dunes and shallow water where the desert meets the ocean and the meeting produces one of the richest bird habitats in West Africa. It was not always this dry. Rock art scattered across the highlands of the Adrar, recorded and published since the 1940s around sites such as Tichitt and Oualata, shows elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses and crocodiles moving through a landscape that no longer exists here. Before roughly five thousand years ago the Sahara held oak and cedar in its highlands and savanna grassland below, threaded with shallow lakes and braided rivers where people fished, herded cattle and hunted. The engravings and paintings, cattle first, then horses, then camels and finally Arabic and Tifinagh script layered over the older images, read almost as a timeline of the desert closing in, with aridity settling at present levels in the north by around 1500 BC and reaching the south only by the middle of the first millennium AD. The people who occupied this land as it dried are remembered as the Bafour, described in the sources as part Berber, part Black African and part Semitic, living as hunters, pastoralists and fishermen before anyone else arrived to contest the ground. Berber groups began moving in from the third and fourth centuries AD, and the Sanhaja among them brought camel pastoralism, which gave them a mobility the Bafour could not match and let them push many Bafour into vassal status or force them south toward what is now the Senegalese border. Arab Muslims reached the region by the late seventh and eighth centuries, though for a long stretch afterward the desert remained a Berber world more than an Arab one. Somewhere south and east of this Berber Sahara lay the Ghana Empire, whose ruins are conventionally placed at Koumbi Saleh in what is now southeastern Mauritania. The site was reported by the French officer Albert Bonnel de Mezieres in 1914 and excavated across several campaigns through the twentieth century, and it does show a substantial Muslim trading town of stone houses and a congregational mosque, occupied mainly between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. But the identification is genuinely contested rather than settled, since no inscription at the site names it as Ghana's capital, the royal town described by the Arab geographer al-Bakri has never been located there, and some archaeologists argue the ruins belong instead to the Berber trading post of Awdaghost, with Ghana's true capital sitting further south near Djenne. What tourists visit as the capital of ancient Ghana is, honestly, the best archaeological guess rather than a confirmed address. It was out of this same Sanhaja world, and not out of any city, that the Almoravid movement grew. Around 1040 a Gudala chief named Yahya ibn Ibrahim returned from pilgrimage determined to bring stricter Islamic teaching to his people, and the scholar he recruited, Abdallah ibn Yasin, built a fortified religious community, a ribat, among the desert confederations of Lamtuna, Gudala and Massufa Berbers who ranged across the territory between the Draa, Niger and Senegal rivers. What followed is one of the more startling reversals in African history, because a reform movement born among camel herders in this desert took Sijilmasa and Awdaghost by the mid-1050s, founded Marrakesh around 1070 as its new capital, and by 1086 was crossing into Iberia to defeat a Castilian king at the battle of Sagrajas, folding most of Muslim Spain into an empire whose roots lay in the dunes of what is now Mauritania. Long after the Almoravids, four fortified caravan towns grew up along the desert's western trade corridor: Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata, inscribed together by UNESCO in 1996 as the Ancient Ksour. Built between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries to serve trans-Saharan trade, each is centred on a mosque with a square minaret, its houses packed along narrow streets inside a defensive wall, using whatever material the site offered, stone at Ouadane and Chinguetti and packed earth at Oualata. They functioned as much as centres of Islamic scholarship as of commerce, and Chinguetti in particular earned an outsized reputation, since it is known in West African tradition as the seventh holiest city of Islam and nicknamed the Sorbonne of the Sahara, and it became a gathering point for pilgrims assembling before the long road to Mecca. At its height the town held around thirty manuscript libraries, and roughly a dozen family collections survive today holding several thousand handwritten texts on Islamic law, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, some dating to the later Middle Ages, now threatened as much by sand and flash flooding as by time. Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries a new wave of migration reached the desert from Yemen by way of the Maghrib, the Beni Hassan, a branch of the Maqil Arab bedouin. Sanhaja Berber groups resisted them in what is remembered as the Char Bouba war, fought through the seventeenth century, and lost. Out of that defeat came a rigid social order that has shaped Mauritania ever since, since Hassaniya Arabic, the bedouin dialect named for the Beni Hassan, displaced Berber as the common language, and society stratified into the Hassan warrior tribes, the Zwaya religious scholars, the Znaga tributaries, artisan and musician castes, and the Haratin, Black populations held in slavery or descended from it, at the bottom. France's presence in this world began carefully. Treaty relations with local emirs date to 1858, but Paris made no serious attempt to govern the interior until the turn of the century, and Mauritania was folded administratively into French West Africa in 1904, while what colonial administrators called pacification of the desert interior dragged on until 1912, with the last resistance from a Reguibat band suppressed only in 1934, one of the latest completed conquests anywhere on the continent. Nouakchott itself barely existed through most of this, since it was a fishing settlement of perhaps two hundred people as late as 1950, chosen in 1957 as the site for a new capital, with construction beginning in 1958 and independence following on 28 November 1960 with Nouakchott, built essentially from nothing, as the seat of government. The caste order forged in the seventeenth century outlived colonisation and independence alike. Recent estimates put the Bidhan, the Arab-Berber Moors, at roughly thirty percent of the population, the Haratin, the Black Moors descended from those the Bidhan enslaved, at around forty percent, and sub-Saharan communities along the Senegal River, including Halpulaar, Soninke and Wolof people who were never absorbed into Moorish society at all, making up the rest. The government does not officially break down the population by ethnicity, which itself says something about how sensitive these lines remain. Slavery is the hardest thread in this history to state plainly, and it deserves plain statement rather than either euphemism or sensationalism. Mauritania abolished it in 1981, the last country in the world to do so by law, and did not make it a criminal offence until 2007, while a constitutional reform in 2012 went further and classified it as a crime against humanity. Prosecutions have remained rare, with only a handful since 2007, and independent researchers, the Global Slavery Index among them, have documented tens of thousands of people, disproportionately Haratin women and children, still living in conditions of hereditary servitude in the twenty-first century. It is not a closed chapter of the country's past but an ongoing struggle that tourists will not see directly and should understand sits beneath the surface of daily life. Mauritania's postcolonial history also carries a short, sharp war. When Spain withdrew from Spanish Sahara under the Madrid Accords of 1975, administration of the territory passed to Morocco and Mauritania without any transfer of sovereignty, and the Polisario Front, seeking an independent Sahrawi state, fought both governments through the rest of the decade. The strain of that war helped topple Mauritania's Daddah government in a coup in 1978, and the military officers who took power signed a peace treaty with Polisario on 5 August 1979, renouncing Mauritania's claim to the southern third of Western Sahara and withdrawing its forces entirely, a rupture Morocco answered by annexing the territory Mauritania had just abandoned. One more thread runs straight through the desert today. The iron ore railway linking the mines at Zouerat to the port of Nouadhibou was built in 1960 and opened in 1963, and its trains, up to three kilometres long with two hundred or more loaded cars, are counted among the longest in the world. The run of 704 kilometres through Fderik and Choum is one travellers genuinely ride, climbing onto the empty ore cars for a dusty, freezing, sunburnt crossing of the Sahara that has become one of the more unusual overland journeys left on the continent. What a visitor actually stands in front of, after all this, is scattered but specific. Chinguetti's sand-swallowed old quarter and its handful of surviving manuscript libraries. Ouadane's stone ruins above its newer town. The Ben Amera monolith, rising some 633 metres from the desert floor near the Western Saharan border, used for centuries by caravan traders as a landmark and beacon. The Richat Structure near Ouadane, an eroded dome of concentric rock rings roughly fifty kilometres across, once mistaken for a meteorite crater and now visible even from orbit. The palm-shaded gorge and warm springs of the Terjit oasis on the edge of the Adrar. The rusted hulks of Nouadhibou's ship graveyard, partially cleared in an EU-funded operation beginning in 2006. The Imraguen fishers of Banc d'Arguin National Park, a UNESCO site since 1989, who still work migratory mullet from traditional sailboats using techniques handed down for generations. And Nouakchott's fish market, loud and briny at dawn as the pirogues come in and the catch is auctioned on the sand. None of this asks to be treated as scenery only. A manuscript in Chinguetti is a working religious and scholarly object rather than a museum prop, and the families who guard them are doing so under real financial and environmental pressure. The caste history that shaped who built the ksour and who laboured in them is not settled, and a traveller moving through Atar, Chinguetti or Nouakchott is moving through a society still working out the difference between what its laws say and what its inheritance still enforces. Ask before photographing people, pay guides and library keepers what their knowledge is worth, and hold the line between admiring a nine-century-old mosque and glossing over what nine centuries actually contained.