MAURITANIA: Hope in the Desert

A volley from the muskets of blue-turbaned Moorish guards rattled in the desert air as the Air France DC-4 taxied to a halt. Smiling, the youthful figure, natty in a grey suit, stepped out to greet the waiting throng. White-bearded Moorish tribesmen in flowing robes pumped his hand, and wives of local French officials crowded round. Mauritania’s Premier Moktar Quid Daddah, 35, was just back from Paris and Washington with a $66 million World Bank loan. With the money, Moktar Quid Daddah hopes to build himself a country.

He had not much to start with. Mauritania is a land of sand twice the size of France sprawled across the lower Sahara on Africa’s Atlantic hump. Its 620,000 people are divided between nomadic Moslem herdsmen in the north and farming Negroes in the south. Both Morocco and the Mali Federation have loudly claimed all or parts of it. But Mauritania has one major asset: a jagged black mountain, 1,500 ft. high and 20 miles long, containing iron deposits estimated at 150 million tons. With the World Bank loan, a mining company called MIFERMA, controlled by

French capital but including British, Italian and German interests, will mine the ore, haul it to the sea and market it abroad, splitting the profits fifty-fifty with Daddah’s government. As part of the deal, MIFERMA will develop electric power and provide fuel oil, build a 400-mile railroad from the iron mines to Port-Etienne, widen and improve Port-Etienne itself. After completion, the port facilities will be turned over to the government. Also important to parched Mauritania, MIFERMA will drill wells to tap the underground reservoirs recently discovered not far from Port-Etienne.

MIFERMA had been dickering for months with the World Bank. But it was Daddah who convinced bank officials that the loan would do just what the bank was set up to do—make a long-term contribution to the world’s resources, and at the same time provide a budding new country with a basic industry.

The son of a desert sheik, Daddah spent his youth following his father’s camel flock. But after his father sent him away to a French-run school in St.Louis de Sénégal, Daddah rose swiftly, serving first as a French army interpreter, later studying at the Sorbonne, where he met and married a pretty French fellow law student. When General Charles de Gaulle came to power, Daddah was Mauritania’s only lawyer, and therefore the obvious man to lead his country to self-rule under the semiautonomous government allowed by the French in 1958.

When Daddah took over, Mauritania had not even a capital; as part of the old French West Africa, it had been administered from St.-Louis, across the frontier in Senegal. “A country without a capital is like a body without a head,” said Daddah, choosing the little oasis settlement of Nouakchott (pop. 600) as a convenient central seat of government. Today, with the help of French grants and loans, Daddah is slowly building a town; using seashells from the coast as a cheaper substitute for the gravel needed to make concrete. He lives in a prefabricated house just like most of the other prefabricated houses in Nouakchott, contents himself with a tiny Citroen, and sees that his ministers are equally frugal.

France has promised his country independence by 1961, and Daddah is ready for it. “As long as we have life and strength, we shall avoid the mistakes, the fanaticism and the demagoguery which seem to be the lot of newly independent countries,” he insists. And by 196.3, with MIFERMA shipping out iron ore at the rate of 6,000,000 tons a year, Mauritania will be in business.