Defying time: the entrance to a mosque in Chinguetti.
Mauritania
The arabesques on Oualata’s...
...walls still inspire the drawings...
...traced on women’s hands (see below).
© Laurent Monlau/Rapho, Paris
Intricate designs adorn the interior of a house in Oualata.
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Moussa
Ould Ebnou
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| The author is
one of Mauritania’s greatest Frenchlanguage novelists. He currently serves as cultural
advisor to his country’s president. Moussa Ould Ebnou has written two novels, L’amour
impossible and Le Barzakh, published by L’Harmattan in Paris in 1990 and
1994 respectively. |
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Deserts
stir our emotions because they represent Nature as it was before human beings came
on the scene. They also show us what it may be like after we have disappeared.
Théodore
Monod, French naturalist (1902-2000)
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Once,
Mauritania’s ksours were thriving centres of trade and learning. Today, the country
is struggling to save them from sand, wind and oblivion
Waves of white, beige
and red sand incessantly blow from the north and south, crashing against the purplish
mass of the Adrar, a mountain range that crosses Mauritania between the Majabat El
Koubra and Aouker deserts. The dunes conceal four jewels: Ouadane and Chinguetti
in the north, Tichitt and Oualata in the southeast. These old, stone-built cities
date back to the 12th and 13th centuries and were once very prosperous, but today
they only barely survive in such a hostile environment. Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt
and Oualata may be drawing their last breath, but they are essential to understanding
the history of this area, whose fate was closely linked to the water table and the
trade routes that span the Maghreb, the Sahel and black Africa.
These cities, known as ksours–of which Chinguetti was probably the most famous–were
located on major caravan routes, and over the centuries turned into metropolises
of trans-Saharan trade, especially in gold and salt. The Chanaguita [inhabitants
of Chinguetti] were skilled merchants who established regular contacts with the Maghreb,
Egypt and Arabia to the north, and Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria to the
south, playing an important part in the spread of both Arabic and Islamic culture.
Trade caravans from Chinguetti sometimes employed over 30,000 camels carrying salt,
wool, gunpowder, dates, millet, wheat and barley. They returned from the south with
gold powder, slaves, ivory, animal hides and ostrich feathers. These goods were subsequently
resold in Cairo, Sijilmassa, Fez and above all Tlemcen, where Venetians and Genoese
traders stocked up in the two fondouks that were specially set aside for them.
According to some sources, the origins of Oualata, which means “shady place” in Berber,
probably date back to a period preceding Islam. By the 13th and 14th centuries, Oualata
had become such an important trading centre that its name appeared on European maps.
A great Muslim family, the Maqqaris, had built a warehouse there for gathering goods
from the south and storing merchandise from the north before they were resold. Oualata
was also where pilgrims from west Africa assembled before travelling on to Chinguetti,
a departure point for the annual caravan to Mecca. This pilgrimage had made the city
so famous that for a long time Mauritania was known as Bilad Chinguel–the land of
Chinguetti.
Libraries
and schools guard priceless manuscripts
A
major trade route connected Oualata with Ouadane, which was a very prosperous city,
especially between the 14th and 18th centuries. But trade was not its sole source
of wealth. Learning has always been extremely important to Mauritanians. Sunnite
Muslims of the Malikite rite, they turned their ksours into renowned intellectual
centres that attracted many foreign students. To this day, their libraries and madrasas
[Koranic schools] have jealously preserved some 40,000 priceless manuscripts. At
one time up to 40 scholars lived on the same street in Ouadane, or at least that’s
what people say. And if the etymology of the city’s name is any indication, that
was most likely true, since it means “the city of the two wadis”: the wadi of the
palm trees and the wadi of knowledge.
Benefiting from its location on the route between Oualata and Ouadane, Tichitt grew
into a magnificent city. The town’s multi-storied houses–with blind walls on the
ground floor, a door for only opening to the outside and façades built of
coloured stones–are fragile remnants of typical Mauritanian architecture.
The buildings’ subdued polychrome stands in sharp contrast to the exuberant façades
in Oualata, where the doors, porches, vents and windows are trimmed with white drawings
against a reddish-brown undercoat. The rosettes around the lustral stones are especially
beautiful. People living here brush their fingers over them before performing ritual
ablutions with water that has often been in short supply in a town whose narrow streets
are stifled by sand and dust.
But Oualata’s most famous paintings adorn the walls of inner courtyards. Composed
of simple, endlessly repeated designs, these arabesques show the stairs, doors, windows,
alcoves and openings off to their best advantage. They are usually painted with a
substance made of brown ochre, charcoal, gum and cow pat.
Children’s
laughter replaced by the stubborn whistling of the wind
These
decorations are typical of Oualata. In Ouadane, on the other hand, the houses were
built of pink or grey sandstone and a mortar made of clay and straw. All the walls
in the city were covered with clay to protect them from the scarce rain, giving them
an extremely sober, refined appearance. Today, this coating only remains in places,
testimony to the decrepit state that the entire city has fallen into. The laughter
of children running through the narrow, astonishingly angular streets and up cramped
stairs between two blocks of houses has faded away. The teeming throngs have vanished
forever. A single sound now breaks this realm of silence: the whistling of the wind
as it stubbornly blows against ghostly façades. Ouadane’s families have moved
to a small part of the “upper town,” deserting all the other neighbourhoods. And
if a few buildings are still standing in the rest of the city, it is thanks to the
foresight of their builders, who provided them with ledges to protect them from rain
and wind erosion.
In Chinguetti too the sand has slowly invaded the courtyards of abandoned houses,
to the point that the floors of formerly inhabited rooms lying under collapsed stone
walls are now more than one metre below street level. But this city remains “the
soul of the country,” and population loss has been less severe than in Ouadane, Tichitt
and Oualata. The square minaret of its famous mosque, which was the national symbol
of Bilad Chinguel for a long time, is still afoot and defying time.
By contrast, Tichitt, located in a basin at the foot of the Adrar, is much less protected
from the sand. Legend has it that seven towns have been superimposed on this site,
and the one that has come down to us today is irretrievably sinking beneath the dunes.
Only the upper stories of a few houses are visible–the rest has been swallowed by
the sand. As recently as a century ago, this oasis was farmland that produced enough
food to feed a population of several thousand inhabitants. Today, the few wind-battered
palm trees are dying, half-buried in sand. The final blow came last year, when torrential
rains destroyed 80 percent of the town. Luckily, the splendid mosque and its square
minaret, the most beautiful building of all, survived.
Musicians
still sing the glory of life in the ksours
Although
Mauritania’s old towns have lost ground to the Sahara in the north and the Sahel
in the south, along with suffering a devastating, decades-long drought, they refuse
to go quietly into the night. The creative genius of ancient civilizations is still
the driving force behind Mauritanian culture. The designs on Oualata’s walls are
the same as those still drawn on the hands and feet of Mauritanian women. They can
also be found in jewelry, leatherwork and woodwork, the embroidery on men’s garments,
the dye of women’s veils, the weave of traditional carpets and even the bills of
the nation’s currency, the ouguiya. The melodies of Vala, a famous musician from
Chinguetti who has become an emblematic figure of Mauritanian music, are still played
on the tidinit, the Moorish lute. Other traditional compositions, such as the awdid,
which was once performed as the Tichitt caravans were being loaded, immortalize the
various aspects of life in the ksours when they were at the height of their glory.
Thus tradition is passed down from one generation to the next, like the beams that
still pump water from old wells in the small farm plots and nonchalantly bow up and
down across the centuries.
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Trade,
religion and culture
In 1996, the
old Mauritanian ksours of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata were included
on the World Heritage List as the last vestiges of traditional desert life. Each
of these towns is typical of the settlement pattern of nomad populations. Each has
a few main streets that served as the caravans’ access roads or led directly to the
palm groves and cemeteries. All were surrounded by defensive walls, today reduced
to a few fragments, which marked the limits between the old ksour and newer neighbourhoods.
Their architecture also developed to meet the requirements of nomad life: houses
were used to store goods most of the year, while the inhabitable rooms fulfilled
various functions depending on the season or time of day.These four medieval towns
are the last existing ksours. They were trade and religious centres as well as focal
points of Islamic culture that housed tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts. Despite
local and regional conflicts, drought, famines, epidemics and the end of the caravan
trade, they have survived to this day. Isolation, new administrative and economic
centres in other parts of Mauritania and the constant outflow of their inhabitants
have nevertheless further jeopardized their existence. At the request of Mauritania’s
government, UNESCO
launched
an international campaign in 1978 aimed at preserving these cities and funded restoration
and conservation work, especially to save the mosques. Two years later, the Mauritanian
Scientific Research Institute set up a photographic and documentary archive. In 1993,
the Mauritanian government created the National Foundation for the Preservation of
Ancient Towns, whose purpose is to help the towns overcome the causes of their decline
and revitalize them with integrated preservation and development programmes. A project
to preserve and renew Mauritania’s cultural heritage funded by the World Bank also
includes the old towns in its remit.
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