Rosso

Rosso exists because of the river. The Senegal has been a trading artery for centuries, its north bank held by the Moorish emirate of Trarza, which grew rich from the gum-arabic trade with European merchants at the river mouth, and its south bank part of the Wolof and Halpulaar country that became Senegal. Boats carried gum, hides, millet and salt, and the crossing points along the lower river were where the desert and the farming lands did business.

Under French rule Senegal and Mauritania were administered as a single territory and the river was no barrier: it was at independence that the new frontier was drawn along the Senegal, leaving Rosso divided into two towns with the same name facing each other across the water. The colony itself was administered from Saint-Louis in Senegal until the late 1950s, so the road and the river crossing here were the main link between Mauritania and its own government.

Rosso, the capital of the Trarza region, grew fast after independence — from some 2,300 people in 1960 — as the principal land gateway between the two countries, and large irrigation schemes were laid out along the river to grow rice. The town's fortunes have followed that border ever since. Relations broke down in 1989, when a dispute over grazing on the river led to violence and to the expulsion of many people in both directions, and the crossing here was closed from 1990 to 1992. It reopened and trade resumed, and the ferry has carried the traffic between the two banks ever since.

Rosso is one of the places where Mauritania's two halves meet. Moorish Bidhan and Haratin families, Hassaniya-speaking, live alongside Halpulaar, Soninke and above all Wolof communities whose language and kin ties run across the river. French is widely understood, Wolof is heard everywhere in the market, and many families have relatives in Senegal, so the border is a formality inside a single social world.

That gives the town a more West African feel than the desert towns to the north: brightly printed cloth alongside the pale daraa and the malahfa, Senegalese music from shopfronts, and mbalax and Mauritanian griot songs at weddings. Islam is the common ground — Sufi brotherhoods, the Tijaniyya in particular, are strong on both banks, and their religious calendar and pilgrimages draw people across the river.

Manners follow the Mauritanian pattern: long greetings that ask after family and health, hospitality offered before business, food eaten from a shared dish with the right hand, and three rounds of mint tea to end any visit. Trade shapes behaviour too, and bargaining, brokering and the endless negotiation of the crossing are part of everyday life. The memory of 1989 sits in the background, seldom discussed with outsiders.

The commune of Rosso counted about 50,600 people at the 2013 census, some 33,500 of them in the town itself, which makes it one of the larger towns of southern Mauritania and the administrative centre of the Trarza region. Government offices, customs, police and the border administration employ a good share of them, and much of the rest of the town lives from trade across the river — lorries of goods, buses of passengers, and the small-scale carrying of produce that keeps the ferry queue busy.

The other economy is farming. The plain around Rosso holds large irrigated rice schemes, watered from the Senegal and helped by the Diama dam downstream, which keeps salt water out of the lower river. Rice, vegetables, maize and beans are grown, cattle and goats are kept, and fish are taken from the river.

The day starts early to avoid the heat, empties in the middle and fills again towards evening, when the market and the riverside are at their busiest. Flooding in the rainy season, mosquitoes and malaria, unreliable electricity and the cost of living are constant local concerns, along with the slow pace of the crossing itself, which can leave lorries waiting a long time.

Rosso eats like the Senegal valley. Thieboudienne — rice cooked in a tomato sauce with fish and vegetables — is the standard lunch, made here with river fish as often as sea fish, and served from a shared dish. Mafé, meat in a groundnut sauce, and yassa, chicken or fish with softened onions and lemon, come straight from across the river.

The rice grown on the schemes around the town is the everyday staple, along with millet and sorghum steamed into a fine couscous or cooked into a thick porridge eaten with soured milk. From the Moorish side of the kitchen come mutton and goat stews, camel meat, and méchoui, a whole roast lamb for weddings and Eid al-Adha. Zrig, soured milk thinned with water and sweetened, is drunk through the day.

Fish from the Senegal — captain, tilapia and catfish among them — is grilled, fried or dried for the lean season. Hibiscus flowers are brewed into a cold red drink, baobab fruit into a pale one, and both are sold in bags at the market. Alcohol is illegal, so the drink that matters is green tea with mint, brewed over coals and poured three times.