Mauritania

From the Sanhaja desert and the Almoravid jihad to the caravan ksour and the modern Islamic Republic.

Mauritania spans the western Sahara and the Sahel, a bridge between the Arab-Berber Maghreb and Black Africa. Its territory held the southern reach of the ancient Ghana (Wagadou) Empire, whose city of Koumbi Saleh was a great trans-Saharan emporium, and it was the cradle of the Almoravid movement, the eleventh-century Sanhaja Berber jihad that came to rule from the Senegal River to Spain. From the thirteenth century onward, waves of Arab Beni Hassan tribes migrated south, and after the Char Bouba war of the seventeenth century their Hassaniya Arabic and warrior elite shaped a Moorish society organised into the emirates of Trarza, Brakna, Tagant and Adrar, with the caravan towns of Chinguetti, Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata as renowned centres of Islamic learning. France gradually subdued the region between 1900 and the 1930s; Mauritania gained independence on 28 November 1960 under Moktar Ould Daddah. Since a 1978 coup the country has experienced repeated military takeovers, a brief and costly involvement in the Western Sahara conflict, and a long struggle against the legacy of slavery, abolished in law in 1981 and criminalised in 2007.