Oualata

Oualata began as a Soninke settlement known as Birou, on the southern edge of the Sahara where the desert meets the Sahel. It grew as the trans-Saharan trade shifted eastward: at the beginning of the 13th century it replaced the older town of Aoudaghost as the principal southern terminus of a caravan road running north to Sijilmasa in Morocco, and became a gathering point for gold, salt, cloth, dates and enslaved people moving in both directions. It formed part of the Ghana empire, and by the 14th century it had become part of the Mali empire.

Ibn Battuta arrived here in 1352 at the end of his crossing of the desert; he describes the town only briefly, but notes its heat, its few date palms and the respect and independence its women enjoyed. Its scholars taught Islamic law, grammar and astronomy; manuscripts were copied, bought and inherited, and family libraries built up over generations. The town's architecture developed its own character, red earth and stone with painted decoration, in a tight lattice of lanes on the slope below the escarpment.

From the second half of the 14th century Timbuktu gradually replaced Oualata as the southern terminus of the trade, and the town declined into a remote provincial place; it was besieged and sacked by the Mossi in 1480. Much of the ksar fell into ruin, though families continued to live in it and to repaint their houses after each rainy season. In 1912 the French built a fort for their camel corps on a hill above the town; after the attempted coup of 22 October 1987 it was turned into a prison for Black Mauritanian political prisoners. In 1996 UNESCO inscribed Oualata, together with Ouadane, Chinguetti and Tichitt, as the Ancient Ksour of Mauritania, and restoration work and a manuscript museum followed. Its isolation, and the security situation along the nearby Malian border, have kept visitors few.

Oualata is best known for a craft practised by its women: the painting of house walls. Doorways are outlined in broad white bands, and niches, arches and inner rooms carry geometric and floral motifs in white and ochre, worked in plaster and earth pigment. The designs are learned within families, repaired and repainted after the rains, and they are the reason the town is recognised beyond Mauritania.

The other inheritance is scholarly. Oualata was one of the caravan towns whose Quranic schools trained jurists and copyists, and manuscripts on law, theology, medicine and astronomy are still held by local families as well as in the town's museum. That tradition gives the place a quiet formality: religious learning carries status, and the mosque and its teachers stand at the centre of community life.

Society here is Moorish and Soninke in origin, Hassaniya-speaking, organised around extended families and strongly observant. Hospitality is a duty rather than a courtesy — a visitor is fed and given tea before anything is asked — and the three rounds of green tea, brewed slowly over coals, punctuate the day. Dress is conservative, the daraa for men and the malahfa for women, and the rhythm of the week is set by Friday prayer. As across Mauritania, the legacy of hereditary slavery, made a crime in 2007, still shapes who does which work.

Oualata is a small town and one of the most isolated inhabited places in the country, about 80 kilometres beyond the end of the paved road at Néma and not far from the Malian frontier. Households live from herding goats, sheep and camels on the plain, from small gardens and date palms where water allows, from trade in the town's few shops, and from salaries paid to teachers, nurses and administrators.

Water is the central problem. Wells and boreholes supply the town, the rainy season is short and unreliable, and drought years thin the herds and push families west towards Néma, Kiffa or Nouakchott. Money sent home by relatives working in the cities or abroad supports many households. Electricity, telephone coverage and supplies all depend on the long track from the west, which the rains can cut for days.

The day starts before the heat, stops for several hours around midday and resumes in the late afternoon, when tea is brewed outside and the lanes of the ksar fill briefly with children and returning herders. Preserving the old town is an active concern: earth walls dissolve if not maintained, young people leave for the cities, and the restoration work and the manuscript museum are attempts to hold what remains.

Food in Oualata is the plain cooking of the Sahel and the desert, shaped by what survives the journey east. Millet and sorghum are ground and steamed into a fine couscous, or cooked into a thick porridge eaten with soured milk, and rice brought by lorry from the west has become a staple alongside them. Sauces are made from dried vegetables, dried tomato, onion and whatever greens are in season.

Meat and milk carry the diet. Goat and mutton are stewed with rice or couscous, camel meat appears at gatherings, and méchoui, a whole lamb roasted over coals or in a pit, marks weddings and Eid al-Adha. Fresh and soured milk from the herds is drunk through the day, often as zrig, milk thinned with water and sweetened. Dates are eaten fresh at the summer harvest and dried for the rest of the year.

Wild foods matter here as they do across the Sahel: baobab leaves and fruit thicken sauces and make drinks, and hibiscus flowers are brewed into a cold red infusion. Bread is baked at home, sometimes in hot sand. Alcohol is illegal, and every meal, every arrival and every negotiation ends with three glasses of strong green tea with mint, poured from a height to raise a foam.