Nouakchott

Nouakchott barely existed before independence. A small settlement with a fort stood by the ksar, a caravan stop on the track between the Senegal river and the north, while the colony of Mauritania was administered from Saint-Louis in Senegal, outside its own borders. When independence approached, the territory needed a capital inside it, and in 1958 work began on a planned city on the sandy plain a few kilometres from the sea. The plan was for a modest administrative town of about 15,000 people.

Almost everything that followed overturned that plan. The droughts of the 1970s and 1980s destroyed the herds that supported nomadic life across the Sahara and the Sahel, and families who had lost their animals came to the capital in enormous numbers, first into tents on the outskirts and then into the sandy quarters that now spread for kilometres in every direction. Within a generation a country of herders became a country of city dwellers, and Nouakchott absorbed most of the change.

The city has grown outwards rather than upwards, still low-built and laid out on a grid of wide avenues that dissolve into sand at the edges. Its port, opened in the 1980s by a Chinese company and known as the Friendship Port, gave Mauritania a deep-water harbour on a coast with almost no natural shelter, and the fishing beach nearby became the city's main landing place for fish. A new international airport north of the city replaced the old one in June 2016. Dune encroachment, seasonal flooding in the low districts and the pressure of continuing migration from the countryside remain the capital's defining problems.

Nouakchott is where Mauritania's communities live side by side: Bidhan and Haratin families from every part of the desert, Halpulaar, Soninke and Wolof from the river valley in the south, and large numbers of Senegalese, Malians and other West Africans working in fishing, building and trade. Hassaniya Arabic is the language of the street, with Pulaar, Soninke and Wolof widely heard and French used in business and administration.

Social life runs on hospitality and on tea. Three rounds of strong, sweet green tea are brewed slowly over coals and poured from a height to raise a foam, each round meant to taste different from the last, and the ceremony is never hurried; it happens in offices, in shops, on mats spread on the sand outside houses. Poetry recited and sung in Hassaniya is highly valued, and the iggawin griot families who keep it are also the country's best-known musicians, playing the tidinit lute and the ardin harp at weddings and gatherings.

Dress marks the city out: men in the pale blue or white daraa, women in the brightly coloured malahfa wrapped over the head and body. Islam is conservative and Sufi-influenced, and the rhythm of the week turns on the Friday midday prayer. The legacy of hereditary slavery, abolished in stages and made a crime in 2007, runs through social relations and politics, and campaigning against its remnants is a visible part of public life in the capital.

Nouakchott's population was counted at 958,399 in the 2013 census and was put at close to 1.5 million by 2023, in a country of about 5.4 million — roughly a third of all Mauritanians live here. Since 2014 the city has been divided into three administrative regions covering nine departments, from wealthy Tevragh Zeina in the north-west to the sprawling outer districts of Arafat, Dar Naim, Toujounine and El Mina.

Government is the city's anchor: the ministries, the central bank, the university and the headquarters of the mining and fishing companies are all here, and so is almost all private business of any size. The port and the fishing beach employ thousands directly and many more in ice, transport, processing and trade. Beyond that the economy is largely informal — market stalls, workshops, taxis, small building sites — and unemployment among young people is high.

The day is shaped by the heat. Shops and offices open early, the middle of the day is quiet, and the streets fill again in the late afternoon and evening, when families walk by the sea and tea is brewed outside. Water supply, drifting sand, rubbish collection and flooding in the low-lying quarters after the August rains are the constant complaints, and a green belt of planted trees is maintained on the city's edge to slow the dunes.

The capital eats fish. Thieboudienne, rice cooked in a tomato sauce with a whole fish and vegetables, carried over from Senegal, is the standard midday meal, and grilled sole, grouper, mullet or sardines are cheap near the beach. Octopus, much of it exported, also appears in local kitchens. Sauces lean on onion, tomato, chilli and dried fish for depth.

Moorish food is meat and milk. Méchoui, a whole lamb or kid roasted for a feast, marks weddings and Eid al-Adha; camel and goat are stewed with rice or with millet couscous; and zrig, soured milk thinned with water and sweetened, is the everyday cooler. Dates from the Adrar and Tagant oases are sold fresh in midsummer and dried the rest of the year, and thin unleavened breads are baked in the sand or on hot plates.

Because Nouakchott gathers people from everywhere, it eats more widely than the rest of the country: Senegalese rice and mafé, a groundnut stew; Lebanese shawarma, hummus and grills; Moroccan tagines; and French bread and pastries sold in every quarter, a colonial inheritance. Alcohol is illegal, so evenings turn on juice, soft drinks and tea, and every meal ends with the three glasses.