Mauritania: History

At the crossroads of the Arab North and sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritania is a vast but sparsely populated country of some 3 million inhabitants whose capital Nouakchott (population: approximately 1 million) is on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Ancient cities in the interior were important Saharan trade centers from the Ghana Empire through the expansion of Arab civilization and into modern times. The largest of these, Chinguetti, is the seventh-holiest site in Islam.

European colonization came relatively late to Mauritania, which at its independence from France in 1960 was still administered from St. Louis, Senegal. Today’s capital, Nouakchott, was a small outpost midway between that city and Port Etienne, now called Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s commercial capital. At independence, much of the country’s population followed a nomadic lifestyle or worked in agriculture in remote areas mostly untouched by colonial administration. Traditional slavery was formally abolished in 1980. As a result of centuries of this practice, Mauritanian society is characterized by former slave-owning groups of Arab-Berber origin, known as White Moors, and the Black Moor descendants of their liberated slaves who generally lived in the northern and eastern regions. Black African communities, also marked by slavery, traditionally resided in the southern part of the country near the Senegal River.

Ethnic tensions persist in Mauritania. In April 1989 violence broke out between communities, stemming from a schism between Arab-Berber and Black African communities. Over the next 2 years the “1989 events" resulted in Mauritania's deportation of Black African citizens to Senegal and Mali, state-sponsored killings, and the purge of tens of thousands of Black Africans from the military and government and their expulsion. In 2010, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees concluded its program of repatriating Mauritanian citizens from Senegal, a significant milestone in Mauritania’s efforts to resolve this decades-long refugee problem, also known as the passif humanitaire.

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