I spent about a week in Mauritania, visiting the cities of Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Zouerate, and a bunch of small towns over the course of multiple 10+ hour car rides and a train ride. As usual, these are my notes on my experiences and various rabbit holes.

The Basics

Population (2021) – 4.6 million

Population Growth Rate (2021) – 2.6%

Size – 398,000 square miles (a bit bigger than Montana or Norway)

GDP (nominal, 2022) – $10.1 billion (1/4th of Vermont, less than Albania)

GDP growth rate (2019, pre-pandemic) – 5.3%

GDP per capita (2022) – $2,328

GDP per capita PPP (2022) – $6,925

Biggest export – Iron ore

Median age – 20.1

Life expectancy (2020) – 64.5

Founded – 1960

Religion – 100000000% Muslim

Corruption Perceptions Index ranking – #130

Heritage Index of Economic Freedom ranking – #117

On the Ground

My first impression of Mauritania was that it was weirdly cold.

Look at a map – Mauritania is entirely in the Saharan Desert, the one desert everyone has heard of. I expected it to be scorching hot as soon as I stepped off the plane, but no: Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott, has an average annual temperature of 73 degrees (23 Celsius), with a daily maximum temperature of only 82 degrees.

Unfortunately, aside from the temperature and the “desert on the sea” aesthetic, Nouakchott is fairly boring. Part of the problem is that Mauritania is an uber-Islamic country where alcohol is illegal and you rarely see women without head coverings, so even the capital doesn’t have a nightlife (except allegedly within the ample grounds of the American and French embassies). But even besides that, Nouakchott is a generally dull, dusty, kind of depressing place. Everything is brown and sandy, the buildings are blocky concrete chunks designed to withstand a merciless sun. If you Google, “Reddit Nouakchott,” the first result is this picture from r/urbanhell:

If you want color in Nouakchott, you need to go to the coast. There are always hundreds (thousands?) of long canoe-like fishing boats on the beach and in the water. They’re quite beautiful against the sand and sea, and there’s this wonderful bustle of fishermen, fishmongers (had to Google that to find the correct term for “fish seller”), kids running around, and donkeys pulling carts. The shore is easily the best part of Nouakchott.

The worst part of Nouakchott is the central market. I sent a picture of it to a friend and he said it looked like a landfill:

I swear this picture is not of some spot near the central market where they dump their garbage. Here is a picture of that:

I commented in Notes on Nigeria that the colossal garbage problem in Lagos and many big African cities can at least be partially attributed to infrastructure problems and a booming population, but I don’t think Nouakchott, a sprawling low-density city of maybe 1.5 million, has that excuse.

Mauritanians are very nice in general; there’s a lot of that old-school Islamic hospitality where they like to give tea to strangers. I ventured into the market to buy a turban and some other stuff, and despite the filth, the people were great. One guy took ten minutes to find a sim card for me, and he refused a tip. I was actually surprised at how little attention I got in the country in general; Mauritania is not exactly a tourist hotspot, and I don’t look like the typical Moroccan/Spanish/French tourist who occasionally wanders in. Even still, I was never harassed by merchants, I just got some polite questions about my background and some smiles when I told them I was in Mauritania as a tourist.

I was targeted by a few beggars in Nouakchott and throughout Mauritania, particularly women holding babies. For the most part, Mauritania didn’t have as bad or as intense beggars as the rest of Africa, but there was one weird beggar event. I was on a ten hour van ride across the country, and half-way through, while at a rest-stop, one of the people I was sharing the van with randomly asked me for money. I guess it was another “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” moments; if you see a white guy, you gotta try begging.

A more charming bit of Nouakchott filth is the cars. Probably 95% of the cars and trucks on the road are older than me. Or maybe the sun and desert dust just fuck cars up really fast. “Rust bucket” is too generous for a lot of these things. But I like them, it gives the streets of Nouakchott more character. One local told me that virtually every old car is a de facto taxi, and indeed, I never had a problem getting anywhere.

Once you get out of Nouakchott, Mauritania is much prettier, and often beautiful. Do you like deserts? Then come to Mauritania, it has them all. It’s got rolling sandy dune deserts like you see in Egypt, it’s got rocky deserts like in the southwestern United States, it has shrub deserts, it has mountain deserts, it has random shacks in the deserts, it has oases, it has wild camels, it has nomads, it’s the most desert country to ever desert. I found that I’m especially a big fan of when a desert smacks into the ocean with absolutely no transition; I’d never seen anything like it before, except at the end of Hidalgo.

99.9% of the Mauritanian desert is beautiful. The 0.1% are the little rest stops along the highway which can look like this:

Desert pro-tip – wear a turban. Most of the men in Mauritania wear them for a reason. I guess I always thought they were just a religious thing, but turbans in the desert are amazing. They somehow cool you down while also keeping the sun off your skin and hair, and you can optionally cover your face to keep out dust and sand. You’re only one quick trip to the Nouakchott central market and a YouTube tutorial away from wearing your very own turban.

Unfortunately, Mauritania’s other cities look a lot like Nouakchott, though a bit less ugly. Zouerate has a nice mountain-surroundings aesthetic but consists of the same brown concrete blocks on dusty roads. Nouadibou is closer to the coast and is less dusty, but looks the same. Sadly, unlike Benin, the French did not grace Mauritania with their city planning skills.

Beauty Standards

In the Western world, some people argue that we should shift beauty standards away from prizing thinness and instead promote fat acceptance to destigmatize the very common and real social and psychological toll of being overweight.

In this domain, and virtually no others, Mauritania is a highly progressive country. Mauritanian men (or at least the 2/3rds that are Moors) don’t like their women thin, they don’t like their women thicc, they don’t like their women fat, they like their women obese.

I remember first hearing about this many years ago from the Vice documentary, “The Fat Farms of Mauritania,” about the practice of force-feeding women to make them obese to get a husband. According to this Harvard International Review article, the process “is called ‘leblouh’ or ‘gavage,’ a French term that refers to ‘the process of fattening up geese to produce foie gras.'” Women as young as five are either sent to special camps or put through the process at home wherein they are fed up to 16,000 calories per day, mostly in the forms of camel milk and millet. How do you force anyone, let alone a child, to eat 8X her normal caloric intake? By torture:

“Older female force-feeders or relatives who conduct the leblouh employ brutal tactics to keep their girls eating. For example, the ‘zayar’ technique involves positioning a girl’s toe between two sticks and pinching it when she resists leblouh. The supervisor may also ‘pull her ear, pinch her inner thigh, bend her finger backward or force her to drink her own vomit,’ and girls are further threatened with beatings if they do not finish their food. A 2013 study using survey data from 2000 found that ‘over 61% of those who had experienced gavage reported being beaten during the process and almost one-third (29%) reported having their fingers broken to encourage participation.'”

How common is this stuff?

This CNN article from 2010 cites a 2007 report that says only 7% of urban women undergo the fattening process, but 75% of rural women do. Recent articles put the current Mauritanian female obesity rate at almost 27%, and overweight rate at about another 27%, which isn’t terribly high by global standards, but is very high by regional standards in a part of the world not known for its food abundance. Ex. – Senegal is at 6%/16% and Burkina Faso is at 6%/7.2%.

Then again, when I Google around I see obesity estimates are all over the place. Plus, I am inherently skeptical of big statistical estimates about very poor countries with terrible infrastructure and internal records. So I have no idea how prevalent the fattening process is in Mauritania. However…

Though I did not see many morbidly obese women during my time in Mauritania, the women are noticeably fat, especially for West Africa. Mauritanian men tend to be tall, thin, even gaunt, with the weathered Berber look you’d expect from living in the Saharan Desert. But the women are… at least plump, often more than plump, with accentuated soft features.

Slave State

Mauritania holds the distinction of being the last country on earth to outlaw slavery, and arguably has the most slaves per capita of any country today.

Slavery has existed in the Muslim Arab world since well before the life of Muhammad (571-632). Islam is fairly conducive to slavery with its texts and traditions laying out numerous regulations on the practice. Slavery was a major source of labor and especially military power in the Arab world throughout most of the second millennia, but went into decline in the 18th and 19th centuries both due to international pressures and various practicalities. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that most of the major Islamic states officially outlawed the practice – Turkey in 1924, Iran in 1929, Saudi Arabia in 1962, etc.

The Saharan states held out the longest, even though it was never really that important to their economies; the Saharan region never had large-scale agriculture or mining operations to absorb vast quantities of slave labor. Instead, slaves were typically used for household work or to assist families with small-scale farming and ranching. Slaves were usually acquired either through purchase from village chiefs selling their own people (which was extremely common throughout Western Africa) or through slave reproduction.

Mauritania, Chad, Mali, and Niger were all French colonies by the late 19th century. France officially outlawed slavery in Chad in 1900, and in Mali and Mauritania in 1905. However, the measures were implemented top-down by a distant Parisian government; both the will to enforce these laws by colonial administrators and the willingness of desert people living far away from ordinary civilization to comply were lacking, to say the least. From Wikipedia’s “Slavery in Niger“:

“When the French took over the region in the early 1900s they had a policy banning the existence of slavery. However local French administrators usually resisted pressure to abolish slavery from the colonial and metropolitan governments. French administrators would take credit for abolishing slavery by simply ignoring its continued existence or claiming that the bonds were voluntary. One local administrator justified such a policy by saying, “I do not think it is presently possible to eliminate slavery. Our civilization has not penetrated deeply enough for the natives, both masters and slaves, to understand and accept any measures towards the outright elimination of slavery.” The local colonial administrators did however carry out policies to put a stop to slave trafficking and slave markets. During World War I, in order to meet quotas of troops to the French army, traditional chiefs supplied slaves to the colonial administration. In urban areas and settled communities with a strong French administrative presence, slavery and forced servitude were gradually ended, but in the rest of the country the practices remained active.”

An interesting detail from the Wikipedia page on Mauritanian slavery:

“The French established villages de liberté (“liberty villages”) so that slaves would have an area to be free in Mauritania. They could take refuge there and be taxed by the French. However, within three months the slave could be reclaimed by their masters, and the villages had few resources.”

Mauritania gained independence in 1960, and with an extremely old-school Islamic government and population, slavery was quietly permitted. Eventually enough international pressure mounted for Mauritania to formally outlaw the practice in 1981, making it the last country in the world to do so (though this CNN article says the 1961 Constitution technically abolished slavery, so I don’t know). However, the new law didn’t actually criminalize slavery, it just outlawed it, and enforcement was non-existent.

It wasn’t until 2007 that Mauritanian formally criminalized slavery. Since then, one person in Mauritania has been charged for slavery – in 2011, a woman was arrested and sentenced to six months imprisonment for owning two young girls (aged 10 and 14). The defendant’s lawyer, who I must mention was named Oumoulmoumnine mint Bakar Vall, claimed the two girls just did free house cleaning and were treated fine. The mothers of the two girls were given suspended sentences for selling their daughters into slavery, but three anti-slavery protesters who marched around the capital during the trial were not so lucky, and were thrown in prison.

So how many slaves are in Mauritania today?

That’s a deceptively difficult question to answer. In the Antebellum South, American slaves were branded and recorded in formal ledgers and deeds. In Mauritania, it’s not so clear-cut. According to the Global Slavery Index, there were 90,000 bona fide slaves in Mauritania in 2018, constituting 2.4% of the population. But there are a lot more Mauritanians working under conditions that arguably qualify as slavery, maybe as many as 600,000 (2017 estimate). These people may not be “owned” in a legal sense, but they may not be physically capable of leaving their jobs, or may be forced to work by relatives or tribal chiefs, or may exist in some other horrendous condition I can’t imagine. From this really good CNN article:

“Many exist somewhere on the continuum between slavery and freedom. Some are beaten; some aren’t. Some are held captive under the threat of violence. Others are like Moulkheir once was — chained by more complicated methods, tricked into believing that their darker skin makes them less worthy, that it’s their place to serve light-skinned masters. Some have escaped and live in fear they’ll be found and returned to the families that own them; some return voluntarily, unable to survive without assistance.”

Other interesting/horrifying details:

– Slaves are rarely bought or sold, but often given as gifts, ex. to a newly married couple, or to a wealthy young man at his circumcision ceremony.
– Children born of master-slave rape are considered slaves just like any other.
– While plenty of slave owners are rich (by Mauritanian standards), many are not. Slavery isn’t commercial in Mauritania so it isn’t really tied to wealth – “It’s not uncommon to find a White Moor living in a tent only slightly larger than that of his or her slaves.”

Part of the reason slavery is so sticky in Mauritania is a bunch of ethnic/racial variables. After travelling around West Africa for a month, it was jarring to see so many fair-skinned people in Mauritania. Plenty of locals are as dark as Senegalese or Nigerians, but plenty of others could pass as Syrian or even Spanish.

About 1/3rd of Mauritanians are Bidhan, or “White Moors,” who share a heavy genetic and cultural connection with the Arab Berbers of North Africa. The rest of population is split between “Black Moors” and other dark-skinned ethnic groups that migrated from elsewhere in West Africa. Traditionally, the White Moors were the wealthier slave owners while the darker population made up the slaves. Economically and politically, Mauritania always was and continues to be dominated by the White Moors who have less of an incentive to crack down on a practice which both economically benefits them and is a part of their cultural heritage.

My eerie conclusion from going down this rabbit hole is that I must have interacted with a bunch of slaves in Mauritania. Again, these slaves didn’t have brands, they weren’t chained up, and I didn’t see anyone getting whipped. But I saw plenty of women sitting by the sides of the roads with exposed arms selling stuff, and the CNN article says those are probable slaves. I saw White Arab owners of stores yelling at black child employees, who were probably somewhere on the free-to-slave spectrum.

Checkpoints

I took numerous long van rides throughout Mauritania and we were consistently stopped at least once every few hours by random military checkpoints, often in the middle of the desert near absolutely nothing. At every stop, a soldier would collect the IDs of everyone in the van. He would glance over the Mauritanian cards quickly and then stop on my American passport. He would ask me something in French, which I would only later learn was a request to see a photocopy of my passport and visa which I was legally required to have, but which I never bothered to get. Eventually, the soldier would give up at hoping that I understood French or Arabic, and he would take a picture of my passport and visa, and maybe call someone to confirm this was ok. Then they’d let us go.

I don’t know why this procedure is so common in Mauritania. Is the country full of illegal immigrants? I mean, Mauritania has some pretty massive and almost entirely unguarded borders, but I can’t imagine that many people are sneaking in.

One time, when a cop took my passport and walked away to make a rather long call, some other people in my van tried to tell me something in French. Eventually I figured out they were advising me not to try to bribe the soldier. Never once during my time in Mauritania was I or anyone else I saw solicited for a bribe. I cannot say the same for almost every other country in West Africa. Whatever other problems Mauritania may have, petty corruption appears not to be one of them.

Flies!

Africa has many problems, I think everyone knows that. I am not saying that the prevalence of flies is among the continent’s greatest problems… but I am saying that the prevalence of flies were among my greatest African problems.

And of all the nations of West Africa, in my experience, none have more flies than Mauritania.

I know, I just wrote about how probably more than 10% of Mauritanians live in slavery, but I can’t help but complain about this. I am not sure I had a single meal during my entire time in West Africa where I wasn’t haunted by at least one fly, but Mauritania was so much worse than anywhere else. There are simply flies everywhere. All the time. And a lot of them. Always.

Maybe I’m just one of these people who don’t like to be unexpectedly touched, or to feel an insect suddenly land on my elbow or my ankle. Mauritanians definitely don’t share in my neurosis.

I have seen Mauritanians sit perfectly still while being covered in tens of flies. The Mauritanian rarely, if ever, brushes flies away when they obnoxiously hover in front of his face. The Mauritanian does not budge while the flies crawl across clothes or skin, or even on food. It is all the same to the Mauritanian. Do Mauritanians have a weak sense of touch? Have they mastered stoicism? I’m not sure, but this is one power I do not wish to learn.

Smoking

Smoking demographics is quickly becoming another side-interest of mine along with the global oil industry.

I mentioned in Notes on Nigeria that Nigeria and much of West Africa has barely any smokers (some commenters disagree with my assessment). Mauritania seems to be the exception based on how many smokers I saw. It’s common to see presumably wealthier Mauritanians sitting in a cafe, lighting up a cig, and drinking their fourth espresso of the night. It’s an odd sight for a country that’s so Muslim that it bans alcohol; as far as I can tell, in orthodox Islam, smoking is somewhere between haram (forbidden) and considered disgusting, but then again, owning Muslim slaves is also haram, so maybe many Mauritanians are less orthodox than I thought, or their a lot of complicated doctrine rules I don’t understand (feel free to inform me in the comments).

According to the World Bank, only about 10.7% of Mauritanians smoke (in 2019), which is about half that of the United States, and a third or less compared to the giant chimney that is Western Europe. Still, that’s higher than the vast majority of West Africa which sits in the mid-single digit range. If the World Bank is right, Mauritanian smoking rates are actually on a fairly sharp decline from 12.6% in 2015. However, as I read more about this stuff, I’m getting that smoking rate estimations are all over the place. Here’s another source that puts Mauritania at 26% in 2015 and an estimated 35% by 2025. As with Nigeria, the vast, vast majority of Mauritanian smokers are men.

The Iron Ore Train

Mauritania has one train. It runs from Nouadibou on the coast to Zouerate inland along the Western Sahara border. The trains, which by some counts are among the longest in the world, have one passenger car at the front, and the rest of the cars are used to ship iron ore from a rich deposit near Zouerate to the coast for export. Every day, without fail, at least one train full of iron ore goes to the coast, and at least one completely empty train goes inland.

At some point in hazy Mauritanian history, some tourist must have noticed that locals would hop on the iron ore carts and literally ride on a pile of iron for 15 hours across the country. Riding the train that way isn’t really allowed, but isn’t really forbidden either. It’s not exactly a luxury means of travel, but it’s free way to move a long distance in a poor country.

So the tourist hopped on and did the ride. And then other tourists followed, and then a bunch made YouTube videos and blog posts about it, and now riding the iron ore train is the main hardcore tourist thing to do in Mauritania.

I recommend doing it once, and then never again. The experience is exactly as awesome and uncomfortable as it sounds. Here’s my short guide:

The first hassle is figuring out exactly when to find the train. You’ll want to take the train from Zouerate to the coast, not the other way around, so that you can sit on the iron instead of in a big empty container. But seemingly every website I checked, and person I talked to in the country, claimed the trains leave Zouerate at a different time. I eventually went to the train “office” in Zouerate to ask, and I found a bunch of guys smoking in front of a concrete shack who were kind enough to type “1300” (1 PM) into my phone.

(Fun fact – Google Translate will default to telling you “train” in French is “former,” which is the “train” you see in a gym rather than the big machines on tracks. This will make you look incredibly stupid in front of confused Mauritanians.)

The second hassle is figuring out exactly where to find the train. For reasons that have never been explained to me, you can’t jump on the iron ore train at its origin in Zouerate, instead you have to get on at nearby Fderik, but not exactly in Fderik. There’s a very specific spot where it stops near Fderik. But no one seems to know exactly where that spot is. A well-meaning good Samaritan actually marked a spot on Google Maps for it, but it turned out to be wrong when I tried to find it with a taxi. Eventually I visually saw the train while we were driving around, and on approach, we were stopped by some guy who may have worked for the train company or security or something, who pointed me in the right direction.

The third hassle is that you have to buy a bunch of shit before getting on the train so you don’t die. If you do the train ride properly, from Zouerate to Nouadibou instead of the other way around, then you will be standing, sitting, and sleeping in iron ore sand for 15 hours. I’m no doctor, but I cannot imagine that’s a healthy thing to do. So it’s highly recommended that you get multiple surgical masks and a turban to limit how much metal you breathe into your delicate lungs. And you should wear goggles, or at least glasses, to limit how much metal goes into your eyeballs.

If you don’t die of iron poisoning, you can still freeze to death. The Sahara Desert is quite cold at night (easily dipping into the 40s Fahrenheit), and it’s even colder on top of a speeding train. So even if you’ve been running around a burning desert for a week in a t-shirt and shorts, you’ll need to find yourself at least a sweatshirt and heavy pants. I bought an sweatshirt featuring the Avengers for $7 from the Nouakchott market just for this occasion.

If you don’t die of freezing to death, you can still die from hating your life because you’re lying on a pile of iron sand which keeps blowing in your face and mouth and all over your possessions, and you’re freezing, and oh god why did you do this. To mitigate these various issues, buy a thin mattress you can throw on top of the iron (cost me $10), a burlap sack for your luggage ($1, my luggage still got covered in sand), and make sure to strategically sleep between one of the iron sand mounds and a vertically protruding edge of the train car so that it creates a barrier against the wind. No, of course you won’t actually sleep, but closing your eyes makes the night go faster.

After all this is done, you will have iron sand everywhere, and you will look like a coal miner the next morning.  Think of the worst time you ever went to the beach and got a bunch of sand on you and you couldn’t get it out of your hair and clothes and ears for a week. Multiply that by 10 and imagine the sand is black and you actually have to scrub at it with soap to get it off.

But… you still have to ride the iron ore train. Because it’s an incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience. Because the process of just figuring out how to get to the train is an adventure in and of itself. Because the views from the top of the train are stunning, and I didn’t get bored of it during six hours of sunlight, or three hours of waking darkness, or six hours of me trying and failing to sleep during darkness. I won’t remember the vast majority of days in my life, but I will never forget riding the iron ore train in Mauritania.

Miscellaneous

• Nouakchott, Nouadibou, Zouerat, Rosso, Terjit, Fderik, Choam, Aleg, Bon Lanuar, Iwik, Tintane, Rachid… does Mauritania have the best sci-fi city names of any country in the world?
• The region of Western Sahara, just to the north of Mauritania, has been claimed by both Mauritania and Morocco since the Spanish left it in 1975. On the Western Sahara question, I side with… Morocco. Because the iron ore train briefly passes through Western Sahara, and if that counts as Moroccan territory, then I can add Morocco to my list of countries I’ve been to.
• Mauritania switched its money out in 2017, and in effect lowered its nominal prices by 9/10ths. However, Mauritanians still generally use the old prices when verbally negotiating. If you’re not warned about this, you’ll think that everything in Mauritania is literally 10X more expensive than it should be.
• Not long before I went to Nouakchott, Al Qaeda launched a successful prison break in the city and freed four jihadists. As far as I know, I did not encounter them.
• I ran into multiple related film crews in the desert, and there were a bunch of super fancy cars under covers. Is the next 007 being filmed in Mauritania? Probably not since the new James Bond hasn’t been cast yet, but keep an eye out for a high-budget movie or commercial with fast cars in a beautiful desert.
• I’ve heard from multiple people that the border crossing from Mauritania to Senegal at Rosso is one of the worst borders in the world (one guy called it “hell on earth”). Aside from an overpriced hotel on the Mauritanian side, I didn’t have a problem crossing by canoe.
• I took a 12 hour ride from Nouakchott to Zouerate packed into a van with at least 15 other people. It was easily the most uncomfortable car ride of my life, but I know I wasn’t the most uncomfortable life form there. That unfortunate honor goes to these two goats strapped to the top of the van: