The history of Mauritania

Mauritania lies where the Sahara meets the Sahel, and its history has been shaped by movement across the desert rather than by any single state. Its south-eastern cliffs hold some of the oldest stone towns in West Africa, the medieval Ghana Empire probably had its capital inside its present borders, and the Almoravid movement that conquered Morocco and Muslim Spain was born among its Berber nomads. From the seventeenth century Arab warrior groups dominated a society of nomads, clerics, farmers and slaves organised into emirates. France ruled the territory loosely from 1904, and the independent Islamic Republic created in 1960 has wrestled with drought, the war over Western Sahara, a long run of military coups, and deep divisions between its Arab-Berber and black African communities.

Until around 5,000 years ago the western Sahara was far wetter than it is today, with lakes in the Hodh depression and grassland across much of the country, and rock paintings and engravings record hunters and cattle herders. As the climate dried, people of the region adapted. The earliest inhabitants named in later tradition are the Bafour, who may be ancestors of the Imraguen fishing people of the coast, while farmers along the Senegal River were probably ancestors of today's riverine peoples.

The most striking prehistoric remains belong to the Tichitt tradition, which flourished from about 2200 BCE to the last centuries BCE along the cliffs of Dhar Tichitt, Dhar Walata, Dhar Néma and Dhar Tagant. Its makers, probably ancestors of the Soninke, built hundreds of villages of dry-stone compounds with houses, granaries and, at some sites, surrounding walls. They herded cattle, grew pearl millet, which may have been domesticated in this region, and later worked metal. Archaeologists consider these settlements among the earliest complex, hierarchically organised societies in West Africa, and a forerunner of the states that later arose in the Sahel. In classical times Roman writers knew only vague names for the peoples beyond the Atlas, though Roman coins found at Akjoujt hint at trade.

The camel spread across the Sahara in the first centuries CE, and from about the third century Berber groups moved south into Mauritania in search of pasture and safety from wars in the north. They subdued or pushed south the older population. By the ninth century three Sanhaja Berber groups, the Lamtuna, Massufa and Gudala, formed a loose confederation that controlled the western caravan routes from its town of Awdaghust. Caravans carried salt from Saharan mines, along with copper, cloth and horses, south to the Sahel, and brought gold, ivory and enslaved people north to Sijilmasa in Morocco.

The southern end of this trade lay with the Ghana Empire, the first great Sahelian state, founded by Soninke rulers. Arab writers from the late eighth century called Ghana "the land of gold". Its probable capital was Koumbi Saleh in south-eastern Mauritania, where excavations have uncovered a large stone-built town with a congregational mosque, occupied from roughly the fifth to the fourteenth century. The geographer al-Bakri, writing around 1068, described a capital of two towns, one for Muslim merchants with twelve mosques and one for the king, who followed the traditional religion. Ghana extended its authority over the Sanhaja in the tenth century and took Awdaghust. Along the trade routes, towns such as Oualata, Tichitt, Ouadane and Chinguetti grew into commercial and religious centres, and Chinguetti later became famous for its libraries of manuscripts.

Islam reached the region with merchants after the Arab conquest of North Africa under the Umayyad Caliphate in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, and the Sanhaja were largely converted by the ninth century, although many kept older customs. Around 1039 a Gudala chief, Yahya ibn Ibrahim, returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca and brought back a strict teacher of Maliki law, Abdallah ibn Yasin. Rejected by the Gudala, Ibn Yasin found support among the Lamtuna, and in the 1050s the movement they formed, the al-Murabitun or Almoravids, began to unite the Sanhaja by force and preaching.

The Almoravids took Sijilmasa in 1054 and Awdaghust soon afterwards. After Ibn Yasin's death in 1059 leadership split: Yusuf ibn Tashfin led the northern wing, founded Marrakesh and went on to rule Morocco and much of Muslim Spain, while Abu Bakr ibn Umar led the southern wing in the desert. Arabic sources say that Abu Bakr captured the Ghana capital in 1076, although modern historians debate whether this was a conquest or a slower process of conversion and alliance. After Abu Bakr's death in 1087 the southern Almoravids fragmented, but the movement left the western Sahara firmly Muslim and attached to the Maliki school.

From the thirteenth century the Mali Empire, founded by Sundiata Keita, took over Ghana's former lands, including the south-east of Mauritania and the Senegal valley. Oualata became a key relay point on the routes linking Mali with North Africa and a gathering place for pilgrims. In 1352 Ibn Battuta arrived there after crossing the desert from Morocco and recorded his surprise at the freedom of its women and the customs of its Massufa inhabitants. Mali's decline in the fifteenth century let the Songhai Empire extend its reach to the region, until a Moroccan army destroyed Songhai power in 1591. Over these centuries the desert towns trained generations of Muslim scholars, and the trading cities of the Adrar and Tagant prospered on salt, dates and caravan traffic.

From the thirteenth century Arab Bedouin groups of the Maqil confederation, who traced their origins to Yemen, moved south through Morocco into the western Sahara. The most important of them, the Bani Hassan, gradually imposed themselves on the Berber tribes. The last great Berber resistance came in the war known as Sharr Bubba (1644–1674), led by the cleric Nasir al-Din. Its failure fixed a social order that lasted into the twentieth century: Arab warrior lineages (hassan) at the top, Berber clerical lineages (zawaya) devoted to scholarship and religion, tributary groups below them, and at the bottom slaves and freed slaves, many of them black Africans. Hassaniya Arabic became the common language, and the population as a whole came to be called Moors. Four emirates, Trarza, Brakna, Tagant and Adrar, dominated politics.

European ships appeared on the coast in the fifteenth century. The Portuguese set up a post at Arguin in 1445 and later a fort, first seeking gold and soon buying slaves, as many as a thousand a year in the mid-fifteenth century, in an early stage of what became the Atlantic slave trade. Spain, the Dutch Republic, Britain and France later competed for the trade in gum arabic, harvested from the acacias of Trarza and Brakna and used in European textile printing. The French settlement at Saint-Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal River from 1659, became the centre of this commerce. The emirs played the Europeans against one another and collected annual payments for access to the trade, and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 recognised French claims to the coast and the river.

French expansion up the Senegal River gathered pace under Louis Faidherbe, governor of Senegal in the 1850s, who fought the emirate of Trarza, but conquest of the interior came only after 1900 as part of the Scramble for Africa. France wanted Mauritania mainly as a link between its possessions in North and West Africa. The administrator Xavier Coppolani combined alliances with zawaya clerics against the warrior groups with military pressure, and French forces occupied Trarza, Brakna and Tagant in 1903–1904. Coppolani was killed at Tidjikja in 1905. The northern emirate of Adrar resisted with the help of the anti-colonial shaykh Ma al-Aynayn and was subdued only between 1909 and 1912, and parts of the far north remained beyond French control for decades.

Mauritania was organised in 1904 as a territory of French West Africa and became a colony in 1920, but it was governed from Saint-Louis in Senegal and received little investment. France ruled indirectly through emirs, clerics and chiefs, banned slavery on paper in 1905 without ending it in practice, and ended inter-clan warfare. About nine-tenths of the people remained nomadic. After the Second World War a series of reforms across French West Africa brought elections, territorial assemblies and finally autonomy, and Mauritania took part in the wider decolonisation of Africa.

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania became independent on 28 November 1960. A new capital, Nouakchott, was built on the site of a small coastal fort, since the colony had never had one of its own. Morocco, which claimed Mauritania as part of a greater Morocco, refused to recognise the new state until 1969. President Moktar Ould Daddah turned the country into a one-party state under his Mauritanian People's Party in 1964. Iron-ore mining at Zouérat, linked by a new railway to the port of Nouadhibou, began in 1963 and soon dominated exports. Black Africans from the Senegal valley, many educated in French, filled much of the new administration, while Moorish elites pushed for the use of Arabic, and language policy provoked unrest in 1966. The great Sahel droughts of the late 1960s and early 1970s killed much of the livestock and drove nomads into the towns. In 1973 Mauritania left the CFA franc zone for its own currency, the ouguiya, and in 1974 it nationalised the iron mines.

When Spain withdrew from its Saharan colony, Mauritania joined Morocco in claiming the territory. Under the Madrid Accords of November 1975 it received the southern part, which it administered from 1976 as Tiris al-Gharbiyya. The Sahrawi independence movement, the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria, struck back hard, raiding the iron-ore railway and twice shelling Nouakchott. The war drained the economy and divided the army.

On 10 July 1978 officers removed Ould Daddah in a bloodless coup. After further shuffles within the junta, Colonel Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla emerged as leader. In August 1979 Mauritania signed a peace agreement with Polisario and gave up its claim to Western Sahara, whose southern zone Morocco then occupied. Haidalla decreed the abolition of slavery in 1981, although no penalties followed and the practice persisted. His rule grew increasingly arbitrary, and in December 1984 Colonel Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya deposed him.

Taya's government pursued an Arab nationalist line, and tensions with the black population came to a head in April 1989, when a dispute between Moorish herders and Senegalese farmers on the border led to deadly riots in both countries. Mauritania expelled tens of thousands of black Mauritanians, many of whom had no ties to Senegal, and in 1990–1991 the authorities carried out a campaign of violence and confiscation against the Halpulaar community in particular. By 1991 the UN refugee agency counted more than 50,000 Mauritanian refugees in Senegal and over 13,000 in Mali; many returned only after 2007. Taya's support for Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War isolated Mauritania, but a new constitution in 1991 legalised opposition parties, though Taya won the elections that followed amid accusations of fraud. Later in the decade he turned towards the West, and in 1999 Mauritania established full diplomatic relations with Israel, a step that provoked strong domestic opposition.

Taya survived a coup attempt in 2003, but on 3 August 2005, while he was abroad for the funeral of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, officers led by Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall took power without bloodshed. The junta oversaw a new constitution limiting presidential terms, approved by referendum in 2006, and in March 2007 Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi won the country's first fully contested presidential election. In the same year a new law made slavery a criminal offence. On 6 August 2008, after Abdallahi tried to dismiss senior commanders, General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz overthrew him. After a negotiated transition Aziz won a presidential election in 2009, and his government cut ties with Israel. Oil, discovered offshore in 2001, began to flow in 2006, and Mauritania became a partner of Western states against armed Islamist groups in the Sahel.

In 2019 Aziz's former ally Mohamed Ould Ghazouani won the presidency, the first transfer of power between elected presidents since independence. Aziz was later prosecuted and in December 2023 sentenced to five years in prison for corruption. Ghazouani was re-elected in June 2024 with about 56 per cent of the vote, ahead of the anti-slavery campaigner Biram Dah Abeid, who rejected the result. The country has hosted large numbers of refugees fleeing conflict in Mali, and in 2024 it agreed a €210 million partnership with the European Union aimed partly at curbing migration by sea to the Canary Islands. Mauritania has largely avoided the jihadist insurgencies affecting its neighbours, but poverty, the legacy of slavery and the relationship between its communities remain central questions in its politics.