Oh Lord, Rosso

If crossing the border into Mauritania was a quiet, forbidding but organized affair, crossing the border out of Mauritania was the opposite, chaotic, crowded, and noisy. Before we could even grab our stuff out the trunk of the sept-place we were being harassed by cab drivers who offered to take us to the border post. I negotiated what I felt was a decent price, until we realized we could have walked and therefore the only decent price would have been $0. The cab driver had a young male assistant who spoke English because he is Gambian and who was actually really helpful in getting us through the madness at the border. First of all, I can’t remember well because I was worrying about where our Gambian friend had run off with our passports but there was an animated crowd of black folks before the gate. Were they seriously trying to sneak into Senegal? Is this like Haitians finding the Dominican side better even though the Dominican Republic is still poor as fuck? I didn’t have time to contemplate this though, as a soldier quickly opened the gate to let us through while simultaneously trying to hold back the crowd. We were promptly approached by another man selling tickets to the ferry which left just as we got our tickets. Beautiful. We got our passports stamped and then a soldier came to ask us for money. Now, let me get this right, I have my passport and the stamp in my pocket, why would I give him money? I tried to be funny and tell him in French that I had paid 10€ for my visa and that if he wanted more money he should ask his government for it. Sadly, I don’t think he spoke much French and even if he had I doubt he would have found my joke funny. After that we just had to negotiate a pirogue ride across the Senegal River to the border post on the other side. The Senegalese side was just the familiar chaos of Senegal, nothing special. There were dudes offering to carry our stuff, “help” us with customs, and exchange CFA, none of which we needed. The border officials made us wait but other than that the process was smooth.

The Fast and the Furious VI: Nouakchott

Nouakchott too got the one-night treatment. We took a cab to the “garage” where the bush taxis to the Senegalese border take off from. I remember it as a regular street somewhere except for the numerous sept-places chasing the customers getting out of cabs. There were literally station wagons chasing after us our cab slowed down. Even though it was a sept-place we had to wait to have nine passengers before taking off. Our driver even took a tenth passenger on, in the form of a moped that ended up on the roof of our ride. A police officer saw this and chased the car down on foot as the driver and his assistant weaved through people, cars, tires, construction materials, incoming traffic and the gas station toward freedom before resuming the chase for the elusive eighth and ninth passengers. I love that these dudes are driving around these tore up old cars and yet still trying to make moves like NASCAR drivers. Fortunately we didn’t get caught and we were able to drive—calmly—for several hours to the Senegalese border through territory that looks just like Northern Senegal only drier.

George III Blvd

The three former French colonies I have been to recently have principal streets named after General Charles de Gaulle. Now de Gaulle was the French president that finally realized that the direct colonialism party was over and France would have to transition to neocolonialism and would be better off leaving peacefully and putting friendly rulers in power everywhere. So de Gaulle was the president that “granted” independence although he did so tactically and reluctantly only after it was clear that the game was over once the French were defeated in Indochina and Algeria degenerated into bloody civil war. Consequently having Avenue Charles de Gaulle in downtown Nouakchott and Dakar is like having Broadway in NYC or Pennsylvania Ave in DC renamed King George III Blvd. I mention this because we were staying off of de Gaulle in Nouakchott. At the same time the other major street in Nouakchott is named after Gamal Abdel Nasser the famous pan-Arabist, anti-imperial, authoritarian independence leader of Egypt. Two clashing personalities, one busy intersection.

Budge

For what yall are paying me I can’t give yall the “t” or at least that’s how I felt when we reached our hostel in Nouakchott. To be right in the middle of town we paid even less—2,000 ouguiya or about $8—for a bigger room with four beds (in true hostel fashion they had dormitories) but no sheets. I guess the $2 difference is the sheets. The hostel also doubles as a camping and we could have paid even less for a tent or the space to set up a tent.

This Time We Stopped for Tea

After only a night in Nouadhibou and where we got to taste their Senegalese-style shwarmas (with fries in the middle and same seasoning) we took off the next day for Nouakchott. Once again a bush taxi, except that unlike Senegal where you have French seven-seater station wagons at Nouadhibou we had to take a regular ancient Mercedes 190D four person car crammed with six dudes (no women of course). The dudes were really nice and accommodating about the whole situation with no one complaining about being crammed into this car. On this ride the desert changed from grey and rocky to a monochromatic yellow of fine sand, easily blown about by the wind. Naturally, we got stopped a couple of times by soldiers wanting to check our passport. After four or five hours we stopped in the middle of the afternoon for a long rest stop; probably to avoid the heat or winds or something. We sat in a tent with passengers from another shared taxi and had tea of course. Then we ate some bland, greasy rice with a tiny portion of lamb with our hands before hitting the road again.

Senegal>Morocco

Mauritania is a transition from “Arab Africa” to “Black Africa” in the conventional wisdom. It’s somewhere between Morocco and Senegal, but in my expert opinion having been to both countries it’s more Senegal than Morocco. Granted it’s the desert and is “The Islamic Republic of” and speak Arabic, and there are all of these Arab looking dudes walking around with those long, puffy robes with the long slits down the side, but even in Nouadhibou 50 km from Morocco I heard mbalax, saw Senegalese-looking people everywhere and it just looked like Senegal, horse-carts, mad dusty, telecentres, dibiteries, unfinished concrete 2-story buildings, and beat-up old French cars. It even smelled like Senegal. Which brings me to one of the most unsavory aspects of Mauritanian society, yup you guessed it, its deep-rooted anti-black racism. Mauritania basically has three main social groups. First there are the moors of Arab and Berber descent (the ones of “purely” Arab descent or Bidan are the elite according to many sources), then there are the former slaves of the Arabs the Haratin or “black moors” (think Othello) who have assimilated Hassaniya and Moorish cultures, and finally the Soudaniens or black Africans who are basically the same ethnic groups that live on the other side of the Senegal River, the Peul, and some Wolof and Soninke. Then again I don’t know how accurate this schematic is since I did meet a woman who self-identied as “black moor” (maure noire) and spoke Hassaniya but also spoke Wolof and French. What’s certain that this kind of ethnic mix is a explosive (just look at similar situations in Chad and Sudan). In 1989 there were race riots which almost threatened to escalate to war with Senegal as the black in the south rebelled against Arab domination of the government and economy, including for example the imposition of Hassaniya. Furthermore, Mauritania has been condemned by international human rights groups as one of the handful of countries worldwide that still tolerates mass slavery. It all just makes me wonder why God chose black people to suffer so much (but then again in Mali and Niger it’s the black folks oppressing the Moors from the desert, so I guess it really is just structural, still black folks have an awful tendency to show up at the bottom of structures worldwide, with Mali and Niger already being among the top ten poorest countries in the world).

Budget

Although both Jonathan were assuming that we would be going all the way to the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, we didn’t find out until we were at the Mauritanian that this would be basically impossible not if we wanted to make it there before midnight. Therefore we had no other choice but to spend a night in Nouadhibou, the biggest town in the border area. Our driver was trying to convince us to stay at some expensive hotel (it was hard to make these calculations, quick how much is 8,000 ouguiya?) and we had to keep insisting that we really didn’t have that kind of money. It’s like people can’t distinguish between kind of travelers. They see all foreigners as rich—which we are—but there is a still difference between a millionaire and a billionaire; even if it might seem trivial to us the billions of non-millionaires out there. I am not a business travelers, clearly if I were I wouldn’t be in your van with the clanking shells and instead would have flown into Nouadhibou or Nouakchott if I really had business there. He kept stating that he didn’t know the city and was tired and we asked him if he could help us find a hostel that was recommended by Lonely Planet. It was on the main street and from we could tell from the map Nouadhibou just isn’t that big. As he argued that he didn’t know where it was, Jonathan yelled out that we drove past it. Our driver didn’t believe it and when we drove back around I saw it and he insisted that he still didn’t see us. Finally we just got out of the van, realizing that he wasn’t going to be staying there so that the only thing that matters is that Jonathan and I saw it. The spot certainly was budget, 2,500 ouguiya or about $10. For this I got the barest accommodations of my life, our “room” consisted of a prison cell sized box (about 6’ by 12’) with two foam mattresses laid on the floor, and a table. There was no window, and the bathrooms were outside obviously. Again playing the “minimum acceptable” game with hostels and winning I guess.