Mauritania & Western Sahara the ways of the moors
The Islamic Republic of Mauritania is where West Africa and the Maghreb meet-a huge, sparsely populated, country – stretching between Morocco and Senegal. Contrary to stereotypical descriptions that portray this chunk of the Western Sahara as being ‘the same as it was centuries ago’, Mauritania, has undergone profound demographic, social, political, and musical transformations over the last forty years. Most of the country is desert and a series of droughts (which started in the 1970s) dramatically changed virtually all aspects of Mauritanian society. In 1950 about seventy percent of the population were nomads, in 2005 only seven percent of the population remains so. Today over ninety percent of the population lives in or around cities, and the population of Nouakchott, the capital, has mushroomed form around 20,000 in the 1960s to more than a half-million today. Despite their recent urbanization Mauritanians have remained deeply attached to their rural roots and to their cultures, as Matthew Lavoie explains

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lthough Mauritania’s population is small it is not ethnically or culturally homogenous. Mauritania’s name comes from its dominant ethnic group, the Moors (Maures in French), who can be divided into ‘white’ Bidans (who claim ancestry from north of the Sahara) and ‘black’ Haratins whose physical ancestry lies in sub-Saharan Africa; both groups speak Hassaniya (an Arabic dialect), and more or less share the same culture. It is the nomadic traditions and culture of the Moors that give present day Mauritania much of its unique character. The Haratins were historically the vassals of the Bidans, though social status in Mauritania is considerably more than a question of skin colour. The Pulaar, Soninke and Wolof (collectively referred to as the ‘Afro-Mauritanians) are all distinct ethnic groups- with their own language, culture and musics- who for centuries have lived and farmed the fertile f loodplains of