Mauritania
A Saharan bridge between Arab North and Black West Africa
Mauritania is a vast, thinly peopled country where the Sahara meets the Atlantic, a cultural and geographic bridge between the Arab-Berber north of the continent and Black sub-Saharan Africa to the south. Most of its roughly 5 million people are concentrated in the capital Nouakchott and a narrow southern strip along the Senegal River, while the immense desert interior holds little but dunes, ancient caravan towns, and rich iron-ore deposits. A society long structured around Moorish, Haratin, and Sub-Saharan African communities, it was among the last countries on Earth to abolish slavery, which persists in practice.
Desert dominates: more than three-quarters of Mauritania is Sahara, a landscape of shifting dunes, rocky plateaus, and the striking circular Richat Structure, a geological bullseye visible from space. The Adrar and Tagant plateaus rise in the center, with the highest point, Kediet ej Jill near the iron city of Zouérat, reaching about 915 meters. The only reliably watered region is the south, along the Senegal River, where farming and herding cluster. The economy leans on iron ore, fishing in one of the world's richest Atlantic fisheries, gold, and newly developing offshore natural gas.
The territory was crossed for centuries by trans-Saharan caravans linking the ancient trading and scholarly towns of Chinguetti, Ouadane, and Tichitt, whose libraries of Islamic manuscripts survive in the desert. Berber and Arab peoples spread Islam and the Hassaniya Arabic dialect, while the south remained home to Wolof, Soninke, and Fula communities. France ruled the area until independence in 1960. Modern Mauritania has been marked by coups, tension between its Arab-Berber and Black African populations, the enduring scourge of hereditary slavery, and a strategic role in efforts to stabilize the wider Sahel.