Kiffa

Kiffa is a young town in an old landscape. The plains of Assaba lie between the Senegal river valley and the Hodh, country long used by Moorish herders moving camels, cattle, sheep and goats between wells and seasonal pasture, and crossed by the routes that linked the river to the caravan towns of the interior. Settlement was small and shifting; wells, markets and the rains decided where people gathered.

Under French rule Kiffa grew as an administrative and trading centre, and it became the seat of the Assaba region; French colonists ran experimental date-palm plantations in the red soil around the town from 1948, though labour and water shortages saw them fail within a few years. Its rise owed most to the road. The Route de l'Espoir, the 1,100-kilometre highway linking Nouakchott with Néma, runs straight through the town, and the traffic it carries — lorries, buses and bush taxis — turned a local market into the principal stop between the capital and the east.

The great droughts of the 1970s and 1980s changed it again. Herders who lost their animals settled on the edge of the town in tents and compounds, and Kiffa absorbed thousands of them, as Nouakchott did on a far larger scale. The town has grown outwards since, with schools, a hospital, administrative offices and an airfield. It is known beyond Mauritania mainly for one thing: the small glass beads made here by women, which carry its name in collections around the world.

Assaba is Moorish country, and Kiffa's culture is Hassaniya-speaking: long greetings, hospitality offered before any business, poetry recited and sung, and the three rounds of green tea with mint brewed over coals and poured from a height. Griot families play the tidinit lute and the ardin harp at weddings, and the town's social calendar turns on marriages, naming ceremonies and the two Eids.

The craft the town is known for is the Kiffa bead. Women made tiny beads from powdered glass, ground from broken bottles and older beads, fused over open fires in small tins and decorated with fine patterns, the recipes kept within families. The beads were worn in necklaces and in the hair and traded widely; the craft died out with the last traditionally trained makers in the 1970s, and the modern versions made by outsiders are imitations, so genuine old examples are prized.

Religious life follows the Sufi brotherhoods, the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya, and Quranic schools have long trained pupils in the region. Haratin communities, descendants of enslaved people and the largest group in much of the interior, farm and herd alongside Bidhan families, and the legacy of that hierarchy is a live social and political question. Dress is conservative, camels and cattle remain a measure of standing, and much of the population still keeps a foot in the herding life of the plains.

Kiffa is the largest town of the Assaba region and its administrative centre, and one of the larger towns of the Mauritanian interior. Government offices, the regional hospital, schools and the security services employ a good share of the workforce, and much of the rest lives from trade: shops, transport, repairs, fuel and the market that draws people from a wide area of the plains.

Livestock is the backbone of the countryside around it. Herds of cattle, sheep, goats and camels move between wells and pasture and are traded through Kiffa towards Nouakchott and beyond, while millet, sorghum and beans are grown in the rains and vegetables in small gardens where water allows. Money sent home by relatives working in the capital or abroad supports many households.

The rhythm is set by the heat and the road: an early start, business done in the morning, a long still middle of the day, and the streets and tea places filling again in the late afternoon and evening, when buses come through. Water supply, unreliable electricity, drought years, the cost of food and the state of the highway are the constant local concerns, along with the pressure of families arriving from the countryside when the rains fail.

Kiffa eats the food of the Moorish interior, with the rice and sauces of the river valley brought up the road. Millet and sorghum are steamed into a fine couscous or cooked into a thick porridge eaten with soured milk; rice arrives by lorry and is served with meat, dried fish or vegetable sauce. Thieboudienne — rice with fish and vegetables in tomato — appears when fish has come up from the Senegal or the coast.

Meat and milk matter most. Goat and mutton are stewed or grilled, camel meat is eaten and its milk drunk fresh, and méchoui, a whole lamb roasted for a feast, marks weddings and Eid al-Adha, when every family that can afford it slaughters a sheep. Zrig, soured milk thinned with water and sweetened, is drunk through the day, and fresh milk is a matter of pride in a herding region.

Dates from the Tagant and Adrar oases are sold fresh in midsummer and dried the rest of the year, and bread baked in town is eaten with everything. Sahelian wild foods appear in the kitchen too: baobab leaves and fruit in sauces and drinks, and hibiscus brewed into a cold red infusion. Alcohol is illegal, so hospitality means tea — three glasses, each poured differently, never hurried.