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Mauritania
Index
Only slightly developed and long neglected, Mauritania played
no role in the rising nationalism in the AOF after World War II.
The 1946 constitution of the French Fourth Republic established
the former colonies of the AOF as overseas territories of France
integrally tied to the French Union. The French administration in
Saint Louis retained jurisdiction in criminal law, public
freedoms, and political and administrative organization; the
Colonial Ministry could still rule by decree, if the decree did
not violate a statute. The indigénat and forced labor were
abolished, and French citizenship was extended to all inhabitants
of French territories willing to renounce their local legal
status.
Elective representation existed on three levels: territorial,
federation (AOF), and national (French). A General Council
(renamed Territorial Assembly in 1952) was established in each
territory with extensive controls over the budget, but with only
consultative powers over all other issues. The Mauritanian
General Council comprised twenty-four members, eight elected by
Europeans and sixteen elected by Mauritanians. Each territory had
five representatives, elected from its General Council, on the
AOF's Grand Council in Dakar, Senegal, which had general
authority over budgeting, politics, administration, planning, and
other matters for all of the AOF. Each territory also sent
representatives to the National Assembly, the Council of the
Republic, and the Assembly of the French Union in Paris.
The franchise created by the 1946 French constitution was
small and restricted to government officials, wage earners,
veterans, owners of registered property, and members or former
members of local associations, cooperatives, or trade unions.
Consequently, in the Mauritanian elections of 1946, there were
fewer than 10,000 qualified voters. In 1947 individuals literate
in French and Arabic were added to the electorate, and in 1951
heads of households and mothers of two children were made
eligible. By 1956 suffrage had become universal.
Before 1946 the territory of Mauritania formed one electoral
unit with Senegal, which was represented by a single senator in
the French Senate. The 1946 constitution, however, separated
Mauritania from Senegal politically, giving it a deputy to the
French National Assembly. At the same time, the bicameral General
Council, which was reorganized into the unicameral Territorial
Assembly in 1952, was established in Mauritania. Nonetheless,
political activity in Mauritania was minimal. The territory's
first party, the Mauritanian Entente, was headed by Horma Ould
Babana, who served as the first Mauritanian deputy to the French
National Assembly.
The Mauritanian Entente was founded in 1946 under the
auspices of Leopold Senghor and Lamine Gueye of the Senegalese
section of the French Socialist Party. Formed specifically for
the 1946 election, the Mauritanian Entente was neither well
organized nor mass based. Yet on a platform calling for movement
toward independence and elimination of chiefdoms, Babana easily
defeated the candidate of the conservative French administration
and the leading clerics. The new deputy, however, spent most of
his five-year term in Paris, out of contact with politics in
Mauritania. As a result, on his return for the 1951 elections,
Babana was defeated by the Mauritanian Progressive Union, led by
Sidi el Moktar N'Diaye and supported by the colonial
administration and its allies, the traditional Maure secular and
clerical ruling classes, who feared the Mauritanian Entente's
"socialist" program. In the 1952 election for members of the
Territorial Assembly, the Mauritanian Progressive Union won the
twenty-two of the twenty-four seats.
The reforms of 1956, or Loi-Cadre (see Glossary), were even
more sweeping than those of 1946. In the face of growing
nationalism and the development of a political consciousness in
the AOF, the Loi-Cadre ended the integrationist phase of French
colonial policy and bestowed a considerable degree of internal
autonomy on the overseas territories. Universal suffrage and the
elimination of the dual college electoral system led to the
creation of district and local representative councils and a
great enlargement of the powers of the territorial assemblies.
Each territory could now formulate its own domestic policies,
although the territories continued to rely on France for
decisions concerning foreign affairs, defense, higher education,
and economic aid.
The most important provision of the 1956 Loi-Cadre was the
establishment of a council of government to assume the major
executive functions of each territory that until that time had
been carried out by a Paris-appointed colonial official. The
councils were composed of three to six ministers elected by the
territorial assemblies on the advice of the dominant party. Each
minister was charged with overseeing a functional department of
government. The head of the ministers became vice president of
the council and, in effect, if not in title, prime minister. In
Mauritania that person was Moktar Ould Daddah, the country's only
lawyer and a member of a prominent pro-French clerical family.
Data as of June 1988
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