The name of the camel was Zajarek. I was told he was moody, but he and I got along fine. By the second day of the mission, the men of the Groupement Nomade de la Garde Nationale let me loose to ride him without a chaperone, and after some initial difficulty I learned to keep him in a jogging gait, which the unit maintained for hours, bouncing lightly on wooden saddles, smoking loose tobacco out of short pipes, tying and retying their black service turbans, and posing with their rifles whenever I went to take a picture.
I rode for a long time with a méhariste named M’Bérik, a jocular, martial man in his fifties. He knew a great deal about the desert and the work of herding animals. We had a moment of confusion when I asked whether he sensed that the climate of the Sahel was ‘hotter now’.
‘The Sahel is very hot now,’ he said. ‘Drones, terrorists, war in every direction,’ he said. ‘Oooh it is too hot!’
His uncle had been killed the month before in a drone strike after he crossed with his herds into Mali, looking for forage that had grown increasingly scarce in recent decades. ‘Look from Sudan, Libya, Mali, Niger, it is hot hot hot.’
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We left the vicinity of Néma, Mauritania, and rode south through dunes and acacias toward the border with Mali. It was long into the winter dry season, and we moved between isolated watering points, where nomads came with their herds of camels, goats, and sheep. The war that raged on the other side of the border had begun in Mauritania, before spreading south and coming to color every part of life in the region known as the Sahel — a name that, in common parlance, denotes a cluster of former French colonies in the northern interior of Africa: Mauritania and Chad at the edges, and Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in what is often referred to as the ‘central Sahel’. In a decade of fighting focused in this central Sahel, transnational Islamist groups built shadow systems of power — drawing recruits and funds by controlling gold mines and villages inhabited above all by the cattle-herding Peul people, fighting by ambush and dispersing when confronted by government or international troops. In January this year, the UN Secretary General António Guterres gave a speech warning that the region had become the world’s ‘epicenter of terrorism’, and that it was facing an ‘an all-out assault on civilization itself’.
The war was fought mostly between central authorities and the sons of nomads. But few people in Mauritania are more than a generation or two away from having been nomads themselves. The méharistes — the camel cavalry — carried small arms and barely enough ammunition for a firefight. But they have developed their own way of fighting the insurgency that has outlasted four international deployments and the military power of half a dozen African governments. It is a soft-touch approach, and goes some way in explaining the mystery of how Mauritania, nearly alone in the region, has managed to achieve a tenuous peace. They cultivate spies. They control the watering points and watch who uses the passes in the high country. They move on the ground, and speak with the women whose sisters have married jihadists and the old men who can point them to the arms caches and smuggling routes.
A short ride to the east of us, thousands of refugees a day were crossing over from Mali toward camps and watering-places near M’bera. The city of Kidal, the ‘historic fief’ of the Tuareg, who in 2012 rose up to take control of northern Mali, was recovered last November by the Malian army and their Russian allies. For at least a few hours, the death’s-head flag of the mercenary Wagner Group flew over the city’s colonial-era fort. The soldiers with us had all seen the photo. At night around the campfire, they talked earnestly about what it portended.
Mauritania has become an uneasy haven from the upheaval that has been ‘shredding the social fabric’ of the Sahel, as Guterres put it. The once-sleepy capital of Nouakchott is booming, a refuge for agents of armed groups, and the locus of geopolitical competition. Why Everyone Is Courting Mauritania ran a September headline in Foreign Policy. ‘NATO, China, Russia, and regional powers all want closer ties.’ Migrants from war-torn countries like Mali and Sudan have come by the tens of thousands to prospect for gold in Mauritania’s deserts, much of which would be smuggled to refineries in Dubai.
‘There,’ M’bérik pointed northeast, toward the trackless frontier inhabited only by gold prospectors, smugglers, and nomads. ‘It is plein désert,’ – the full desert. ‘We go nine days to places no 4×4 can go. No one has a compass. No one has a GPS.’ Many Mauritanians consider it vaguely shameful to rely on maps or devices to navigate the desert. ‘And there are many mean people there.’
I asked him how they didn’t get lost. ‘Monsieur James,’ he chided me. ‘Nous sommes les gens du terrain.’
I was back in Mauritania for the first time in fifteen years. In 2008, when I was twenty-one, I moved to Mauritania to work as the logistics chief for a crew of pilots and geophysicists exploring for resources in the far northeastern region of the country, near the borders with Mali and Algeria. At the time, the global economy was several years into a boom in resource prices known as the commodity ‘super-cycle’, which many economists and development gurus expected would bring prosperity to African resource-exporting nations. The country’s first major gold mine, near the Atlantic coast at a site called Tasiast, would soon be developed by the Canadian mining firm Kinross. The few bars of the capital Nouakchott were full every night with South Africans, Australians, Britons, and Canadians — all involved in developing mines or offshore oil and gas fields. The first night I drank a few beers with the American Ambassador, who predicted great things for the region. ‘It’s finally time,’ he said. ‘With everything they have here, someday it’ll look like Dubai.’
I lived for most of this time in a town called Zouérat in the far northeast of the country, built around a set of iron mines developed by a French consortium in the 1960s. Until recently they represented the country’s only major source of export income, and by far its largest source of government revenue. If the American-led order really is an empire, then Zouérat was by definition a frontier town — a heavily guarded mining outpost at the outer edge of where the order held sway.
There was no paved road to the city. The only land route was a train line that served as an almost too-perfect synecdoche for the way that our system transfers resources from the periphery to the center — a thin capillary stretching deep into the desert, carrying back the substance used to build Western infrastructure. The train line has never been extended to the capital of Nouakchott, where a full half of the population lives. The iron leaves as ore, sometimes worth as much as $130 a ton. When some of the iron comes back, its worth is multiplied thousands of times, in the form of cars and building materials, and as the mining equipment and train engines used to haul it out in the first place.
Every empire has its ways of keeping order at its fringes. The Americans living those days in Mauritania arrived in the spring. They were taciturn pilots who landed in Beechcraft King Airs, planes that the Canadian pilots I worked with noted were the same kind that US law enforcement agencies use to monitor smugglers in the lake-strewn borderlands where Ontario, New York State, and the Iroquois reservations come together. It was a safe bet that the men were there to make surveillance flights, helping the Mauritanian military search for smugglers and fighters in what was then a force of about one thousand or so members of a newly formed franchise known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
The leadership of AQIM came from an elite of ethnic Arabs, most of them veterans of the civil war that began in Algeria in the early 1990s. They grew powerful and rich by smuggling drugs, guns, and cigarettes along the traditional trans-Saharan routes linking sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean. The commander of the group’s operations in Mauritania, an Algerian named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, became internationally famous under the nom-de-trafic Mister Marlboro.
Shortly before I got to Mauritania, a young ex-gangster named Sidi Ould Sidna orchestrated the kidnapping and beheading of four French tourists in the southern town of Aleg. A few weeks into my time in Zouérat, I traveled overland to the capital. When I got to the hotel I’d reserved I found shrapnel and burning thatch in the courtyard. A small Volkswagen parked outside had been positively aerated by gunfire. I had missed the assault by a few hours.
This attack was claimed by AQIM, which was earning tens of millions of dollars a year by kidnaping and ransoming Westerners. Sometimes smugglers in caravans would fire small arms at our planes, which flew at low altitudes making large survey maps showing what are known as anomalies — areas where magnetic or gravimetric readings indicate propitious areas to drill and sample. It was the first step in the long and expensive path toward mining development.
This development did not much benefit the people of Mauritania or its Sahelian neighbors. Mining creates little wealth for regular people — per dollar of revenue earned, it creates fewer jobs than almost any other industry. The wealth it creates comes in the form of resource rents paid directly to state coffers, and for it to benefit populations or create lasting development, a government needs to save and spend carefully to avoid falling into a vicious cycle of dependency. Mining exports raise the value of the local currency, making food and goods produced locally more expensive, which can leave a country even more dependent on resource exports to sustain itself. It’s a cycle that arose in many African countries in the years after they gained independence.
In 1974, Mauritania nationalized the company working the iron mines in Zouérat and redubbed it the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière (SNIM). It also withdrew from the CFA Franc, the regional currency pegged to the franc and then to the euro that has made it impossible for France’s former African colonies to devalue their currencies to spend on infrastructure, security, or social programs. But it did not escape the resource trap. A large majority of people living in ‘extreme poverty’ on earth today live in African countries defined by the IMF as ‘resource-rich’.
I was elected to be our project’s ‘crew chief’, which meant that I oversaw demobilization of our project. My last duty was to deliver a CD containing the data from our $7.5 million project to the local offices of Rio Tinto, the Anglo–Australian mining behemoth. I was conflicted about this final act, which seemed to implicate me more directly than I was ready to accept in the process of binding this country of nomads to the rich world. But I was twenty-one, and a small cog in a process that then seemed inexorable. I handed the disc off to a South African geophysicist with a salt-and-pepper beard and an old-hippie vibe, who offered me tea as he unwrapped the disc and carefully wrote out a label for it. ‘Where should I put this?’ he muttered as he looked around the messy office. ‘You know, I have quite a few of these lying around.’
The country I arrived in last December was not the Mauritania I remembered. It was in the midst of an upheaval that had transfigured the whole society. The change was part of a chain reaction that had been set off when France, in 2011, had pushed for the NATO bombing campaign that drove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. Gaddafi had offered training and refuge to Tuareg rebels from the north of Mali. After he fell, the Tuareg retrieved thousands of small arms and heavy weaponry such as SA-7 mobile rocket launchers from Libyan weapons caches, and joined in a brief but consequential alliance with al-Qaeda, which had always wanted a regional war. ‘Back then I was on the dark web all the time,’ Rudy Attalah, who had been George W. Bush’s head of counterterrorism in Africa and now runs a think tank, told me. ‘And there was this map they shared, with black arrows all pointing directly to Bamako. They said, if Mali falls, all of West Africa will fall.’ The alliance swept toward Bamako, and French troops intervened, in what became a deployment that would span three countries and last eight years.
The jihadist campaign in Mauritania had by this point become a part of life in the country. In the summer of 2009, AQIM murdered an American aid worker and carried out a suicide attack on the French Embassy in Nouakchott. A year earlier they targeted the vital iron mines and ambushed and killed twelve soldiers near Zouérat. They attacked the military barracks at Néma, and in 2011 they tried to assassinate President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who took power in a coup shortly after I left the country. And then everything
went quiet.
‘Various explanations were proffered,’ an intelligence brief by an American security consultant explained, about the mysterious and sudden peace that emerged. ‘Mauritania was good at counterterrorism; the government had made a deal with the devil; jihadi groups respected Mauritania’s neutrality.’
The truth may be a combination of all three. In 2016, American officials declassified a letter from 2010, found with Osama Bin Laden when US Navy Seals killed him at his secret compound in Pakistan. It discussed a possible truce with Mauritanian authorities, provided they pay ‘between ten to twenty million euros’ a year and agree to ‘not intercept the Mujahidin and cause any evil in the country’.
Even if there wasn’t an official deal, Mauritania found some arrangement that led the jihadists to turn their attention elsewhere. ‘It wasn’t that there were these attacks and our military did this great fighting,’ Yahya Loud, an Islamist opposition parliamentarian, told me when I got to Nouakchott. ‘They just stopped.’ The country turned toward the Arab world, and Abdel Aziz oversaw an Islamicization of public life. ‘The average Mauritanian is already an extremist in their interpretation of Islam,’ Loud laughed. ‘They don’t see us as the enemy.’
Under the leadership of Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, who would go on to become president in 2019, the country developed a security apparatus that was far more supple than that of its neighbors, investing its new gold revenue in units specializing in mobile desert warfare, in the camel corps of the Groupement Nomade, and in intelligence. They monitored social media, and imprisoned and ‘corrected’ suspected enemies.
The war spread south, and a so-called ‘jihad noir’, formed in Burkina Faso and Niger. When a wave of coups brought populist and anti-Western leaders to power in the three countries of the central Sahel, Mauritania became the region’s strategic free agent. The government struck a military agreement with Saudi Arabia in 2017. The United Arab Emirates pledged a $2 billion investment package in 2020, amid rumors it planned to build a drone base in the northeast. As the country looked to become a gas exporter by the end of 2023, interest and investment flooded in from powers across the world.
Villas the like of which I never imagined seeing when I first lived in Mauritania began to appear behind high walls on the outskirts of Nouakchott. In July 2023, Ghazouani met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the second time in the space of eight months. ‘These meetings underscore Mauritania’s status as the sole bastion of relative political stability in the Sahel region,’ Foreign Policy reported. It was a sign of ‘the often-overlooked intensification of geostrategic competition in Mauritania’.
‘You’re surprised?’ the driver who picked me up at Nouakchott’s modern new airport asked. ‘There’s a lot of money in Nouakchott now. A lot, a lot of money. It’s the gold.’ He was proud of the new growth, and that the country was at peace. ‘What we have is a military government,’ he said. ‘We have elections but we go from one strong man in the military to the next. Not many people know Mauritania, but we’re developing, we have peace, we are the example for all of West Africa. For all the Sahel. We are the only peaceful country.’
In Nouakchott, I hired a fixer named Ely Cheikh Mohamed to help me see the gold rush that was at the center of the region’s upheaval.
Ely was a thirty-two-year-old who spoke excellent English, French, and international Arabic. He was from a family of Sufi leaders, and grew up in the central city of Atar as a religious child, expecting to become an Islamic scholar. Islamic education in Mauritania had long been popular among foreign students and jihadists, ‘both because of the authenticity of the curriculum and the austerity of the locale,’ as a security report I’d read put it.
Ely lived this austere life in childhood, but in his late teens he’d discovered Nietzsche, and it all went sideways from there. He had studied philosophy and math, and he was part of the small and intimate circuit of intellectuals and writers that make up Nouakchott’s bohemians. He was conflicted and in some obvious ways bitter about the opportunities available to a kid who wasn’t in the country’s elite and had been denied when he’d tried to apply for a visa to get to America. He had worked for a Chinese mining company in Zouérat. ‘The Chinese, they treat people like animals,’ he said. ‘They look down on everyone African. I’m educated so I felt like I can say to them you can’t talk to people like this. It made me unpopular. Now I can’t find a steady job, so I am a fixer.’
I went to the city of Zouérat, where I’d lived in 2008. We sat around drinking tea for hours, and a local guide named Ahmed Jidou helped me arrange interviews with miners. Breaking for a lunch of fish with rice, we sat on the floor and shared and ate with our hands. The fish was new, one mechanic explained. President Abdel Aziz had made it a personal mission to convince a desert people to look to the resources of the ocean. ‘He told us it was bizarre that a country with the fishiest coast in the world’ — la côte la plus poissoneuse du monde — ‘lets the Chinese and the Europeans take it all, and we only eat goats.’
Ahmed introduced me to an administrator at the SNIM. Abselaam Beyrouk had worked his whole life for the company. We spent a couple afternoons talking at his house, which was part of a tract of new houses constructed for workers. He told me about the days before independence, when Zouérat had been almost entirely purpose-built as a company town. At the time, the salaries for the SNIM’s 3,000 expat workers made up two thirds of the wages paid out in the entire country. ‘The French came and built pools, housing, cinemas. It was very . . . clean.’ The company now operates four mines around Zouérat, and alone contributes 10 percent of the country’s GDP and 22 percent of the country’s export revenue. But it only employs 6,500 people, in a country of five million.
‘At the beginning it was all for the French, it was so the French could exploit and take everything,’ he said. ‘There were movements, there were strikes, in 1968.’ I had never heard this story. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘People died – there are plenty of people in town who have family who died in the strikes.’
A clandestine Marxist and nationalist movement grew up among the mining workforce, and the singular importance of the Zouérat mines to the national economy gave them leverage. The dictator Moktar Ould Daddah nationalized the mines and pulled out of the CFA to calm the agitation, and the SNIM began a process of ‘Mauritanization’.
‘I was there when the Mauritanization started,’ Ibrahima Aw told me. He was a slim and serious man in his fifties who joined us one day and sat apart from everyone, because he didn’t speak Hassaniya. He was Peul, and had left his ancestral home in the southern town of Kaidyi to look for work in the mines. He’d ended up as a mechanic working on the SNIM’s train engines. ‘It was bunches of French people just leaving. They started doing anything they could to Mauritanize.’
‘That can work, okay,’ he said. ‘But they’re still just an exploitation company. It’s not refining anything. You break rocks, you sell, that’s it.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Do you see what I mean? If you want to make a factory or something here — you have to ask the World Bank, the International Bank of Development, something like that to give the money. All the deals they make are with foreign companies,’ he said. ‘And one day, when everything is mined, voilà, that’ll be it.’
Ibrahima had the air of frustration particular to highly intelligent people stuck in a life they feel has dead-ended. He wanted to explain to me the life of a Peul, the people who now make up the vast majority of both jihadist fighters and civilian victims in the central Sahel, as the drought pushed herders and the far larger populations of settled farmers into conflict over productive land. ‘Look, I’ve basically lived my whole life here,’ he said. ‘And when you leave your home at sixteen, and live here where you’re never around many Peuls?’ He paused ‘But a Peul is a Peul, everywhere.’
He said that for the Peul, the problems came with the borders drawn by Europeans. ‘The French found this people, who are intellectuals in Arabic and in Islam, who have wisdom, a way of life, laws and judges. And this people refused to be integrated. So the French, because they’re politicians, they’re savvy, they cut the community up, into many parts. So now some are Mauritanians, some are Senegalese, some are Malians. The Peul don’t have a land of their own. Like the Kurds, like the Palestinians, like the Tuaregs.’
He had been speaking in the third-person plural, but suddenly he switched. ‘But it’s only us, only in our case, that we never rose up to demand a land of our own. We let it be. We’re resigned.’
He expressed a feeling I heard during the months I spent in Africa. The Western vision of democracy and development had failed, and whatever came to replace it wouldn’t necessarily be any better. ‘I don’t care if we have a democracy or not a democracy,’ he said. ‘If it’s a good dictatorship? That’s better than democracy, do you understand?’
He had watched as the Peul tried to escape the massacres and drone strikes across the border. ‘They’re fleeing here,’ he said. ‘But you know that soon Mauritania will be too full of refugees.’
‘It’s a world crisis,’ he said. ‘You are the best, the Americans, with your democracy, integration.’ He did not think this would be coming to Africa. ‘At some moments I look and say we should have stayed colonized. Maybe it’s better. I’m distressed. That’s why I talk this way.’
I drove out with Beyrouk to see the newly-constructed camel corrals on the edge of town. I asked him, given that he was management at the SNIM, about a rumor I had heard from Ely. He’d said he’d heard talk of a Russian-operated gold mine, far out into the desert near the Algerian border. I had thought this was implausible, but Beyrouk knew what I was talking about.
‘Oh yeah, that’s at the border,’ he said. ‘It’s top,’ he said, pronouncing the word in English. I didn’t understand what he meant. ‘It’s top-secret,’ he said. ‘We say top here, like James Bond.’
I asked what he thought the Russians were doing out there.
‘I think it’s an exchange, they offer guns and arms,’ he said. ‘There’s an exchange like that. We never know,’ he said. ‘You can’t get near it. I went there and they said you can’t come near. But there are Russians.’
Five months before, in July 2023, a coup in Niger — France’s last ally in the central Sahel and home to a key American surveillance base — set off a panic among Western officials and their African allies. A ‘domino effect’ was thought to be turning the Sahel into what Western think-tank types began to call the ‘coup belt’. The deposed Nigerien president had come to power in an election that was almost certainly fraudulent, but the US and France went to increasingly desperate measures to try to restore their ‘democratic’ ally. A Western-backed regional grouping, led by Nigeria, threatened to invade.
The threat fizzled into nothing but embarrassment, and the entire central Sahel slipped out of the Western sphere of influence. Niger joined Mali and Burkina Faso in a new bloc, all led by coup governments that had come to power accusing democratic and Western-backed governments of their weakness in the fight against jihadist insurgents. They threw out French troops and turned to Russian mercenaries as their business partners.
All three states — Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso —were highly dependent on gold. Their leaders fanned local resentment of France and the West, and launched mass popular mobilizations as part of ‘a process of recovering our total sovereignty’, as the leader of Niger’s new junta put it.
Western analysts began taking bets about what country would be next to fall.
I had little idea when I first came to work in Mauritania that I was playing a bit part in setting off one of the biggest gold rushes in history. At the time, I hadn’t known exactly what we were looking for — geophysical surveys don’t necessarily target a particular resource. But there was gold in the block of territory we surveyed, and lots of it. When the area was opened to miners in 2016, the ‘maudit fièvre de l’or’ burned so hot that tens of thousands raced to pay the 100,000 ougiya (€250) the government was charging for permits. Jeune Afrique reported that Nouakchott had been choked by traffic jams, as would-be miners lined up on Avenue Charles de Gaulle, trying to buy equipment and set out. Scammers sold fake metal detectors for around €200. A good one cost €4,000, a fortune in Mauritania. By 2019, a full 10 percent of the population of the central Sahel was working in the small-time mining sector. Rebel groups and Islamists took over mines. Gold replaced kidnapping as the biggest source of revenue for the jihadist groups.
The whole arc of the failed promise of development became legible in the traces of the gold rush. ‘Gold mining was initially sidelined by the impetus of "modernisation",’ a report by the Italian scholar Luca Ranieri, whom Ely had helped to research gold smuggling, put it. ‘However, the environmental crises of the 1970s and 1980s propelled artisanal gold mining as an alternative source of livelihood for local labourers.’
Gold made the Sahel countries into some of the most mining-dependent economies on earth. In Burkina Faso, Russia won new gold-mining concessions, and the country’s young president, Ibrahim Traoré, announced highly symbolic plans to build its own gold refinery. ‘For a while now gold has been our biggest export,’ he said. ‘But we don’t have control over the gold. We asked ourselves many questions, and now we’ve decided to put a whole chain in place.’ He said the new facility would welcome the country’s small-time gold miners. ‘So much of the gold in our country is exported fraudulently,’ he said, ‘and goes to support terrorism. So we will ask our local miners to bring their gold to the center.’
Mauritania created a governmental organization called MAADEN — Arabic for ‘mine’ — to regulate small-time gold mining. In Zouérat, MAADEN had built a centralized processing for miners to come and process their ore.
I talked to the site manager, a man named Hamed Salam, who had a bad limp and wore a hi-vis jacket and a black turban. He used the French term for local mining — ‘minerie traditionelle’. This was a funny way of phrasing it, since before the huge mine at Tasiast opened in 2007 there had never been much gold mining in Mauritania. He said that it was what they called it everywhere, and then pointed at the clutches of squalid tents staked all around, where men who’d brought in their ore from far out in the desert were camping. It was, quite literally, a nomadic existence. ‘It’s mining, but it’s also a traditional way of life.’ In English, journalists use the delicate euphemism ‘artisanal mining’ to describe the same industry, which makes no more sense.
The site was infernally loud, with dozens of screeching crushers pulverizing the bags of ore into sand. Diesel engines powered scores of generators and big trucks roared constantly. The wind was ripping hard enough that it blew away one miner’s tent. Mercury-laden dust from Sahelian mines has been traced as far away as the Canary Islands.
Never with success, Salam had tried his own hand at mining. I asked how the successful miners found their sites. ‘They just hope,’ he said. ‘Some of them have metal detectors.’ There was so much gold that often people just looked for quartz veins and dug. Miners spoke of it wistfully as a lottery.
Salam took me to look at a row of amalgamators, where mercury was added to the ore sand to process it out. Mercury binds to gold like a magnet, and makes an extremely dense alloy, which lets you easily separate it out by machine or by swirling in a pan. Artisanal miners do this without the machines, filtering out the likely gold by mixing pulverized ore with water, then pouring the liquid cup-by-cup over an inclined trough lined with fabric, so that the densest sand gets caught in the fibers. You collect this and then massage a pea-sized bit of mercury into the sand with your palm, over and over, until the alloy forms. Then you swirl out the remaining sand. If all goes well you have a few grams of gold, reduced down from perhaps a hundred kilos of rock.
Here there were machines that did it, and we looked down into the open vats where sand was being mixed by huge steel wheels. ‘That is the mercury,’ he said, pointing down into the churning sludge. The miners paid an extortionate price to the processors who owned the machines, almost $25 a gram – 40 percent of its worth.
‘Every break I get,’ Salam told me, ‘I go and look for gold.’
We went to the government office nearby, where permits were handed out and there were four 4×4 ambulances parked, waiting to be dispatched to cave-ins and other accidents out in the mining camps. I asked the official in charge how many gold prospectors there were in Mauritania now. ‘Hundreds of thousands,’ he said. Ahmed cut in. ‘Before we had so many people leaving to become migrants,’ he said. ‘Now they stay for the work.’
Back in Nouakchott, Ely and I began hanging out at a modern spot called Arena Café, where members of Nouakchott’s small intellectual scene often met up. He talked about books and politics for hours on end. Ely warned me not to underestimate the country’s internal surveillance apparatus. Social media in the country was heavily monitored, and journalists were sometimes arrested and charged under the country’s broad ‘blasphemy’ laws. ‘It’s sophisticated, with foreign help. They are bringing some kind of surveillance software here.’ He was reading the conservative American economist Thomas Sowell, and said he thought ‘post-colonialism’ in the West doomed Africa to rule by the Chinese and the Russians. ‘You pull back,’ he said. ‘And for someone like me, if they arrest me — the only help I can hope for is if France or America says something about human rights. If the West leaves Africa, people like me have no hope.’
He asked me if I had read Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, the fourteenth-century study of empire that describes history as a continuous cycling of power: groups hardened and given common purpose by life on the frontier move to overthrow ruling classes that have grown soft and decadent in centers of power, only to become effete, sedentary rulers themselves. ‘It is a good explanation of what is going on in Africa now,’ Ely said. ‘The power change happens in all civilizations. Savage people that live on the fringes gather and become dominant, and they take the power. The story here is not new.’
We arranged a meeting with a deputy to the mayor of Nouakchott, an engineer by training named Salek Najem. He had lived in Algeria and Germany before coming back and marrying a Frenchwoman. He was refined and erudite and had been shadowed all his life by jihadist violence. At the Hamburg University of Technology he studied with the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta.
‘The old Nouakchott was multicultural,’ he said. ‘There were lots of ethnicities — Wolof, Soniké, Maur, Haratin. Everyone lived side by side. You’d have a Peul next to a Haratin. All the kids played together.’
‘I think it was in 1992 that Mitterrand said to all the African countries that it was time for a democratic system. And this system broke Mauritanian society. Before, we didn’t know what tribe or ethnicity anyone came from. But democracy reignited all that. Every clan and tribe started to try to win things for itself.’
‘Everything started to change in 1978,’ Najem said. ‘There was la sécheresse, two years without rain, when people lost their herds — their way of living — and fled to the city. That is how the slums started. For us who grew up here, we were in the center, but bit by bit they made camps and corrals all around the city, and they brought the nomad culture here.’
‘Now you have no more trees, no more animals,’ he said. ‘But there’s some positive in that. It wasn’t the State, it wasn’t the French, that liberated the slaves here. It was la sécheressse, because people didn’t need slaves anymore to watch their herds, and they couldn’t feed the slaves they had. So they said, go, go away.’ He’d lived in Algeria during the civil war that broke out after the military government refused to allow Islamists who’d won democratic elections to take power. ‘When I went to Algeria in 1996, during the war, I saw the checkpoints and gunfire. I was in a bombing once. Ça va,’ he said. ‘At the time it wasn’t a big deal.’
‘It’s that war that influences all the Sahel now,’ Najem said. ‘If in 1992 the French had let the Islamists take a bit of power – if they had just let them run some of the communes, we wouldn’t be where we are now. You have to look at it and see that the Islamists were in the right. They won the elections. But I was there, and I remember some real atrocities. They would arrive in a village and burn the houses of people who hadn’t voted for them, or whoever was informing for the army against them. And then of course the army would come and burn all the other houses, because they knew those were the people who supported the jihadists. So you see how it was during les années noires in Algeria.’
The same thing was happening now in the Sahel. ‘The groups that left to go to Mali all grew out of the Algerian groups,’ Najem said. ‘All the first jihadists there were involved in drug trafficking, cigarette trafficking, and they were the ones who recruited the Mauritanians. It was all the big chiefs who have been killed today, Abou Zeid, there was Abou Yahia El-Hammam, Droukel . . . Mister Marlboro.’
I asked whether he thought the country had done a deal with the Islamists. ‘Mauritania invested a lot of money in the army in the past few years,’ he said. ‘But it’s only calm because all these people don’t have any time for us. The jihadists don’t want to open a second front with Mauritania. And anyway, all this is a facade. It’s a security that’s not secure.’
He said the new Islamism was a facade too. ‘They have to pretend,’ he said. ‘It’s become this social thing for the elites. They look to the Gulf. But behind the walls . . . who knows.’
Ely and I arranged to go north to Chamy, sometimes described by foreign reporters as the gold capital of the Sahara, in a new white Hilux. It was only a few hours north along the coast, and from the road you could see where the land faded into the Atlantic. The city had quadrupled in size in the past four years to 48,000. The rent for one of the little cinderblock houses in town was now 15,000 ougiya a month, almost $400. Our driver, Vaissal, was in his forties. He had a deeply pockmarked face and a trim moustache. He had worked in gold, and he knew a lot about how things actually worked.
He took us to a mine site far into the desert, through a classically Saharan set of dunes and wandering camels. He was worried that the Gendarmerie Nationale might find us and make trouble, so we drove fast, fishtailing and sinking through low washes of soft sand. We ended up at a tent city on a low ridge. ‘There are probably a thousand people here,’ Vaissal said. ‘You never know. They come, they go. The conditions are terrible.’
We stopped by a mining pit, where four or five shafts had been dug with pneumatic picks. A young Haratin miner told us they were about forty meters deep. He looked bemused when I asked if there was any ventilation. He’d been living in the camp since 2016. I went to look around. ‘Be careful,’ Ely said. ‘I had a friend who died, walking around talking on his phone. He was on the phone with his girlfriend and just fell in.’
Vaissal said we had to move; he had spotted a national guard Land Cruiser moving toward us. We pulled down the main track, which was lined with tents — small shops selling bags of rice and bottles of cooking oil. Women sat in the entryway to many of the tents, holding babies and watching us silently. One clutch of three women hailed us. ‘There’s a lot of prostitution here,’ Vaissal said. ‘I heard the HIV rate is twelve percent.’ I said it seemed unlikely that sex-workers would solicit in daylight in Mauritania. He said that the morals were bad in Chamy.
‘Every mining town in the world is the same.’
We drove toward the Tasiast mine site, which we could see in the distance. Vaissal took out an old water bottle full of mercury, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag, and handed it to me. He laughed when he saw the look on my face. It was a lot of mercury, and heavy. He told us he’d had to quit working for nine months after getting mercury poisoning.
Tasiast looked like a mountain being slowly denuded. Vaissal told me I had it backwards – the mountain we saw in the distance was overburden from a pit mine. They were piling it hundreds of feet high as they dug. A huge billboard reading Danger: Cyanide had been erected on the road leading to the mine.
Cyanide leaching is a more efficient, and more expensive and mechanically involved, way of processing gold than using mercury. Pulverized rock is sprayed with a cyanide solution that dissolves the gold. Artisanal miners bring the sand they’ve already sorted once with the mercury process to cyanide leachers who take another cut, trying to squeeze every bit of value out of the rock. Huge amounts of cyanide escape into the environment during this process.
The cyanide processors are often owned by entrepreneurs from Sudan. ‘They’re gangsters,’ Vaissal said. ‘They have contact with the Sudanese government. They went to Turkey before they came here, but they’re too corrupt. They had legal problems. So they came here and now they’re fine.’
‘Most of the gold is actually trafficked,’ Vaissal said. ‘You can see why — because they buy the illegal gold for more than the real price. So people want to sell it to them, and they can launder the money.’
This was almost point-for-point what I’d just read in a UN report on how gold trafficking funds armed groups in the Sahel. Traffickers typically pay a 5 to 10 percent premium to launder money, and in return get an asset that is easily transported and tradeable on international markets.
‘It goes to terrorism,’ he said. ‘To drugs. Who really knows? It’s all international.’
In the past decade, Nouakchott has become a haven for rebels, refugees, and journalists. At the Arena Café I encountered a France 24 correspondent named Anne-Fleur Lespiaut. She had contacts among the separatist Tuaregs, who had been scattered by the Russian advance. She put me in touch with the young leader of a splinter faction fighting around Menaka, in Mali, who had been accused of cutting a mercenary deal with the Nigerien government to fight against the Peul and Arabs in the north. He said he’d been there trying to broker dialogue with other herding groups. ‘It’s the land issue all pastoralists face,’ he said. ‘Our states give priority to farmers and for us there is nothing left.’
Lespiaut had been expelled from Niger by the new anti-French government. She’d spent a long time reporting on the gold trade in Bamako, the waystation where much of the region’s smuggled gold was brought to be refined into rough bars before being shipped, usually in hand luggage, to Dubai. The city has hundreds of small refineries built to process trafficked gold. ‘You look out and you see smoke rising from building after building after building,’ she told me. She’d been to the mining sites in northern Mali. ‘Là c’est le business-is-business,’ she said. ‘Everyone tried to keep it peaceful.’ But in February Wagner troops began seizing mines directly.
I talked about this with Yahya Loud, the opposition parliamentarian, who had been elected to a seat representing Mauritanians abroad. He had lived much of his life in the Bronx, and seemed amazed by what had happened since the gold rush began. ‘Our national budget doubled in three years,’ he said. ‘Our GDP doubled in five years — doubled. But mostly Mauritanians don’t see the effect of that.’
‘Most of the gold now goes out through trafficking,’ he said. ‘They send it to Mali and it finds its way on an Emirates flight to Dubai. That’s called a “gold flight”.’ Dubai’s officials deny this, but the emirate, long an entrepôt for African traders who come to buy car parts or electronics, has been accused by rival refining centers like Switzerland of accepting forged documents that obscure the provenance of trafficked gold. Refiners there are fond of the impure blocks of gold that come from Bamako. ‘Buyers in Dubai prize low-grade bars of African gold,’ one report put it, because ‘precious metals such as silver, palladium and platinum can compose ten percent of a bar’s original mass.’
‘How come there’s a daily flight from Bamako to Dubai now?’ Loud asked me. ‘That’s something that would have never happened before.’
A single ton of gold is worth around $67 million at today’s prices. So the suitcase traffic represents a huge amount of money, especially in this part of the world. Mali produces around 60 tons of artisanal gold a year, though no one knows how much of this is trafficked. In Burkina Faso, it is estimated that 30 tons of artisanal gold are smuggled illegally every year, to say nothing of the legal production. That comes out to more than $2 billion, equal to the entire GDP of the Central African Republic, where I reported for the last issue of Granta. A UN report suggested at least 1.8 million people were working as gold miners in the three central Sahel nations, and the true number is assuredly much higher.
‘We let the central bank buy gold,’ Loud told me, ‘as a way of controlling the traffic. We said we would use this gold to build our reserves and make our currency stronger. But the World Bank said, no, we can’t do that.’ There was concern that the Mauritanian central bank was acting as a state-backed money-laundering operation. He shrugged. ‘So instead it disappears.’
Loud told me that the Mauritanian government began giving out artisanal permits right around the time that Mauritanians began migrating en masse to Europe and the United States. It has become the only option for many of the people pushed by drought out of farming or herding.
‘Wear a turban over your face,’ Salek Najem told us before we went to the Malian border. ‘Be very discrete.’
Vaissal drove us to Néma, with one bare foot propped on the dashboard. The drive took two days. We stopped for a night at a small roadside guesthouse. Vaissal grew increasingly frustrated by the trouble we had at checkpoints, and with Ely, who made a point of joining him each time he stopped to pray.
‘He is from a warrior tribe,’ Ely said. ‘He’s very Islamist. It is like that with all of Mauritania. There is one truth you see in public, but under it there are lots of people who are basically al-Qaeda.’ He said Vaissal was making snide insinuations that he was too soft and Westernized.
Néma was in a tightly controlled military zone. An overworked representative of the UN High Commission on Refugees helped me with my papers. She was a French former child actress named Joséphine Lebas-Joly. People were coming by the thousands now, she told me. There had been around 60,000 refugees in the border areas in 2014, during the fighting between the French-led international force and the jihadist groups. Now there were well over a hundred thousand in the region of Hodh el Gharbi, along with more than a million animals in the flocks and herds they’d brought with them. This put a burden on the desert environment, and meant that an impossible number of animals were competing to graze in an area where almost all the local Mauritanians also kept livestock. So many refugees were crossing that even with the entire UNHCR staff registering people, they could not keep up.
‘It’s a nightmare,’ Lebas-Joly told me. ‘All the estimates are that it’s going to triple, or more.’ Most of the new arrivals did not live in the camps, and had spread out instead around a muddy and malarial lakebed. ‘It should be,’ she paused, struggling with the English phasing. ‘It should be at least eighteen-thousand people. In the last two weeks.’
I went out in town with a local schoolteacher, a friend of Ely’s. We drove through the marketplace, a crowded and rutted dirt track between cinderblock shops selling sacks of pilfered World Food Program rice and fly-covered goat meat by the kilo. He took me to a spot where Peul refugees from Mali had been squatting in abandoned houses, but said it would be hard to get them to talk. Ely told me that the vendor who sold him cigarettes back in Nouakchott was a Malian refugee too. ‘He lied to me for months,’ he said. ‘He didn’t want to say. He was scared of Malian intelligence.’
Only one of the refugees we found spoke any Hassaniya or French, and he came out to talk to us. He said they’d come from Baly, just over the border, three months before. They had left their animals. He said they’d come willingly, looking for work, but now they rarely had any food. ‘We are seventeen here,’ he said. ‘I am the man of the family.’ He was no older than fifteen, and blind.
He wouldn’t say what had happened to the men in the family. Ely’s friend said they had probably been killed or conscripted into a jihadist group. Two young girls in dresses hung onto him as he talked to us, and a naked baby sat with one leg dangling off the doorstep. There were scars around his eye sockets and he didn’t answer when we asked what had happened to his eyes.
‘I want to tell you a story about how this all works,’ said Colonel Moulay, the imposing commander in charge of the intelligence units of the Groupement Nomade. He spoke in eloquent French, and sat in a huge leather armchair. ‘I was in Niger, where you know they have more and more problems, and I met with a general. While I was there, two herders came to ask for help. There had been five cows stolen. They asked if the general could help recover them. But I had already seen the cows tied up in the courtyard.’ The Nigerien troops had stolen the cows themselves. ‘You cannot win a war like this.’
Moulay showed me a picture from a few days before of himself with the American Ambassador. He said that militaries across Africa had been contacting him, hoping to copy the Mauritanian model. ‘Everywhere I go, they want to know. You are here wanting to know — why does it work for you and not for us?’
He gave me a philosophical lecture, echoing the Muqaddimah, and seemed to be suggesting that the conflict in the Sahel could never be won, only managed. ‘There was the first war in Chad, the second war in Chad, then war in Mali. Then there was the war in Libya, and then another war in Mali. So you see, war always comes from another war unfolding in the region.’
He described how the jihadist and Tuareg fighters in the north of Mali had melted away as the Russian and Malian troops advanced. Much of the civilian population had dispersed as well, many to Mauritania. ‘They let them take it,’ he said. ‘And when the people come back? It’ll start again, bit by bit. Look at modern history — no power has won an asymmetric conflict. In the end they will leave with their tails between their legs.’
He said that Mauritania’s approach, combining counterinsurgency warfare with development aid, was unique in the region. I noticed that when he used the word ‘development’ he meant something different than the promises usually held up by the West, that modern economies would rise to fill the void left by the upset of colonization and a changing climate. His version of development meant things like offering water stations in the desert — for better or worse allowing for nothing more than that nomads might remain nomads.
Moulay said the Mauritanians fought their frontier war by living and thinking like a frontier people. ‘Our work is intelligence,’ he said. ‘And we work by aiding the nomadic populations. The nomads are our school.’
He arranged for me to join a unit of méharistes, and after two days of riding through a bare landscape of acacias and dunes we came to a watering point where several bands had gathered with their herds. Ely took notes for me as an adjutant-chef questioned a man under the shade of a wild plum tree. ‘There was one stranger who passed on a motorcycle,’ the herder said. ‘Six days ago. I reported him immediately.’
The adjutant-chef was concerned above all that the mission reflect well on him and Mauritania’s military. He made sure the men were aware that days on a hard saddle and nights on the hard ground might be taxing for a Westerner. It was hard to convey to them that I found the camping and riding through borderlands invigorating. As an American it felt like a chance to live out some of what we had lost on our way to becoming a world-straddling commercial superpower.
‘It is true what he says,’ an old soldier named Shalek said. ‘Life in America used to be very much like it is here. The cowboys were almost nomads. But now they have lost that.’
Back in Nouakchott, I spent a couple evenings reading at the outdoor restaurant attached to the French Embassy, where I met a young Wolof named Ibrahim Sey. His mother had been in Arizona since he was a boy, and he hadn’t heard from her in years. He thought she might be in Tucson.
He was debating trying to get to America via Pedro, a Nicaraguan smuggler all the young men in Nouakchott seemed to have heard of. The route was a series of flights from the capital to Manuaga, followed by a long journey by foot across the Texan border. But Ibrahim didn’t have the money. I showed him videos of scenes at the Arizona border, and warned him that this Pedro probably wasn’t a real person. He took out his phone, in turn, and showed me texts they’d already exchanged. He had friends who’d made good money mining gold, but he didn’t have the startup money for that either. He spoke four languages and had gone to college. He gestured at his waiter’s uniform. ‘This is the best I can hope for here.’
Ibrahim had lived in both Nouakchott and Dakar. He missed Dakar. ‘It’s a city with life. C’est une ville cool,’ he said. ‘But it’s so expensive to live, and there are no jobs. No one can survive there.’ He thought the jihadists driven out of havens in Mali would take up their trade again in Mauritania. The only hope a young African had was to get out, he told me. ‘Or . . . maybe things will break,’ he said. ‘People hope China or Russia or somewhere will come to change things. But the Mauritanians, the nomads, they’re different,’ he said. ‘I think they would be happy to just go back to the desert.’
