Sacral philomath; semi-permanent vision quest
I only made it up to Chinguetti once or twice a year. This one of the old town’s mosque is from January 2016 when my mother-in-law came to visit. Our friend, a popular Mauritanian tour guide, organized a camping trip. It was also the first and only time we saw Ouadane. Unfortunately time never allowed us to go as far as Oualata.
More travel daydreams. I started looking back at photos from Sierra Leone and forgot I had taken this one before taking the boat to the Banana Islands.
I’ve recommended a hypothetical overland trip from Spain/Morocco to Sierra Leone and back to so many people with having only overlanded half of it. It’s been in my head awhile. I learned a lot about my preferred way of travel in Latin America that I would like to use in West Africa again.
Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal (maybe The Gambia), Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
Three months minimum. Local transport. Stay in villages and bring rice for potential hosts. You could fly down to Freetown and start up depending on how you feel about air travel.
What do you do when you might be deported back to a country that wants you dead? That’s the problem many Afro-Mauritanian immigrants face now, due to increased attention by ICE and a complex relationship with the Mauritanian regime back home.
Ann McDougall wrote a piece for Africa is a Country to correct some assumptions. Mauritania is known to the world as one of the few countries that still practice slavery. Technically, the practice has been illegal since 1981. Abolitionists like Biram Dah Abeid are routinely imprisoned at home while receiving awards abroad. A few bidani Moor friends describe abolitionists as highlighting a situation that doesn’t actually exist.
But the immigrants in Ohio and Kentucky weren’t fleeing slavery. They escaped an ethnic cleansing perpetrated during a border war between Mauritania and Senegal a generation ago. The Mauritanian regime interrogated, imprisoned, killed, raped, and expelled Afro-Mauritanians en masse who lived near the river into Senegal to make way for bidani Moor land speculators during the late 80s. These were some dark times.
The fall-out from these initial évenements continued through the end of 1991; thousands more were detained and tortured. At least 500 mysteriously disappeared in the process. On National Independence Day, (November 28) in 1991, 28 African (Halpulaar) Mauritanian soldiers were publicly, symbolically hanged outside the northern town of Inal where they had been imprisoned. The “Martyrs of Inal” are still remembered—both in Mauritania and in Ohio.
McDougall gives a few reasons why forcing Afro-Mauritanians back home will put them in danger. Either the Trump administration doesn’t listen enough to experts and could not actually know the intricacies of their plight or they just don’t care. It is worrying either way.
She also references Franklin Foer in The Atlantic in a bigger article about a reinvigorated ICE under President Trump. ICE has been in the news a lot lately. But I found this anecdote particularly heartbreaking to such a small and insular expatriate community and one often overlooked in Immigrant America.
When [the Afro-Mauritanian refugees from Senegal] had arrived in New York, many of them had paid an English-speaking compatriot to fill out their application for asylum. But instead of recording their individual stories in specific detail, the man simply cut and pasted together generic narratives. (It is not uncommon for new arrivals to the United States, desperate and naive, to fall prey to such scams.) A year or two after the refugees arrived in the country, judges reviewed their cases and, noticing the suspicious repetitions, accused a number of them of fraud and ordered them deported.
But those deportation orders never amounted to more than paper pronouncements. Where would Immigration and Customs Enforcement even send them? The Mauritanian government had erased the refugees from its databases and refused to issue them travel documents. It had no interest in taking back the villagers it had so violently removed. So ICE let their cases slide.
Now, the the United States under Trump wants nothing more than to rid the country of anyone who came here desperately seeking shelter. A friend in Nouakchott told me her brother was detained for two days by ICE in Ohio.
The Mauritanian deportees will not be sent into slavery. But they will be made stateless—an internationally recognized crime.
Update: I found the book Mauritania: The Other Apartheid? (PDF) by Garba Diallo from 1993. There is more information about FLAM, racism, and land rights.
Bai Bureh is recognized as the leader of a 1898 Temne rebellion against British colonial rule in northern Sierra Leone. His father was a Loko war-chief and in his youth, Bai Bureh was sent to Gbendembu to a training school for warriors. Throughout the 1860s and 70s he served under a Susu ruler but in 1886 was crowned ruler of Kasseh, near Port Loko. Needless to say, he was opposed to British indirect rule. When the protectorate was declared, the British immediately issued an arrest warrant.
From the Historical Dictionary of Sierra Leone:
After the British protectorate was declared over the Sierra Leone interior in 1896, a house tax was imposed, which many of the rulers and their people opposed, in addition to imposing the new laws the British were trying to implement. The British reaction was a forceful show of authority, including arresting, deposing, and brutalizing some of the local rulers. Bai Bureh was believed to be one of the rulers staunchly opposed to the tax and thus faced inevitable confrontation with the British who determined to make an example of him. This led to a major war of resistance in 1898 between the British and a Bai Bureh–led coalition that lasted for 10 months. Bai Bureh was defeated by the British-led forces, which had superior resources and armaments and had also destroyed the food supplies and large sections of territory. Bai Bureh surrendered, was arrested, and was exiled to the Gold Coast. He was brought back in 1905 and reinstated as ruler of Kasseh where he died in 1908.
Bai Bureh’s guerrilla tactics were very successful in the initial stages of the rebellion. Due to his reputation as an effective warrior was able to bring many fighters from all around Northern Sierra Leone to help him; Limba, Temne, Loko, and Susu.
This is the only known photograph of Bai Bureh. It was discovered by Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Gary Schulze, who found the photo on eBay. Before this discovery, there was only a pencil sketch of him from a British army officer.