Mauritania���s past doesn���t want to go away

The so-called ���peaceful transition��� in Mauritania from colonialism to political independence isn���t unanimously understood as such inside the country and reflect older rivalries.





Mauritania. Image credit Francisco Freire.

Contrary to what happened in most postcolonial transitions in Africa, in Mauritania the post-independence government initially was not associated with any liberation movement. It was, in fact, composed of people who had been, in most cases, educated in France and groomed to govern independent Mauritania by French colonial administrators. It is probably because of this factor that today, more than 50 years after Mauritania���s independence, we are (finally) faced with a public debate centered on the country���s colonial heritage. A debate in which local actors are blatantly labeled as ���resisters��� or as ���collaborators.���

But the ongoing muqawama (resistance) debate in Mauritania should not be solely associated with the country���s colonial past. In fact, it reenacts an ancestral rivalry between the Zawaya and Hassane social status groups (tentatively translated in English as ���religious��� and ���warrior���). The former constituted the bulk of the country���s political structure during the national independence period, while the latter, favoring Hassane values, are currently finding themselves emboldened, notably by the policies of former President Ould Abdel Aziz���s (2009-2019) policies and, quite possibly, by those of his designated successor, Ould Ghazwani (in office since August 2019).

The Hassane and Zawaya labels are generally (but not exclusively) associated with the different status groups traditionally acknowledged in the western regions of the Sahara. On the ���resisters��� side, one could identify different Hassane political leaderships, which led an effective opposition to colonial forces (notably in the initial decades of the 20th century). By contrast, the ���collaborator��� label tends to be associated with Zawaya status actors from the southwestern region of present-day Mauritania, who, in fact, accepted the presence���deemed inevitable���of French colonial forces in the northern margins of the Senegal River. These social markers must, however, be used with caution. They provide an overall framing of the colonial debates as perceived locally, but they must, at the same time, give room to many exceptions which complicate this largely idealized social design. One particularly poignant example of this has to do with the assassination of the well-known French colonial administrator Xavier Coppolani in 1905. The raid that culminated in Coppolani���s death was led by Sharif Ould Moulay Zein, from a Zawaya or collaborator background, who currently epitomizes the ���resistance narrative��� in Mauritania.

This late-decolonial dispute between collaborators and resisters confirm that the so-called ���peaceful transition��� in Mauritania wasn���t unanimously understood as such in the country. It also confirms, to a very large extent, the pervasive character of a traditional social order where the Hassane and Zawaya, the two ���noble��� components of this structure disputed political privilege. This social design is associated, in particular, with the hassanophone populations (speakers of hassaniyya) of the western regions of the Sahara. This structure also incorporates various groups of tributary status, with a clear demographic emphasis on the Ha���atine population, of slave descent.

In 1960, the leading figures guiding Mauritania���s transition to independence were affiliated with Zawaya social status groups from the southwestern Trarza region of Mauritania. Moctar ould Daddah, the first president of the country, and himself a product of southwestern Mauritanian religious scholarship, stayed in power for 18 years, but after 1978 a succession of different leaders seemed to have curbed the pivotal role that the Trarza Zawaya held for many decades. This is the historical background that culminated in President Ould Abdel Aziz���s public defense of the muqawama as an official state policy. The adoption of this narrative in major public and media spheres reopened the country to a debate, which had been muted for a long time but that wasn���t at all concluded.

Currently, some of Mauritania���s more distinguished political figures defend the presentation of the country as a nation marked by the blood of the martyrs who fought against French colonialism. Two red stripes, symbolizing the blood of anti-colonial combatants, were added to the national flag in 2017, and the new Nouakchott international airport was named after the battle of Um Tunsi (1932), in which a French-led military expedition (which included Mauritanian soldiers) was defeated.