Nouakchott (dpa) – As the weekend draws close, urban Mauritanians begin to feel the call of the wild.
“I simply need to get out of the city, to a wide open space where the wind blows freely,” a government official said in the capital Nouakchott. “I pack my family into a car and we drive out to the Sahara, buying camel milk on the roadside, stopping to have tea with some nomads in their tent. The thirst for travel is in our blood.”
Out on the arid plains of this vast Saharan country, brand-new off-road vehicles stand parked next to nomadic tents. They belong to wealthy city dwellers spending free days in the desert, often with poorer relatives who work for them, guarding their goats and camels.
Luxurious villas with satellite antennas emerge in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but sand and rocks in sight.
They are second residences of urbanites who can think of no better holiday than being under the scorching sun of the Sahara and the occasional cloud of dust raised by a passing herd of animals.
“The walls of city houses feel like a prison,” said the official. In Nouakchott, tents are sometimes pitched on roofs of houses, where residents go and spend time until night falls.
“It is eternal nostalgia,” said a Nouakchott man who works for an international aid agency. Mauritania’s Arab-African nomads were once the lords of the desert, wandering from oasis to oasis with their animals and taking camel caravans to Timbuktu and Morocco.
Around 90 per cent of Mauritanians were nomads just a few decades ago, but a series of protracted droughts and the advantages offered by city life have reduced that figure to only 10 per cent of the 2.5- million population, forever changing the country whose almost entire culture was based on a nomadic way of life.
In the open spaces of the desert where there was little shelter to offer protection or privacy, a strict code of honesty and hospitality prevailed, and Mauritanians take pride in it to this day. “It is a question of honour for me to offer hospitality to a total stranger,” said a journalist who lives in the desert town of Atar.
In urban shantytowns, however, the old way of life is being drastically altered. In the slum of Kebba in Nouakchott, tents on undulating dunes under starry skies have given way to ugly shacks made of rags, planks of wood and corrugated iron.
Goats nibble on piles of rubbish by fences formed by rusty car wrecks. Slum dwellers gather at a water well funded by a German aid organization, complaining of unemployment and the impossibility of making ends meet.
Nouakchott and the port Nouadhibou are among the fastest-growing cities in the world, with the capital’s population of more than 700,000 increasing 6 per cent annually.
The vast majority of Nouakchott residents live from odd jobs and some 80 per cent are estimated to have no electricity nor running water at home.
In the desert, family and clan took care of their less fortunate members, but in shantytowns solidarity is absent.
Newcomers find themselves among strangers, the traditional thrifty way of life is disrupted by new material temptations, and western influences alter old ways of thinking.
“Traditionally, stealing was such a shame that a thief might even commit suicide if he was discovered,” said Nouakchott mayor Hasni Ould Didi. But crime is on the increase, as is divorce and the numbers of households where women are in charge.
The government of President Maaouya Ould Taya is trying to fight poverty with the help of donors. “We are using more than 50 million dollars in five years to provide slums with electricity, roads, schools and other improvements,” Ould Didi explained.
“I still have dreams about life in the desert sometimes, but I know there is no turning back,” said Mohammed Salem Ould Horma, an old man who has lived in the Kebba slum for 27 years.
Despite all the problems rapid urbanisation does have a bright side. “The shantytowns are real melting pots where rigid clan ties are breaking down,” Ould Didi said. “Instead of thinking of themselves as members of clans and casts, Mauritanians are growing into a nation.”
