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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Mauritania
Index
In 1987 the pace of modernization remained slow in
Mauritania, where much of the population was closely bound to
traditional subsistence agriculture and pastoralism and where
literacy in French or Arabic was limited to only about 18 percent
of the population. Although the modernizing elite shared with the
traditional elite and the Mauritanian masses a common history and
religion that prevented the state from collapsing, centrifugal
forces competed for scarce economic and political resources.
These forces ranged from ethnic groups and tribes to occupational
and social classes.
An even greater impediment to development and modernization
was the cleavage between the Maures and Mauritania's black
population, the size of which has never been precisely
ascertained and may be either undercounted or overrepresented,
depending on one's perspective. Historically, the Maures have
discriminated against the black population, which, well into the
twentieth century, continued to be a source of slaves
(see Maures
, ch. 2). Different languages and a fairly uncomplicated
geographic split tended to reinforce racial differences.
Moreover, the black southern portion of the country, which was
predominantly agricultural and until independence had generated
much of the country's wealth, lost economic and political
influence as mining and fishing investments in the Maure northern
portion achieved far greater economic importance beginning in the
late 1960s. By the mid-1980s, however, the economic pendulum
began to swing back again as mining and fishing revenues leveled
off or began dropping while the relentless process of
desertification had increased the value of black-held lands along
the Senegal River. Nevertheless, blacks still complained that the
government allocated greater resources to projects benefiting the
Maures than to those benefiting blacks.
Data as of June 1988
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