Mauritaniaموريتانيا

Rock art in the Adrar shows that the Sahara was once green, with cattle herders and giraffes. As it dried, Berber Sanhaja nomads controlled the routes between the salt mines of the north and the gold and grain of the Sahel. Koumbi Saleh, in the far south-east, is thought to have been the capital of the Ghana empire.

In the 11th century a reform movement among the Sanhaja, the Almoravids, grew from a desert retreat into an empire that took Morocco, founded Marrakech and crossed into Spain. Their southern wing pushed against Ghana and spread Islam in the Sahel.

The ksour — fortified caravan towns — of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata flourished between the 12th and 16th centuries. Chinguetti became a gathering point for pilgrims to Mecca and a centre of learning; family libraries there still hold manuscripts on law, astronomy and poetry.

From the 15th to the 17th century Arab Beni Hassan tribes moved into the western Sahara and, after the Char Bouba war (1644–1674), took political dominance over Berber groups. Their dialect, Hassaniya, became the common language, and a hierarchy took shape: warrior Arab tribes, Berber scholarly (marabout) tribes, tributaries, craftsmen and griots, and enslaved people.

The Haratin, descendants of enslaved black Africans who speak Hassaniya, are now perhaps the largest group. Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery, in 1981, and criminalised it only in 2007; activists say forms of servitude persist, and the issue is central to politics.

Along the Senegal River live Halpulaar (Fula), Soninke and Wolof communities who share culture with Senegal and Mali. Tension between them and the Arabic-speaking state peaked in 1989–91, when tens of thousands of black Mauritanians were expelled to Senegal and Mali.

France conquered the territory slowly from its Senegal base between 1902 and 1934, running it from Saint-Louis. When independence came on 28 November 1960, there was no capital: Nouakchott was built from a small fort and planned for 15,000 people. It now holds over a million.

Morocco claimed the whole of Mauritania until 1969. In 1975 Mauritania took the southern third of Spanish Western Sahara, but the Polisario Front's attacks crippled it; a 1978 coup followed and it withdrew in 1979.

Military men ruled for decades. A 2008 coup brought Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, later elected; in 2019 his defence minister Mohamed Ould Ghazouani won the presidency in the country's first transfer between elected leaders, and Aziz was later jailed for corruption. Mauritania has avoided the jihadist attacks that hit its Sahel neighbours since 2011.

About three quarters of the country is desert. The Adrar plateau rises in sandstone cliffs cut by palm-filled valleys (batha); ergs of shifting dunes cross it. Near Ouadane lies the Richat Structure, a 40 km set of concentric rings once thought to be a crater, now read as an eroded dome.

The Atlantic coast is where the cold Canary Current meets the desert, creating some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. The Banc d'Arguin's shallow waters host millions of migratory birds each winter and Imraguen fishermen who still work with sailing boats and, famously, with dolphins that drive mullet toward their nets.

Iron ore from Zouérat reaches the port of Nouadhibou on a 700 km railway opened in 1963; its trains, up to 2–3 km long, are among the longest in the world.

Mauritanians are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, and the country is proud of its scholars: mahadras, traditional desert schools, taught law, grammar and poetry by memorisation, and some still do. The country was once called 'the land of a million poets'.

Sufi orders, especially the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, spread from here into West Africa. The republic's official name has been Islamic since 1960, and Sharia influences the criminal code.

Poetry, in classical Arabic and in Hassaniya (ghna), is still performed; griot families (iggawen) play the tidinit lute and the ardin harp.

Tea — atay — is poured three times with a foaming flourish; a Mauritanian saying compares the rounds to life, love and death, from bitter to sweet. It can take an hour and is the main social ritual.

Men wear the loose blue or white draa (boubou); women wrap the colourful melhfa. Nomadic life has shrunk, but many urban families still spend holidays in tents in the desert.

The summer date harvest, the Guetna, draws families to Adrar oases. Ideal beauty was long linked to plumpness, and the practice of force-feeding girls (leblouh), though declining, is a known social issue.