Photo by author, all rights reserved.
Some years ago, the mayor of Tevragh Zeina (TZ), the largest and most prosperous neighborhood in Mauritania’s capital city Nouakchott, proudly announced that “only rich people live here”. Visitors are likely to have the same first impression, given the prominence of foreign embassies, international hotels and luxury villas. Yet there is an underside to its beauty and wealth. Niched into vacant lots and partially-constructed houses are tiny settlements of wooden shacks and hangars – cement-based ‘tent equivalents’ with wooden frames and cloth roofs. Alongside supermarkets, upscale-restaurants and imported car dealers you see ‘hole-in-the-wall’ boutiques selling car parts, clothes, tea and anything else you might need. Often partially hidden in the back by a threadbare curtain are mattresses, cooking utensils and a spare boubou (man’s robe) or two.
Who actually lives here, hidden in plain sight? Most are haratine – freed slaves and their descendants. French colonialism repeatedly and ineffectually made slavery illegal. The newly-independent Islamic Republic of Mauritania signed the UN Declaration of Human Rights decrying slavery in 1961. But it was only in 1980-81 that the nation officially abolished the institution, and the struggle continues to remove its ‘vestiges’ (the government’s term). Yet haratine are by definition exactly that: their identity is tied by tradition to their former masters (bidan – literally ‘whites’ in Arabic, the upper-class nobility). The rhetoric of current politics notwithstanding, they live in the uncomfortable ambivalence of slavery’s legacy.
