History · Mauritania

Mauritania: The Desert Bridge

A vast Saharan country on the seam between Arab and Black Africa — home of the Almoravids and of caravan cities of scholars, a lightly held French colony, and the last country on Earth to abolish slavery

By Worldlore Editorial · 10 September 2026

The stone ruins of an old desert town on a rocky slope, with a modern village beyond
Ouadane, a caravan town founded in the 12th century on the trans-Saharan trade route — one of Mauritania's ancient centres of Islamic learning. (Виктор Пинчук / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0)

A country on a fault line

Mauritania is enormous and nearly empty — over a million square kilometres, about nine-tenths of it Sahara, with fewer than five million people, most in the south-west and in the overgrown desert capital of Nouakchott, built from nothing after 1958. It sits on the seam between Arab North Africa and Black sub-Saharan Africa, and that division defines it: a society layered into Arab-Berber "White Moors", the Hassaniya-speaking "Black Moors" descended from enslaved people, and the sub-Saharan peoples of the river valley. Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery, and the practice has not entirely disappeared.

A short history

  1. to c. 1000 CE

    Berber Sahara

    Trans-Saharan trade; towns like Awdaghust.

  2. 1040s–1050s

    The Almoravids

    A Berber reform movement rises in the western desert.

  3. 13th–17th centuries

    Arab migration

    Bedouin tribes move west; Hassaniya Arabic spreads.

  4. c. 1644–1674

    Char Bouba war

    Arab warrior tribes become dominant.

  5. 1903–1934

    French conquest

    France takes the south, then the nomadic north.

  6. 1960

    Independence

    The Islamic Republic of Mauritania, under Moktar Ould Daddah.

  7. 1975–1979

    Western Sahara war

    Mauritania takes, then renounces, a share of the territory.

  8. 1978–2005

    Military rule

    Coups, and 21 years under Colonel Taya.

  9. 1981 / 2007

    Slavery

    Abolished, then finally criminalised.

Almoravids and caravan cities

The Sahara was a corridor of trade, and the puritanical Almoravid movement — which went on to conquer Morocco and Muslim Spain and to break the Ghana Empire in the 11th century — began among the Sanhaja Berbers of this western desert. From the 13th century, Arab Bedouin tribes migrated west across the Sahara, and after a long war in the 17th century the Arabs became dominant, spreading Hassaniya Arabic and a caste order of warrior and scholarly tribes.

An ancient handwritten Quran with ornate script, held open in a family library at Chinguetti
A centuries-old manuscript in a family library at Chinguetti — once considered a holy city of Islam, and the source of Mauritania's Arabic name, Bilad Shinqit. The desert towns held famous collections of books. (Dr. Ondřej Havelka / Wikimedia Commons)

French rule, and independence

France, pushing north from Senegal, established a protectorate over the south from 1903 and only completed the conquest of the nomadic north in 1934, against long resistance. Mauritania was a French colony with almost no infrastructure or administration, governed from Senegal — there was no capital on its own soil.

Moktar Ould Daddah in robes, photographed in 1977
Moktar Ould Daddah, Mauritania's first president. Morocco claimed the whole country as part of a 'Greater Morocco' and refused to recognise it until 1969. (FOCR / Wikimedia Commons)

Mauritania became independent on 28 November 1960 as an Islamic Republic. Ould Daddah built a one-party state, made Arabic co-official — resented by Afro-Mauritanians — and nationalised the iron-ore mines that are still the economic backbone.

War, and military rule

In 1975 Mauritania joined Morocco in partitioning the Spanish Sahara as Spain withdrew, taking the southern third. The Polisario Front's guerrillas then targeted weak Mauritania relentlessly, raiding as far as Nouakchott and wrecking the economy. A 1978 coup toppled Ould Daddah; the new government made peace with Polisario in 1979 and gave up its claim, whereupon Morocco annexed the whole territory.

An extremely long freight train loaded with iron ore crossing flat desert
The Mauritania Railway iron-ore train, among the longest and heaviest in the world, hauling ore some 700 kilometres from Zouérat to the coast — the mainstay of the economy. (Ben Kawam / Wikimedia Commons)

Decades of coups followed. From 1984, Colonel Maaouya Ould Taya ruled for 21 years, a period that included the 1989 conflict with Senegal and the accompanying expulsion of tens of thousands of Afro-Mauritanians and the killing of hundreds of Black soldiers — events still officially unaddressed. Taya was overthrown in 2005.

Mauritania now

Wooden fishing boats drawn up on a beach with crowds sorting the catch at Nouakchott
The fish market at Nouakchott. Mauritania's rich Atlantic fisheries, along with iron ore, gold, and new offshore gas, are its main resources. (Uzabiaga / Wikimedia Commons)

Since 2019, power has passed — for the first time between elected presidents, though within the same military-backed camp — to Mohamed Ould Ghazouani. Mauritania has largely kept the Sahel's jihadist insurgency out, unlike Mali, and is a major transit country for migration toward Europe. Its unresolved issues are internal: the persistence of slavery and the marginal status of the Haratin, the grievances of Afro-Mauritanians, and the Arab–African balance in a state that officially defines itself as Arab. Anti-slavery activists are repeatedly jailed.

What Mauritania carries

Mauritania is a bridge country that has never fully reconciled the two shores it connects. Its Arab-Berber identity produced the Almoravids and the manuscript libraries of the desert; its position on the edge of Black Africa produced a society built on the enslavement of Black people that the state was the last on Earth to outlaw. Managing that division, rather than the empty desert around it, is the central task of the Mauritanian state.

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