Mauritania, May 1991

“Even people who have lived in this ‘God forsaken place’ and would never do so again agree that it’s a truly exotic and unforgettable place to visit”.
-from West Africa, a travel survival kit. Lonely Planet, 1988, p. 299.

Early in 1991 a German firm by the name of POGA, which is based in Bad Homburg, asked me, sight unseen, to go on a mission to Mauritania. So, in May of that year I found myself in this vast, haunting desert country in northwest Africa. I only spent a month there, but it was enough to make a lasting impression on me.

Like many others, I yearn to visit out of the way places, ones that are off the beaten track. At the time I visited it, Mauritania certainly fit that bill: I was told that no more than perhaps three to four hundred tourists visited the country each year. It’s not as if Mauritania was at the other end of the world; it is, after all, only a three or four hour hour flight from most European capitals. But the country feels like it is at the end of the world. The capital, Nouakchott ( "Nouakshit" to some expats ), is, or was when I was there at least, a sand-infested, feature-less town, with only one or two decent hotels and restaurants, and no paved roads. But in a perverse sort of way, this is what made the place so attractive: it is just so incredibly different. Everything you see is different, from the Moorish men in their pale blue and white robes to the noonday sun directly overhead that doesn’t even make you sweat, and dries your leathery skin within seconds of exiting the pool.

Sand envelops the country, so much so that when I was there there was not even a paved road between the capital, Nouakchott, and the country’s second city, Nouadhibou, located about three hundred kilometres north along the coast. I am told there used to be a paved road linking the two towns, but that within weeks of it being built ( no doubt with foreign aid ), it was buried in sand. Consequently, the only way you could get from one city to the other, flying aside, was by driving along the beach at low tide. I actually saw a French family doing this in their Mitsubishi Pajero. It must have been quite an adventure, since there is virtually nothing but surf and sand the whole way. Now, as I understand it, there is a paved road linking the two cities.

The Moors, who are descended from Arabs and Berbers, are a very austere bunch. The men are mostly tall and thin. Typically they sport a beard, a turban and sandals, all of which makes them look like they just stepped out of Franco Zeffirelli’s film Jesus of Nazareth. They tend to have a certain noble air about them. They are also inscrutable. In the past they were nomads, but nowadays they are almost all sedentary. A few diehards still maintain their herds of emaciated camels. One of these is a former President, who returned to the desert after being toppled in a coup. Moors make quite a sight, with their billowing robes and loping gait. The more affluent can be seen tooling around in their Mercedes. They are known as traders and businessmen: throughout West Africa they can be seen running their shops and trading in foreign exchange.

By all accounts, a good Moor does not like to get his hands dirty. This, after all, is what slaves were made for, or, if there are none of those around, women. Slavery is outlawed nowadays, but vestiges of it can still be found, I am told, in the system of indentured labour. Blacks actually outnumber the Arab Moors, but they are treated with disdain by the ruling, fair-skinned Moors, who control the economy and the government. But since Moors are too busy making money to do anything practical such as serve in the military, blacks occupy most of the posts in the armed forces. In 1989, the ruling Moors suspected a military coup, and in the ensuing purge several hundred blacks thought to be traitors were rounded up, tortured and murdered. Had I known this before I entered the country, I never would have gone on mission there.

Whenever I think back to the time I spent in Mauritania, I have this recurring image of myself on a domestic flight between Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the country’s second city, and undoubtedly one of the most godforesaken places I have every visited. The short-range propeller-driven plane was jam-packed. I suspect it always was, because of that paved road buried under the sand. In any case, I was the only Westerner on the flight; other than me, the whole plane was full of these Biblical characters from central casting, in their long gowns, staring into the great beyond. If you believe in cultural relativism, I suppose the scene was not all that much different from what you see on a business shuttle flight between Toronto and Montreal, Boston and New York, or London and Paris. In either case, when you are the only one dressed in civvies, you better be self-assured; otherwise, you are going to feel like odd man out.

For all their noble airs, Moors are not the friendliest of people. I am told they can be very hard to get to know. I therefore consider myself fortunate to have got to meet four Mauritanians during my stay: the clerk at the hotel I stayed at; a black newsagent at the hotel; a semi-retired governor of one of the provinces, and the head of a national marine park. It was through these four individuals that I got to know a little bit about the country. My clerk friend was incredibly friendly, and overly helpful. He complained incessantly about his plight as an underpaid desk clerk in a government-owned hotel. He also decried the way the country was run, for the betterment of those in power and the well-to-do rather than the common man. He was painfully thin, and said his wages did not even give him enough money to buy decent food. His main goal seemed to be to get the hell out of the country, to some sort of El Dorado like Canada. Who could blame him for that? Of course he wanted my address in Canada, but my policy in Africa is never to give it out; instead, I usually offer to send information on Canadian bursaries or other forms of assistance. I have heard too many stories about people who did give out their address, only to have the person they gave it to write them with a heartbreaking story; the letter usually ends in a request for money for some worthwhile cause, such as a brother’s operation or a little sister’s funeral. Unfortunately, when one is five thousand miles away from the scene, it is impossible to determine whether these solicitations are genuine.

The country he inhabited had few resources other than iron ore and fish. The vast majority of the population was illiterate. Mauritania was, and is, one of the poorest countries on earth, although now, as I write, there is revenue from offshore oil production. Graft and corruption were rampant, and racism was endemic. Whatever wealth the country did possess was being milked for all it was worth. A few people had loads of money, while most people had nothing. Most young people with any get-up-and-go had already got up and gone. Years of drought had forced tens of thousands from the interior region to the capital, where they had been swept off the streets by an embarrassed government and herded into a tent community on the outskirts of town. People swept sand off their sidewalks each day the way Canadians sweep off a light dusting of snow. When I was there the situation was especially critical, as Mauritania was suffering the wrath of the Western powers for its failure to come on board during the Gulf War. When I arrived in the country an Iraqi Airways jet was sitting on the tarmac at the airport; when I left one month later it was still there.

My second erstwhile Mauritanian friend was the newsagent at the Marhaba Hotel. I would meet him each day in the hotel lobby. He would be sitting there at his desk by the corner. His name was Bou. He was a retired Mauritanian postal employee. Now he sold stamps, postcards, newspapers and magazines at one of the principal hotels in the capital. ‘Marhaba’ means ‘welcome’ in Arabic. During my stay there, I got to know a little about Bou, his country and his past. The thing I remember most about Monsieur Gaye was his lovely smile. It was the kind of smile that announced to all the world: “ Welcome to my country. Maybe it is one of the most wretched, godforsaken places on earth. True, I am discriminated against because I am black. And, yes, I can barely earn a living from this kiosk. Nonetheless, I welcome you to my country, because it is the only one I’ve got.”

It was hard to tell how old Bou was just by looking at him. He had grey hair, to be sure, and he certainly looked much older than most people you see in black Africa. This is, after all, a continent where the average life expectancy is around forty-two. Let’s just say that Bou was, as the French quaintly put it, ‘a man of a certain age’. And from what I could glean about him, he had lived a full, if not an easy life.

He was in fact much older than the country itself, for Mauritania only gained its independence from France in 1960. Bou was born, therefore, into colonial French West Africa. Quite possibly he had been born into slavery, which was commonly practised in Mauritania by the dominant Moors, and was only outlawed in 1980. In any event, Bou grew up in a rural setting, and got his big break, if one can put it that way, when he was inducted into the French Army. He was assigned to the Camel Corps in the northern desert, where he and his regiment lived out of tents. This would have been sometime around the early nineteen-fifties.

Within a year or two Bou found himself in Indochina. He was rather vague about his time there. Whatever transpired during this period of his life, he obviously survived it, probably leaving Viet Nam around the time of the French debacle of Dien Bien Phu.

Upon his return to Africa, Bou took a job with the Post Office, or PTT as it is known in francophone countries. He delighted in talking about these years of his life. Evidently he steadily rose up the ladder in the Mauritanian union of postal employees, because before long he was attending various international conferences on postal labour. In this capacity he made many trips to Geneva. So, he and I would swap stories about that picturesque Swiss city on the shores of Lac Leman, where I had studied for many years. Geneva was a short three hour hop by plane from Nouakchott, but it seemed more like a million miles away from that dusty, dingy town sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert.

Monsieur Bou spoke excellent French. He was also very polite, in an old-world kind of way, but always with an African twist. For example, he would ask me two or three times how I was, the rationale being that the first and second times the question is posed no one ever tells the truth. Only by asking someone a third time do you find out how they really are. That, at least, is how the theory goes. When it was my turn to ask Bou how he was, we would sometimes engage in our own private joke. The dialogue would go something like this:

Me: How are you today, Monsieur Bou? Are you well?
Bou: Yes, I am well, thank you very much.
Me: And how are the camels?
Bou: They are well, too ( chuckling ).
Me: And the goats?
Bou: Yes, yes. They are all well ( more chuckling ).
Me: And the children? They are fine, I hope?
Bou: Yes, of course. They are very well.
Me: Oh, yes, how is your wife?
Bou: Which one? I have several!

Bou always impressed me with how seriously he took his work. He worked six days a week, Friday being his day off. He would be there at six thirty in the morning, and he would still be there at five thirty in the evening. He came in from the country. I never asked how he got there. I just assumed that he came on one of those rickety, jam-packed minibuses or 'matatas' that one sees all over Africa. To pass the time between customers he would listen to his portable radio, which he would press up to his ear. He was very trim, and he wore western-style clothes, which immediately set himself apart from most of his compatriots, and especially the ruling Moors, who flaunted their traditional indigo robes. The country he was now a national of was a typical African kleptocracy, ruled by forty or so thieves. A good chunk of the wealth had been siphoned off to the Canary Islands nearby, where a sizeable expatriate community flourished. Racism was endemic, and hundreds of blacks had been murdered the year before I arrived. While I was in the country, Mauritania was siding with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Reading, listening to the radio, and conversation were about the only pursuits that did not seem to be outlawed.

I never really determined whether he had a concession from the hotel to operate his desk in the lobby, or was in fact paid a wage by the government, which owned the Marhaba. Either way, he treated each item in his modest collection of stamps, postcards, newspapers, magazines and a few books as if it were a precious diamond. If I selected a postcard, he would help me choose an appropriate stamp for it. Or if the latest Jeune Afrique came in, he would put a copy aside for me until I dropped by. In this way, I began to see that my daily stops at his stand probably meant as much to him as they did to me. We both needed each other: I needed his companionship and access to the outside world, and he needed my companionship and truck. This seemed to me to be a fair exchange, especially in a country with so little ‘culture’ discernible to the temporary guest.

Monsieur Bou was especially proud of the Mauritanian stamps he had for sale. My being from Canada, he wasted no time in showing me the commemorative set which his old PTT had just released in honour of the upcoming 1992 Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France. I was impressed by the quality of these stamps, which depict various winter sports, including figure skating, cross country skiing, hockey and Alpine skiing. We both found it highly amusing that a country that is ninety-five percent covered with sand should celebrate the glories of winter sport. Interesting as these stamps may have been to look at, I had no desire to purchase them. Then I noticed that on each and every one of them the letter “T” was missing from Albertville, a fact that did not seem to overly concern my African friend. A few years ago I showed these prized philatelic specimens of mine to an Ottawa stamp dealer at a collector’s show. He dismissed them as being of no interest whatsoever, partly on the grounds that they were not first day issue, and partly because they had been touched by human hands. So, I still have the stamps.

I also kept Monsieur Bou’s business card. It very proudly identified him as a Philatelist. I often think of him, and I have often thought of writing him. Something holds me back. Perhaps I am too afraid to find out what has become of him. He was, after all, a man of a certain age. If I ever return to Mauritania, I will make a point of stopping by the Marhaba Hotel, just across from the Place de l’Indépendence, to see whether he still has his kiosk. If he does, I will go up to him, shake his hand, ask him how he is, how his camels are, and so on and so on down the line. In the meantime, I prefer to guard the perfect memory I have of our brief encounter, when I was a stranger in a foreign land, and he made me feel welcome.

Someone in an entirely different situation also made me feel welcome in his country, under entirely different circumstances. Zein Gaye was a semi-retired Governor of a province of Mauritania. As a patronage appointment, he had been appointed director general of the crown corporation responsible for ship safety in the country. Mauritania was the site for the famous French painting “Le Naufrage de la Meduse”, which caused quite a scandal in France during the early nineteenth century, because it exposed the incompetence of French maritime safety practices. Thus, one might have expected Mr. Gaye’s agency to have a certain prominence in Mauritanian circles. In fact, quite the opposite had occurred, to the point where the agency he headed was considered something of a national joke. The agency’s office was located in Nouadhibou, where hundreds of wrecks clogged the harbour, having apparently been brought from afar and unceremoniously scuttled for insurance purposes. Since my visit in 1991, a French salvage firm was hired to salvage these hulks, but ran into legal challenges from people claiming to be the rightful owners. The Frenchmen, I am told, had to make a quit exit, leaving millions of francs worth of salvage equipment behind. Whether Mr. Gaye was responsible for this debacle, I have no way of knowing. All I know is that when I met him I found him to be of the utmost charm. Meeting him was like going back in time, to a bygone era of gentility and erudition. I had read where centuries ago the Moors were known for their education and cultivation; Gaye seemed to me to be the embodiment of this civility. He was probably in his seventies, and he spoke excellent French.

My German colleague Fritz had set up an appointment to see Mr. Gaye in his Nouadhibou office, which was located in a nondescript, two-storied building down a dusty cul-de-sac. Fritz had told me that Gaye was “an interesting character” whom he wanted me to meet. Wolfgang accompanied me to the meeting. We were kept waiting in an anti-chamber for several minutes before being ushered in to Gaye’s very small, cluttered office. In Africa, as in certain parts of the western world, these delays are often intentional, meant to convey a sense of the host’s importance and busy-ness. And just in case we felt slighted, a servant very quickly brought us mint tea, followed by another, and then yet another. Each tea was served the old-fashioned way, from a brass pot with a long spout, the server pouring the tea from a height of perhaps eighteen inches directly into the glass below, without spilling a drop.

Maloum’s office gave no hint of his rank. It was small and cluttered, with files strewn all over his desk. Overhead, a fan spun around, circulating stale air throughout the room. The walls were a pale green, a colour you see a lot of in Mauritania; it is the same colour as phlegm. The meeting went well enough, I thought. I had been sent to Mauritania to determine which marine environmental protection treaties the country should accede to in order to protect itself against oil spills. Mauritania was not party to any of the relevant treaties at the time. Mr. Gaye was aware of the treaties in question; he even pulled a dog-eared copy of one of them out of his drawer. He said that his inspectors were applying this particular one anyway. He explained that since Mauritania did not have any domestic rules to apply, the standards contained in the international treaties were the only thing to go by. I was flabbergasted by this revelation. It seemed like an eminently practical solution. Nevertheless, it relied on voluntary compliance, since you could not prosecute someone if they had not broken any law.

At the end of our meeting, Gaye suggested that he would like to have us over for dinner one night. I thought he was just being polite, but Wolfgang was quite certain that he was serious. Sure enough, two days later we were summoned to Gaye’s home for a 7 PM couscous meal. The scene was like something out of One Thousand and One Nights: tapestries hung from the walls, and instead of chairs there were cushions and pillows strewn all over the floor. We were introduced to the host’s two sons, both in their twenties. If there were any daughters, they certainly were not in evidence. In fact, the only time any women were present was to bring in the food and take away the dishes after the meal. Wolfgang explained to me that this was the custom among the Moors: women always stayed in the background, and when they did appear they were not to engage in social intercourse. Thus, for all I know, one of the veiled women who served the food might have been Mrs. Gaye, a daughter or a daughter-in-law. One or two black retainers did enter the room to serve us drinks before supper and mint tea after: Fritz surmised that they were slaves or ex-slaves. While slavery has been illegal for decades now, apparently the practice has been difficult to eradicate because however bad their plight may be, slaves are often considered members of the family.

I found the whole setting distinctly uncomfortable. This was really putting my moral self-righteousness to the test. I was sitting on the horns of dilemma, for on the one hand I wanted to challenge the way women and blacks were treated in this household, and on the other hand I did not want to offend my host. I could not but wonder whether Gaye was aware of the injustice of it all. If he was, he certainly did not let on. He wanted to know as much as he could about my own country, Canada. And his sons both spoke of their love for Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where they had gone to university. It seems that for a certain class of Moors Abidjan represents a kind of African Paris; Casablanca and Rabat had apparently been off limits because of Mauritania’s bitter dispute with Morocco over Western Sahara. I was impressed at how intellectual and sophisticated Maloum and his sons were. Hassaniya was their mother tongue, but they spoke beautiful French, and they were quite knowledgeable of world affairs. They were also very proud of their native land. While I was chatting and tossing these ethical problems around in my head, the women and servants brought the meal in. We were all seated cross-legged on the floor as platter after platter of steaming hot food was placed on the rug in front of us. It was like some sort of medieval banquet. Everything seemed carefully designed to impress us with the wealth and social status of our host, as well as the high esteem in which he held us, his honoured guests. Of course the plat principal was couscous, which we ate with our hands. Fritz explained to me that a Moor will always eat couscous with his left hand, the right hand being reserved for wiping his behind. The correct movement of scooping up the couscous resembles the trajectory of a steam shovel scooping up dirt or an elephant feeding itself: the arm moves forward in a downward-sloping arc, the hand dives into the dish, and cups the food in the palm before being drawn back towards the mouth. There was very little conversation while we gorged ourselves. The only noise was the occasional burp, plus the slurping of food and drink. Being a vegetarian, I simply ignored all the lamb that was offered. I found the whole meal rather disgusting. On top of everything, my legs were killing me from sitting Indian-style on the floor for so long.

After the meal, the conversation resumed for perhaps a half hour, when all of a sudden our host and his two sons got up and left. They did not even wait to see us out! When I expressed my shock to Fritz at this sudden exit, he downplayed the incident, suggesting that this was simply the Mauritanian way: eat and run. The next day, I wrote a thank you note to Gaye, and delivered it to his office. I was touched by his generosity in inviting us, and I was very grateful to him for providing me with a glimpse of Mauritanian life behind the walls. But I was also horrified by much of what I had seen. I suffered from culture shock. I had a sense of time warp; it was like being placed in a time capsule and travelling back many centuries to the time of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I would like to think that Maloum was being genuinely friendly in inviting me to his house, although business and protocol were probably uppermost in his mind.

My evening chez Gaye was undoubtedly the highlight of my stay in Nouadhibou. The city exists basically because of two things: fish and iron ore. The industrial fishery here is very substantial, and the ore from Zouerate in the interior is transported by rail to Cansado near Nouadhibou, whence it is shipped abroad. So, Nouadhibou is a very workmanlike place. But it is a place totally devoid of charm, with nary a decent hotel or restaurant. The only memorable distraction while I was there was a short trip out to Cap Blanc, close to the border with Western Sahara, where one can see a few of the last remaining Mediterranean monk seals in the wild. When I was there, it was said that there were only two hundred seals left in this particular population. They were considered on the verge of extinction because they mate in caves along the rocky coast, and these sites were being disturbed. I was also told that the Mauritanian Navy used the seals for target practice, although sailors were belatedly being educated as to the extremely dangerous effects of this activity.

The last of the four Mauritanians I met was Mustafa Diouf, Director of the Parc national du Banc d’Arguin, a marine park located between the country’s two main coastal cities, which is noted for its abundance and variety of migrating bird life. I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Diouf was excellent at his job. He probably had all the qualifications ( his business card merely identifies him as an agronomist ). The problem was, in my meeting with him at park headquarters in Nouadhibou I found it totally impossible to take him seriously. Diouf was a Harratin, or black Moor. This in itself was no reason to dismiss him as a martinet; one sees a fair number of these descendants of slaves who have been assimilated into the dominant Arab culture. He looked very young, and he was very short; he was probably no more than five foot two. His head barely rose above his enormous desk. But what made him look rather comical was the fact that except for his big blue eyes, he was covered from head to toe in his robes and turban. I felt like I was talking to a mummy, or someone wrapped in an enormous blue and white bandage. Those piercing eyes kept staring out at me.

During the course of our hour-long meeting, I cannot recall him blinking once, although I am sure he did. What I can remember is that he carried a fly swatter in one hand. He seemed to use it to punctuate my sentences, for just about every time I attempted to make an important point, he would flail away at another fly that was buzzing in front of him. Notwithstanding the distraction, I was able to ask all the questions I had planned. The conclusion I reached about Mr. Diouf and his beautiful park was that he was there as a gatekeeper; and his role seemed to have more to do with keeping people out than letting them in. The park itself was more of a wilderness reserve than a park in the western sense. It was very inaccessible, and the permit required to enter it was both expensive and hard to come by. A well-placed bribe would no doubt also grease the wheels. Just about the only person I heard about who succeeded in getting in, aside from a camera crew which produced a wonderful film on the area, was the Duke of Edinburgh, in his capacity as Patron of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWW). The Banc d’Arguin is also home to the Imraguen, a tribe of fishermen who use dolphins to help them catch fish. In 1996 dozens of dead dolphins mysteriously washed up on shore, possibly as a result of a toxic spill.

As we prepared to leave Diouf’s office, I asked him for some written material on the park. He basically said there wasn’t anything, but Fritz, who had accompanied me to the meeting, knew better. As we passed through the anti-chamber on our way out Wolfgang slipped a lovely colour brochure of the park into my notebook. He took it from one of several piles of unopened brochures. It was produced with French aid money. When I got around to leafing through the brochure back in Canada I noticed there was a photograph of Diouf in the Foreword. The top of his head was like a bowling ball; no wonder his head had been covered with a turban when I met him.

I met two other Moors during my month-long stay: one was a bright young marine biologist who I later learned had been picked out by the United States Coast Guard for study in Alabama. The other was an incredibly stupid young lawyer who insisted that Mauritania had ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, when I knew from the UN itself that they had not. To top things off, the young man’s boss insisted likewise; as head of the foreign ministry’s international law unit, he should definitely have known better. Further research on my part revealed that the Mauritanian parliament had authorised ratification, but that the instruments of ratification had never been sent. This was a case of bureaucratic stupidity on a grand scale. Six years later, and those instruments had still not made it across the Atlantic to 1, UN Plaza on the Lower East Side.
My German colleague Fritz was a character in himself. Compact in build, bearded, and with a perpetual grin on his face, he was a highly competent aid worker. His job was to run the country’s system for controlling foreign fishing, and he did a good job of things. Everybody liked Fritz, who had been there for four years by the time I arrived; prior to that he had spent six years in Nigeria. Fritz was one of those highly educated, well-read Germans you often find abroad. He had gone to Tubingen University, and liked to talk about the fraternity he belonged to; it was one of those typically teutonic organisations where the members became blood brothers, and engaged in various acts of self-mutilation as a way of demonstrating their courage. Wolfgang met me at the airport in his company-supplied Toyota Land Cruiser.

On the way into town, I asked Fritz what expats did for fun around there. He must have thought I was bored already, for he immediately took me to the outskirts of town for a quick spin through the dunes. For a minute or two he raced up and down the dunes like a madman. He explained to me that as he sped along the autobahn, every decent German dreamt of coming to Mauritania just to tool around the desert, preferably in a Mercedes four wheel drive vehicle. I did not want to hurt his feelings, but all I could think of was Rommel and his Desert Rats creating a sandstorm in North Africa, and running out of gas at El Alamein.

I met another little general in Nouakchott. He was the World Bank representative, an Indian who had spent some time in Canada. When I arrived for an appointment with him in his lavish set of offices, there was absolutely no one in the building. I waited half an hour before he finally arrived. He seemed utterly stunned to see me. Evidently he had totally forgotten our meeting; but instead of simply apologising and getting on with things, he insisted that I was wrong, and tried to give me a dressing down. The whole thing was completely ludicrous: this puny little Indian standing there ramrod straight, wasting time trying to make me feel guilty for something that he himself had fucked-up. Welcome to the wacky world of the World Bank, I thought to himself. The offices they occupied were obscenely lavish when compared to the surroundings of Nouakchott.

Most of the other foreigners I had occasion to meet in Mauritania were French. Although this is the country where Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote a number of his books, including Vol de Nuit, Mauritania tends to be a dumping ground for French bureaucrats and other officials. Nevertheless, the ones I met were a fascinating collection of somewhat amusing and even eccentric characters. There was, for instance, Michel Pare, the resident UNDP representative in the country. He kept giggling during our meeting, as if I were cracking jokes all the time, or as if someone was tickling him. It was most unsettling. I simply could not take him seriously; he was like a complete buffoon. And yet I learned later from Fritz that this very same man had been responsible for saving several hundred lives the previous year, when Moors were slaughtering any Senegalese they could get their hands on, in retribution for alleged attacks on Moors in Senegal. Pare organised the secret airlift of hundreds of Senegalese who would no doubt have otherwise been rounded up and massacred.

I heard a similar story about another Frenchman who I had occasion to meet, although this time the heroic effort was more modest, and yet more personal in nature. Francois Beaudoind was a rather sad character working in the fisheries ministry as a so-called 'cooperant'. He was a trained veterinarian, sent by the French ministry he had worked for in Paris. As told to me by Fritz, who worked alongside Francois in Nouakchott, Francois basically had no choice about coming to Mauritania: he had to either go or be fired. Discarded French generals used to be sent to Limoges, whence the French colloquialism for being fired ( limogés ). So, in Francois’s case, he was shipped off to Nouakshit. I must say, I quite liked Francois, in spite of what I had been told about him. Francois’s big crime was that he had ‘gone native’ in Mauritania, in one sense at least. For he had adopted this incredibly bad habit of riding in to work aboard his motorcycle at around 9:15 AM, and speeding away with great panache by 11 AM. This was the total extent of Francois’s day at the office: in by 9:15, out by 11. Beaudoin's 'je m’en foutism’ attitude was so flagrant as to be almost worthy of respect. It was one thing for the average, underpaid local bureaucrat to behave like this, but for a European to emulate the locals in this respect was absolutely unheard of. And yet, somehow he got away with it.

Who knows what Francois did to wile away the rest of his day. All I really can say is that he had a lovely house tucked away behind your typical cement wall, a nice, if somewhat soporific wife, two kids, a dog and tons of videos and music albums. One of his hobbies was to get in his four wheel drive and go out to the country looking for pottery shards. When I heard that he did this occasionally, I asked if he would take me along with him. Within a few days he obliged, and so we went on a fascinating little excursion to the outskirts of Nouakchott, where the hard-packed, ocre-coloured sand was littered with shards. There was nothing to prevent me from taking samples away as souvenirs, but I resisted the temptation, on the theory that if everyone did likewise there would not be any left. From what I gather, this particular site that he brought me to was approximately one thousand years old; but the way it looked it could have been brand new.

Ineffectual as Francois may have been, he was nonetheless responsible for at least one heroic act during his four-year exile in Mauritania. For, like his compatriot Michel Pare of the UNDP, Monsieur Beuadoin had saved at least one life during the reprisals against local Senegalese. It appears that at the height of the lynchings, in 1990 I believe, gangs of people would regularly come to the Macqueron’s door looking for their Senegalese housekeeper. Since handing her over would mean certain death, Francois simply told them each time they came that she was no longer in their employ. Evidently, they did not believe him, and so they persisted. So, for the longest time, a period of perhaps three or four weeks, the Beaudoin's simply hid their maid in the house, never letting the would-be murderers in, and keeping the lady out of sight at all times. They did this at quite some risk to their own safety, I am told. Then, one moonless night, under the cover of darkness, they bundled her out of the house and into the car, driving straight to the airport, where she boarded one of Michel Pare's planes for safe passage to neighbouring Senegal.

In the years since I visited Mauritania I have often wondered what became of Francois Beaudoin. When I saw him in Mauritania he had about one year left on his ‘sentence’, as it were. The rumour was that he was going to be offered another godawful posting somewhere. In the summer of 1996, I got my answer. Coming out of a meeting in the fisheries ministry in Windhoek, Namibia, who was waiting to go in the same office but Beaudoin himself. We shook hands, but did not have a chance to really talk. But I learned from Fritz, who by this time had been posted to Namibia full-time, that Francois had gone back to Paris, where he was now assessing programs for the French ministry responsible for technical assistance. It just so happened that he was in Windhoek the same time I was, seeing the same officials, on another fisheries project. This is what African fisheries consulting is all about: a very small world of people that you keep bumping into, wherever you go. Thus, it seems that in the end everything had worked out well for Frederic. I would like to think that his good deed in saving the life of his Senegalese maid ( who many others would not have cared about ), had something to do with the improvement in his fortunes.

Another Frenchman, who I have somewhat less sympathy for is Marcel de Rochefoucault. Marcel was a very fit, aristocratic advisor to the Mauritanian Navy. When I met him he had been in the country for two or three years. He had obviously had his fill of things, to the point where he seemed to spend most of his time around the beautiful pool at the Novotel, just down the road from the French Embassy compound. Colonel Marcelwas a charming man: well- bred, well-educated and a good talker. But he was also a broken man. How he ever ended up in this dump is beyond me. His family were back in France, probably living in a chateau somewhere, while he had a modest little apartment in Nouakchott.

Marcel’s problem was that a number of the Mauritanian naval officers he had been training had been executed in cold blood on trumped-up charges of treason. Following an uprising in the capital in 1989, the Moor-dominated government cracked down on the military. They accused the black-dominated military of plotting a coup. Hundreds of soldiers suspected of involvement in this internal revolt were jailed, tortured, and in many cases murdered. France’s involvement in this whole affair is shrouded in mystery. No one seriously accuses them of direct involvement in the massacres and/or assassination, but the fact that they were actively training military forces at the time, and continued to do so after the horrific bloodshed, makes them look like accomplices to wholesale murder. For Marcel to have to go on working in Mauritania, haunted by these memories, must have been close to unbearable.

Although France gave up her West African colonies three or four decades ago, she still plays a preponderant role in the region. France seems to regard the whole area as her own private reserve. Any attempts by other countries to exert influence in the region are jealously and energetically rebuffed. French influence extends to military support and intervention. Vast sums of money are spent on French military hardware, local armed forces are trained by French advisors, and the mother country reserves for herself the right to step in and apply military force whenever and wherever she sees fit.

According to my Lonely Planet Guide for West Africa, ten thousand years ago Mauritania had enough vegetation to support a variety of wildlife, including elephants, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. Now the permanent vegetation is confined for the most part to the banks of the Senegal River on the southern boundary with Senegal, therefore making agriculture possible. The creeping desert has invaded Nouakchott in the last twenty-five to thirty years. Sand piles up against walls, it gets in your nostrils, and even into your lungs. Every morning a vacuum cleaner sucked sand from the bottom of the hotel swimming pool. I am told that the problem is particularly acute when the Harmattan wind blows in from the interior, as it does at certain times of the year. Needless to say, the air is extremely dry in Mauritania. Within a minute or so of hopping out of the swimming pool, my skin would be perfectly dry; no towel would be needed. But the scorching equatorial sun very quickly made my skin feel like leather; it is a very peculiar sensation.

If I were to return to Mauritania, I would try to be there sometime between July and October, when the rains come. I am told that during this period the region around Nouakchott is transformed into a carpet of green, with plants and flowers blooming. I would also visit the interior, places such as the ancient city of Chinguetti.

Mauritania made an indelible impression on me. The light is very special, the sky is a deep blue and the sand is a red brick colour, just like a cinder tennis court. Like the Arctic, the landscape dominates everything. The horizons are endless, and there are few distractions. You have to make your own fun.

The desert around Nouakchott has its own particular scent, very musty, as if someone peed his pants. The local currency, the ougiya used to stink just about the same way, until they replaced the old, crumpled bills with newer, better quality ones.

There is a striking contrast between the desert and the sea, with the former scorching hot and the latter surprisingly cold. The sea tends to be very rough around Nouakchott, and the temperature differential produces a very strong wind at the beach. In downtown Nouakchott it can be 30 degrees Celsius with not a breath of air, while ten kilometres away at the fishermen’s beach you would be wise to wear a windbreaker with the hood up. In my spare time, I would sometimes cadge a lift to that beach, where I could watch the fishermen, who are all black, bring their pirogues ( big wooden canoes with a small outboard ) in with the day’s catch aboard. This could be a very dangerous operation as they struggled to keep the boats afloat in heavy seas. Most of them wore bright yellow sou’westers, just like I had worn in the days of my erstwhile sailing career aboard the M.V. Tundraland in the High Arctic. I marvelled at their bravery, risking their lives against the elements. I am told that theirs is a very hazardous profession. These days, of course, beaches like these are staging areas for the perilous journey towards Europe by desparate migrants, many of whom die or drown en route.

The pirogues tend to go out to sea around dawn, and return in the late afternoon. The boats are beached and the catch is apportioned among the crew, the owner of the vessel, and whoever else may have a claim to it. The men catch the fish whereas the women sort it out, clean it and market it. This is the way it is throughout West Africa. The fish are mainly demersals, or bottom dwellers, as opposed to the free swimming pelagics one finds further out to sea. The fishermen and their families migrate quite a bit along the coast, from Ghana right up to Nouadhibou in northern Mauritania. Thus, it is not uncommon to here English spoken on the fishing beach in Nouakchott. Africans show little respect for the political boundaries that were first established by the colonial powers, and then carried over into the independence era. And, let’s face it, some of these boundaries make no sense whatsoever. In the case of Mauritania and Senegal, for instance, it would have made much more sense to give the southern, black part of the country along the Senegal river to neighbouring, black Senegal than to Mauritania, with its dominant Arab/Berber culture. If this had been done in 1960, at the time of independence, much grief and sorrow might have been spared.

Many African countries make it extremely difficult for the temporary visitor to leave the country with a favourable impression of the place. Mauritania is a classic example of this problem. Just entering the airport terminal at Nouakchott can be a tremendous struggle. There are dozens of people trying to get through a single door at the entrance. Invariably, an illiterate guard asks to see your papers. Meanwhile, a bunch of screaming locals are being overly helpful, grabbing at your bags and offering to steer you through all the red tape that awaits you inside All this is being done in 30 degree weather, when you are hot and sweaty and tired. Just about wherever you travel on this continent, the local officials give you the impression of doing everything for the first time: this is the first plane that has ever left the airport, this is the boarding clerk’s first day on the job, etc. What this means is that you must always expect the unexpected, prepare for the worst, and never take anything for granted.

When there is a scheduled stop in Nouadhibou, for instance, on your flight from Nouakchott to Las Palmas, and you look out the window and see your suitcase sitting on the tarmac, you must never believe the stewardess as she tries to reassure you that everything is in order and that it will eventually be put back on board. She, after all, doesn’t have a clue what is going on! Instead, instinctively you run down the gangway and run after the trolley that by now is carrying it off to the terminal. Then you yank it off the trolley and rush back to the airplane and hop on before they take off without you. This is par for the course in Africa. It is not why we go there, but it is why they pay us to go there. Some places you go to they give you danger pay; in Africa you get frustration pay.

It is easy to look down own’s nose at Mauritania. But then you remind yourself that at the time of independence there was not one port in the entire country. Also, a capital city had to be built from scratch, since the old regional capital, St. Louis, ended up on the Senegalese side of the river. The first meeting of the President and his Cabinet back in 1960 was held in a tent. And when a President was overthrown in a coup several years ago, he went back to the desert to tend to his herd of camels and lead a nomadic way of life. So, maybe there is some hope for this country. Maybe if I return in another thirty years I will be surprised to find that Arab and African are on an equal footing, that well has been more equitably apportioned, and that women are emancipated. And maybe, just maybe, I will arrive to discover that the desert has stopped its inexorable advance, and that trees are growing again, just as they did thousands of years ago.