MONGABAY.COM
Mongabay.com seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development (more)
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
|
|
Mauritania
Index
A woman tends a plot rented from the Women's Cooperative
in Mbagne.
Courtesy UNICEF (Maggie Murray-Lee)
The massive influx of nomads into towns and cities during the
1970s and 1980s created a severe housing shortage in southern
Mauritania. Kébés quickly sprang up around
Nouakchott and other cities and towns and along major roadways.
These kébés continued to grow as drought emptied the
countryside of most of its inhabitants. By the late 1980s,
according to government estimates, roughly one-half of
Nouakchott's total population lived in the shantytowns.
Many of these nomads continued to live in tents, each tent
normally housing five or six people. Others constructed crude
dwellings of wood and scrap metal. In the south, refugees more
commonly built temporary houses of sun-dried brick. In virtually
all locales, kébé dwellers and permanent city residents
alike had little or no access to such basic urban amenities as
drinkable water or sanitary waste disposal. To emphasize that it
considered the kébés temporary, the government prohibited
construction of permanent housing in shantytowns, hoping to
induce refugees to return to their rural homelands. Expenditures
on rural and urban water supplies were set at more than 14
percent of projected public investment for the years 1985 through
1988, or US$10.4 million, an increase of almost 11 percent over
the amount budgeted from 1980 through 1984.
Confronted with an urgent need for low-cost housing, the
government created the Real Estate Construction and Management
Corporation (Société de Construction et de Gestion Immobilière)
in 1974. Relatively few housing units were built, however, and
those proved too expensive for the intended occupants because of
cost overruns and poor financial management. From 1977 to 1982,
an experimental self-help housing scheme in the Sahara District
of Rosso Region led to the construction of more than 500 housing
units for 4,500 people. Employing local labor and materials and
assisted by outside expertise and capital, the project succeeded
until external financing and local initiative faltered.
Additional international assistance was promised in 1985 when
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia agreed to finance more than 1,000 lowcost dwellings.
* * *
The best coverage of contemporary Mauritanian society is
found in Introduction à la Mauritanie, published by the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. The essays
in this volume cover major aspects of Mauritanian society;
particularly relevant is the essay by Francis de Chassey,
"L'evolution des structures sociales en Mauritanie de la
colonisation à nos Jours." Two other sources on social structure
are Charles C. Stewart's "Political Authority and Social
Stratification in Mauritania," which traces the continuity in
social classes and political authority from the nineteenth to the
mid-twentieth century, and Amadou Diallo's "Réflexions sur la
question nationale en Mauritanie." Diallo covers much of the same
ground as Stewart, but in addition he looks at the representation
of different ethnic groups in the professions and state offices.
Richard V. Weekes's Muslim Peoples contains basic
ethnographic information on Mauritania's major peoples.
Otherwise, information on family structure and values and on
Mauritanian Islam is generally lacking in current literature,
although Barbara Abeille's study of women provides information on
the role of women and the family. Sources on contemporary
Mauritanian slavery are Roger Sawyer's Slavery in the
Twentieth Century. John Mercer's "Slavery in Mauritania
Today," and the 1984 report of the United Nations Economic and
Social Council's Commission on Human Rights, Slavery and
Slavery-Like Practices. These studies detail the conditions
of slaves in mid-twentieth-century Mauritania and also provide
prima facie evidence that the Mauritanian government has
acknowledged the existence of slavery and attempted to ameliorate
if not to abolish it.
A number of sources deal with the current cycle of drought
affecting West Africa. Michael H. Glantz, in "Drought in Africa,"
discusses the fundamental factors behind recurrent African
droughts. William S. Ellis and Steve McCurry assess the impact of
the drought upon humans, animals, and land in the mid-1980s in
text and photographs in "Africa's Sahel--The Stricken Land." (For
further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of June 1988
|
|