MAURITANIA

	CLIMATE
	In the desert, temperatures often rise well above 100°F (38°C). In the Chemama, temperatures are less extreme. There, a short rainy season lasts from July to September. From December to March, cool winds blow south from the Sahara; these are followed by hot, dry winds that whip up blinding sandstorms.

Powerful Empires and Desert Nomads

Ten thousand years ago the vast Sahara region of northern Africa was grassland with trees and streams. Hunters and cattle herders, known as the Bafour (BAH-foor) people, lived there around 5000 B.C.E. They left behind rock paintings of themselves and their animals, and today their stone tools and arrowheads are still found in the desert sands of Mauritania (mawr-uh-TAE-nee-uh). Around the same time ancestors of the Wolof (WOE-lawf) and Tukulor (TOO-koo-lohr) people lived by hunting, gathering, and growing crops in the fertile Senegal River Valley.

By around 3000 B.C.E. large parts of the Sahara had become desert. Around 300 C.E. camels were introduced, making long-distance trade across the desert easier and allowing nomad Berber (BUHR-buhr) peoples from northern Africa to migrate south. By around 700 they controlled northern Mauritania and introduced the faith of Islam to the region. Muslim Arabs from the Middle East also crossed the Sahara at this time.

From around 700 to about 1200, the Ghana Empire of the Soninke (soe-NIHN-keh) people was based in southeast Mauritania and western Mali. Its rulers traded in gold, ivory, slaves, salt, cloth, and copper across the Sahara. During the eleventh century, Berbers from northern Africa attacked the Ghana Empire, and its wealth and power declined. By around 1230 the Mali Empire of the Malinke people, which included southern Mauritania, had taken over as the strongest power in the region. It was followed around 1470 to 1600 by the Songhai Empire (see MALI).

Arab nomads started to migrate westward through northern Africa in the fourteenth century. By the seventeenth century, the Bani Maqil Arabs had pushed south into Mauritania, where they formed a ruling Arab Islamic aristocracy among the local Berber nomads.

In 1445 the first European merchants arrived in Mauritania. Berber and Arab traders started to sell them African peoples as slaves around 1600.

After around 1800 Mauritania was divided into states called emirates, each ruled by an Arab or Berber emir, or leader. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the French encouraged wars between these leaders to weaken them and to provide more captives for the slave trade. In the early twentieth century the French also sent traders and explorers, supposedly to investigate inland areas of Mauritania; in reality they hoped to control the region.

In 1920 Mauritania was declared a colony of France and was ruled as part of French West Africa. Nomadic peoples in the north fought against French rule but were finally defeated in 1933. In 1956 Morocco, supported by many northern nomads, laid claim to parts of Mauritania. Fighting between the French and northern Mauritanian peoples broke out again.

In 1957 Mauritania’s first political party was formed, and in 1958 Mauritania became a self-governing republic within the French community. The following year elections for a new National Assembly were held, and Moktah Ould Daddah became prime minister. He declared Mauritania independent from France the next year and became its first president. The new nation remained deeply dependent on France for political, financial, and military support.

The new government was dominated by Bidani Maurs, people of Arab and Berber ancestry. In 1964 Daddah declared Mauritania a one-party state, and in 1966 Arabic became the compulsory language for use in schools and government offices. This was deeply resented by black African peoples, who also accused the government of racial discrimination and civil rights abuses.

Since 1969 droughts have devastated the northern and central regions of the country. Facing starvation, the nomads living there moved to shantytowns outside big cities. Then, in 1976, Mauritania took over the southern part of the neighboring Spanish colony, Spanish Sahara, now Western Sahara, soon after Morocco had seized the northern half (see WESTERN SAHARA). The POLISARIO Front guerrillas, who wanted independence for Spanish Sahara, fought back. The war was a disaster for Mauritania, and it led to an economic and political crisis. In 1978 the military removed President Daddah from office.

After the economic crisis deepened, Colonel Maawiya Ould Taya came to power in a coup. He planned new agricultural projects, which provoked resentment in the fertile south. Black African farmers there feared that the Maurish elite would take over their farms. From 1989 to 1990 many thousands of black Mauritanians were expelled to Senegal, and many black Mauritanians with high-ranking jobs "disappeared" after an alleged coup attempt.

During the 1990s protesters in Mauritania and foreign aid donors abroad called for political reform and an end to civil rights abuses. In 1991 President Taya introduced a new constitution, although many black African southerners and Muslim fundamentalists complained that it still did not give them equal rights. Two subsequent multiparty presidential elections were widely seen as flawed. A bloodless coup in 2005 deposed President Taya. Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, the leader of the military council currently governing the country, has promised to relinquish power peacefully, but for now Mauritania remains an autocratic state. The country continues to experience ethnic tensions between its black population and Maur communities.