Islamic Republic of Mauritania

Islamic Republic of Mauritania الجمهورية الإسلامية الموريتانية
Flag Coat of arms
Capital and largest city	Nouakchott
Dominant mode of production	Capitalism
Government	Unitary presidential Islamic republic
• President	Mohamed Ould Ghazouani
• Prime Minister	Mohamed Ould Bilal
Area
• Total	1,030,000 km²
Population
• 2023 estimate	4,244,878

Mauritania, officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, is a country in West Africa bordered by Western Sahara, Algeria, Mali, and Senegal. Following independence from French colonial rule, along with Morocco it attempted to invade Western Sahara, and annex parts of its territory, most of the country is now occupied by Morocco.

History

Precolonialism

The earliest evidence of complex social organization within the territory of modern Mauritania is found in the south-central sandstone escarpments of Dhar Tichitt, Dhar Walata, Dhar Néma, and Dhar Tagant approximately between 8050 and 1050 BCE. The Sahara was significantly wetter and capable of sustaining substantial human populations. The civilization that emerged at Dhar Tichitt around 2000 BCE represents one of the earliest known complex agropastoral societies in North and West Africa. Its economic foundation rested on cattle and sheep pastoralism, hunting, fishing in lakes, and the cultivation of bulrush millet.

Architecturally, the Tichitt used dry-stone masonry architecture. Archaeological surveys have identified over 500 distinct settlements exhibiting a nested settlement hierarchy from small hamlets to large, proto-urban centers suggesting the emergence of hierarchical social structures and state formation. Villages were constructed on cliffs rising up to 60 meters above the surrounding plains, combining defensive advantages with proximity to seasonal water sources. The settlements featured heavy stone enclosures serving as living quarters, cattle pens, and granaries, with narrow alleyways and public squares indicating urban planning.

We see a major architectural transformation, with the construction of stone-masonry compounds and fortified walls; a sharp decline in aquatic faunal remains indicates advancing desertification, while the proliferation of heavy, non-portable milling stones attests to the centrality of grain processing. All of this reflects the gradual abandonment of the region as intensifying aridity and encroaching sand dunes destroyed the ecological basis of the agropastoral system. The emergence of granaries, settlement hierarchies, and defensive fortifications points to the development of surplus appropriation and the beginnings of class differentiation.

The abandonment of the Dhar Tichitt did not represent the disappearance of their populations; archaeological evidence shows that Tichitt tradition appears in the Middle Niger floodplain, suggesting that migrating groups carried their technological and agricultural knowledge southward.

Bafour & Berber

Following the depopulation of the Dhars, the Mauritanian landscape was inhabited by populations identified in oral traditions and early Arabic sources as the Bafour. They were non-Arab inhabitants similar to the Dhar of the Western Sahara and were a spectrum of early farmers, pastoralists and hunter-gatherers who inhabited central regions such as the Adrar Plateau. The Bafour developed agricultural innovations, most notably the introduction of irrigation techniques and the systematic cultivation of the date palm, which permitted human settlement to persist in isolated desert oases.

The southern river valleys were simultaneously cultivated by populations ancestral to the modern Toucouleur and Wolof peoples. Over subsequent centuries, the ethnic and cultural legacy of the Bafour was progressively absorbed into other emergent groups: many migrated southward, assimilating into Soninke, Serer, and Fula populations, while those who remained along the Atlantic coast adapted to coast and their descendants being identified as the present Imraguen fishermen of the Bay of Arguin.

Around 200 and 300 CE, we see southward migrations from the Maghreb driven by the search for pasture land and the desire to escape the political instability, taxation, and warfare of Roman and post-Roman North Africa. These groups were the direct ancestors of the people who established the Sanhaja Confederation who then gradually subjugated the remaining Bafour populations, reducing them to tributary or vassal status operating out of primitive accumulation in which they established themselves as a ruling stratum over an indigenous productive base.

Through this the Berber identity came to replace and marginalize the Bafour but specifically the introduction of the camel to the western Sahara did this, as prior to the camel, desert crossings were severely restricted in scale. The camel revolutionized Saharan logistics, enabling deep-desert pastoralism, the execution of long-distance military raids, and most notably the establishment of large-scale trans-Saharan trade routes. It changed the Sahara into a highway, linking Mediterranean economies with the Sahelian interior.

Sanhaja Confederation

Between 701 and 800 CE, the Berber tribes of the western Sahara had unified and created into the Sanhaja Confederation, a decentralized political-economic network controlled by three clans: the Lamtuna, the Godala and the Massufa. This confederation controlled the western arteries of the trans-Saharan caravan trade, exercising an effective monopoly over the transport of West African gold and Saharan salt which formed the backbone of the regional economy.

The Sanhaja controlled major salt deposits, notably the Awlil mines along the Atlantic coast and the Sebkha of Ijil in the northern desert. Massive slabs of salt, weighing up to 90 kilograms each, were loaded onto camel caravans sometimes numbering in the thousands and transported southward. In Sahelian markets, this salt was exchanged in remote areas, on a pound-for-pound basis for gold dust from the Bambuk and Buré regions, as well as for ivory, animal hides, and slaves.

The city of Awdaghust, located in the Hodh depression of southeastern Mauritania, emerged as the paramount commercial hub of this era. It transformed from a pastoral chiefdom into a major urban center between the tenth and eleventh centuries, Awdaghust became the central point of exchange between Muslim merchants from the Maghreb and the Wangara (sub-Saharan merchants). Al-Bakri, writing in the eleventh century, described Awdaghust at its zenith as a large, prosperous town surrounded by date palms and irrigated wheat fields, boasting markets, mosques, and a developed industrial sector producing tools, construction materials, and jewelry. The city's social structure reflected the complex class relations of the trans-Saharan economy: a merchant elite of North African origin, a Sanhaja political-military aristocracy, a stratum of indigenous artisans and traders.

Ghana Empire

The Ghana Empire known to its Soninke founders as Wagadu exercised territorial, military, and economic hegemony over present-day southeastern Mauritania. Despite its imperial core and legendary capital of Koumbi Saleh lay near the modern Mali-Mauritania border, Ghana's influence permeated the entire region. The Ghana Empire’s material basis of Wagadu's power was its capacity to tax the salt-gold trade passing through its territory, extracting surplus from the circulation of commodities. Culturally, Ghana's rise and decline is preserved in Soninke oral tradition through the Epic of Wagadu and the myth of Bida, the great serpent.

According to oral traditions;

The legendary Dinga established a covenant with Bida, a seven-headed python dwelling in a sacred well, who guaranteed the empire's prosperity manifested as rains of gold and abundant harvests in exchange for the annual sacrifice of the empire's most beautiful virgin. This persisted for generations until the hero Mamadi Sefe Dekote, refusing to surrender his betrothed Siya Yatabare so he ambushed and slew the serpent. In its death throes, Bida cursed Wagadu to seven years, seven months, and seven days without rain or gold.

— Soninke people, The Wagadu Epic

This oral tradition, despite being mythical in form, contains authentic historical content as the slaying of Bida represents the socio-religious transition from animist, earth-based cults to new world views  including Islam. The serpent's curse preserves the collective memory of the severe and long environmental crisis in the Sahel during the eleventh century, a period of desertification that destroyed the agricultural surplus underpinning the Soninke state and triggered a massive diaspora of the Soninke people across West Africa.

Almoravid Dynasty

A medieval nautical chart depicting Abu Bakr ibn Umar, the general and leader of the Almoravid Empire from the 1413 Portolan Chart by Mecia de Viladestes.

As the Ghana Empire expanded its influence in the early eleventh century, the Sanhaja Confederation fragmented, losing control of Awdaghust to Ghana. It was through this political crisis and economic displacement the Almoravid movement was born, this movement transformed the Mauritanian Sanhaja from regional traders into a transcontinental empire. Around 1040 CE, a Gudala chieftain named Yahya ibn Ibrahim, returning from pilgrimage to Mecca, brought the militant Maliki theologian Abdallah ibn Yasin to the Mauritanian Adrar to reform the superficial and syncretic Islam of the Sanhaja tribes.

Ibn Yasin established a ribat, a fortified religious retreat on an island either the Mauritanian coast or in the Senegal River, where he gathered a dedicated core of followers who became known as the al-Murabitun (‘’those of the ribat’’) but europeanized as Almoravids. Ibn Yasin's ideology was revolutionary in its implications for Sanhaja social organization. The Almoravid movement represented a campaign to overcome the fragmentation of lineage-based tribal organization through the imposition of a unifying trans-tribal ideology, creating the basis for a centralized state apparatus that could mobilize the productive and military capacities of the Sanhaja.

Ibn Yasin's death in battle, leadership passed to Abu Bakr ibn Umar and subsequently to Yusuf ibn Tashfin under who the Almoravids launched a multi-directional imperial expansion. To the north, they conquered Morocco, founding the imperial capital of Marrakesh in 1062, and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into the Iberian Peninsula, where they decisively halted the Christian Reconquista at the Battle of al-Zallaqa (Sagrajas). It eventually stretched from the Senegal River to the Ebro in Spain.

It has long been incorrectly assumed that, the Almoravids under Abu Bakr ibn Umar violently conquered the Ghana Empire's capital in 1076–1077 and forcibly converted the Soninke population. This narrative inaccuretly portrayed the Almoravids as destroyers who shattered the Ghana Empire, but modern scholarship find no evidence of a violent Almoravid military conquest of Ghana but rather the Ghana Empire collapsed due to a combination of factors. Those being the severe desertification written in the Bida myth, the Almoravid commercial competition which increasingly sidelined its trade monopolies and internal rebellions by vassal states such as the Susu. The Islamization of the region during the Almoravid period was not forced though it was very lasting and spread fast, it occured primarily through gradual, commercial exchanges and contact by Muslim merchants and clerics.

Char Bouba War

The Almoravid Empire's collapse in the twelfth century, created a power vacuum in the western Sahara. This vacuum was filled by waves of Arab Bedouin tribes in the thirteenth century, specifically the Bani Hassan, a branch of the Ma'qil Arabs originating from Yemen began migrating into Mauritania from the north and east. The Bani Hassan were militaristic, highly mobile camel-herding pastoralists, culturally and economically distinct from the indigenous Sanhaja Berber populations. They systematically encroached upon Sanhaja territories, disrupting established trade networks, seizing pasturage and water sources, and imposing tributary relations upon the Berber inhabitants which started the Char Bouba War also known as Thirty Years' War of the Sahara.

The Char Bouba War was fought between the coalition of indigenous Sanhaja Berber forces who were islamically orthodox against the Bani Hassan who were islamically loose, the Berber resistance was flared by the Berber Nasir al-Din, a charismatic religious leader who viewed it as a holy war to defend Islamic orthodoxy against the Bedouin who prioritized tribalism over the Islamic virtue that all muslims are equal. But despite resistance, the Berber suffered from the same internal tribal divisions that had historically weakened Sanhaja political organization, lacking the military cohesion of the Bani Hassan forces. By 1674, the Sanhaja Berber were permanently defeated.

The outcome of the Char Bouba War fundamentally changed Mauritanian society. The defeated indigenous Sanhaja Berber tribes were forcibly disarmed, stripped of the right to bear weapons or ride horses, and compelled to pay a humiliating tributary tax to the tribalist Bani Hassan, but the defeated Berber realizing they couldnt win renounced warfare and instead monopolized the spheres of Islamic scholarship, jurisprudence, and commerce. In an system where the Berber comprised the Islamic and commercial structures and the Bani Hassan tasked with violence and extracting surplus through direct tribute.

Colonialism

Mauritania was apart of French West Africa before declaring independence in 1960.

Neocolonialism

When Mauritania declared independence from France in 1960, Morocco refused to recognise it as independent due to claiming Mauritania as part of "Greater Morocco". Morocco unsuccessfully tried to block its entry into the UN, and broke ties with Tunisia for recognizing the new state. Mauritania's new president Mokhtar Ould Daddah, countered Morocco's claims by putting forward his own idea of a "Greater Mauritania".

Eventually Morocco recognised Mauritania's independence in 1969 and the two countries began collaborating at the expense of Western Sahara.

Invasion of Western Sahara

In the 1960s Spain was being pressured by the UN to give Western Sahara the right to self determination. In 1966 Morocco, and Mauritania joined the calls for the Sahrawi people's right to self determination with the hidden motive of wanting to make Western Sahara a province of theirs. In 1974 Spain agreed to hold an independence referendum under UN supervision in 1975.

With Spain weakening Morocco and Mauritania changed their position, and Moroccan King, Hassan II made a secret deal with Mauritania to split Western Sahara between themselves with Mauritania keeping Rio De Oro, and Morocco taking Saguiet el-Hamra. With the support of the US and France, Morocco delayed the UN referendum in order to give it and Mauritania a chance to negotiate with Spain in December 1975 with the result of Spain agreeing to leave the territory in February 1976. In April 1976, the two expansionists officially agreed on the demarcation line separating their claims to Western Sahara, leading to a short lived joint occupation period. Over the next few years Morocco would slowly ease Mauritania out before they officially withdrew in 1979, and Morocco became the sole occupier.