Mauritania
Capital: Nouakchott · North Africa
Saharan crossroads where the Almoravid movement began, home to ancient caravan libraries of Chinguetti and a blend of Moorish and West African cultures.
Ethnic communities
- Bidhan (Moors)Hassaniya-speaking Arab-Berber nomadic society
- HaratinHistorically servile Moorish communities, now a major population
- HalpulaarFulbe-related farmers and herders of the Senegal River valley
- SoninkeDescendants of the Ghana Empire's founders
More communities of Mauritania
- Bidhan (White Moors) · Hassaniya nomad society of scholars, herders and emirates
- Wolof · Southern river-bank farmers linked to Senegal's kin
- Fulbe herders · Cattle nomads threading the agro-pastoral south
- Imraguen fishers · Banc d'Arguin net-fishers who call dolphins to the hunt
- Nemadi · Last hunting families of the eastern desert with dog packs
- Znaga Berber speakers · Remnant speakers of the Sanhaja's old tongue
- Reguibat · Great camel confederation of the northern wastes
- Tajakant & Oulad Delim · Saharan trading and warrior tribes
- Idaw Ali · Clerical tribe famed for Tijani scholarship
- Laghlal & Smasside · Zawiya lineages of teaching and trade
- Adrar oasis folk · Chinguetti–Ouadane librarians of the desert manuscripts
Languages
Major languages: Arabic (Hassaniya), Pulaar, Soninke, Wolof
Language families: Afro-Asiatic; Niger-Congo
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Ghana Empire (Wagadu core)
- • Almoravid Empire
- • Emirates of Trarza and Brakna
Heritage sites
- • Ancient ksour of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata
- • Banc d'Arguin
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Mauritania
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the arts1958–2011
Dimi Mint Abba
Moorish music
Griot singer and ardin player who won the Umm Kulthum prize in Tunis in 1977 and became Mauritania's musical ambassador.
- Politics & liberation1924–2003
Moktar Ould Daddah
Independence
First president of Mauritania, who took the country to independence in 1960 and out of the CFA franc zone a decade later.
Deep-dive community profiles
Amazigh (Berber)
The indigenous peoples of North Africa — 'Imazighen', the free people — whose Tifinagh script, mountain and desert civilizations, and millennia of continuous culture long predate the Arab arrival, stretching from the Canary Islands to the Siwa oasis.
Open deep profile →Arosien
A Sahrawi tribe of religious rather than warrior standing, holding the shrine of Sidi Ahmed al-Aroussi in the desert north, whose members were traditionally exempt from raiding because their blessing was worth more than their weapons.
Open deep profile →Bidhan (Moors)
The Hassaniya-speaking Moors of the western Sahara — divided historically between hassan warrior lineages and zawiya scholarly ones, holders of desert libraries with thousands of manuscripts, and the group that has dominated Mauritanian politics since independence.
Open deep profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Open deep profile →Haalpulaar of the Senegal River
The black Mauritanians of the river valley — Pulaar-speaking farmers and herders whose expulsion in 1989 sent tens of thousands across the river, and whose citizenship in the country of their birth is still contested.
Open deep profile →Haratin
The Black population of the Saharan oases and Moorish society — descendants of enslaved people who worked the date gardens and the water tunnels, the largest single group in Mauritania, and the community at the centre of the world's longest-running struggle against chattel slavery.
Open deep profile →Imraguen
The fishers who work with dolphins — a small community on Mauritania's Banc d'Arguin who wade into the Atlantic beating the water to call wild dolphins that drive mullet into their nets, a partnership found almost nowhere else on earth.
Open deep profile →Oulad Delim
The Arab warrior tribe of the Río de Oro — Maqil Bedouin in descent who held the southern Western Sahara and the Dakhla coast, dominated their neighbours militarily for two centuries, and split sharply between Moroccan and Polisario allegiance after 1975.
Open deep profile →Ouled Tidrarin
A zawiya tribe of the western Sahara — a lineage of scholars and traders rather than warriors, who taught, arbitrated and kept the manuscripts while the hassan tribes fought, and who are now scattered between the territory, the camps and Mauritania.
Open deep profile →Reguibat
The great camel confederation of the western Sahara — warriors and herders who dominated the desert between the Atlantic and the Adrar, resisted French and Spanish penetration into the 1930s, and form the backbone of the Sahrawi independence movement.
Open deep profile →Serahule (Soninke of the Gambia)
The Gambia's traders and diamond dealers — Soninke people descended from the founders of ancient Ghana, who kept a merchant network from the upper river to Sierra Leone's mines and Europe's cities, and who are the country's most conspicuously commercial community.
Open deep profile →Soninke
Founders of Wagadu — the Ghana Empire, West Africa's first great state — whose gold-road merchants, the Wangara, seeded trade diasporas from the Sahara to the forest, and whose epic of the serpent Bida still explains the empire's fall.
Open deep profile →Wolof
Senegal's leading nation and the culture of teranga (hospitality) — heirs of the Jolof Empire, marshals of sabar drumming and làmb wrestling, whose Sufi brotherhoods and mbalax rhythms define the modern Senegambian world.
Open deep profile →