Zouérat

Zouérat exists because of iron. Geologists identified the rich haematite of the Kédia d'Idjil, the massif above the present town, in the first half of the twentieth century, and from the 1950s a mining company built a town, pits and a railway to the Atlantic across some 700 kilometres of desert where there had been only wells and herding routes. Production began in the early 1960s, shortly after independence, and the company and the settlement grew together.

Ore quickly became the young country's principal export, and in 1974 the mines were nationalised, with operations passing to the state company SNIM, which still runs them. Workers came from across Mauritania and from abroad, and Zouérat changed from a camp into a town with schools, a hospital, company housing and a market, the administrative centre of the vast Tiris Zemmour region.

The Western Sahara war brought the conflict here: during the 1970s Polisario fighters raided Zouérat and the railway, striking at the source of the government's revenue, and the attacks contributed to the pressures that led to the coup of 1978 and Mauritania's withdrawal from the war the following year. Mining continued, and the droughts of the same decades pushed herding families who had lost their animals into the town's outer quarters. Zouérat today remains a company town in character, its fortunes tied to the price of iron ore and the state of the railway, and it is the largest settlement in the Mauritanian north.

Zouérat is unlike the old towns of the Adrar. It has no ksar, no manuscript libraries and little pre-industrial past; its identity was made in the mines and by people who came from elsewhere to work them. Hassaniya-speaking Moorish families, Haratin workers and Afro-Mauritanians from the Senegal River valley live in the same quarters, and the town is more mixed in origin than almost anywhere else in the desert north.

For all that, the customs are those of Mauritania generally. Islam is conservatively practised, prayer times shape the working day, and the three rounds of strong, sweet, foamy green tea are made everywhere — in shops, offices, workshops and at the roadside — and are as much a fixture of a mining town as of a nomad camp. Greetings are long, hospitality is taken seriously, and a guest is fed.

Life revolves around shifts and the railway timetable. The company's presence shows in the housing, the sports grounds and the clubs, and in the way families talk about employment: a job at SNIM is a settled wage in a region with few alternatives. Dress follows the national pattern, the loose daraa and the wrapped malahfa, and the desert traditions of camel herding and poetry survive among families who settled here within living memory.

About 62,000 people live in Zouérat, making it the biggest town in the Mauritanian north. Nearly everything turns on SNIM: the pits and crushers on the Kédia d'Idjil, the workshops, the loading yards and the trains, plus the jobs that follow them in administration, transport, shops and services. Public employment in the regional government, the hospital and the schools accounts for much of the rest.

Nothing is grown here. Food, fuel, building materials and water treatment all arrive by rail or by truck, and prices are higher than in the capital. Dust is a constant: red-black iron dust from the mines and sand from the plain settle on streets, walls and washing. Housing runs from the company's built quarters to self-built compounds on the edges, and services thin out towards the outskirts.

The daily rhythm is industrial rather than agricultural — shift changes, buses to the pits, the market busy early and late, long evenings of tea and talk after the heat. Concerns are those of a single-industry town far from everything: dependence on ore prices and one employer, the health effects of dust and heat, water supply, and whether young people can find work without moving to Nouadhibou or Nouakchott.

Zouérat eats what the trains and trucks bring. The staples are rice, couscous and pasta served with goat, mutton or camel in a sauce of onion, tomato and imported vegetables, eaten from a shared dish with the right hand. Grilled meat is the town's everyday restaurant food, cooked over charcoal at simple grill houses near the market and eaten with bread. Dried meat, cut into strips and hardened in the sun, keeps in a place where refrigeration is not guaranteed.

Dates come up from the Adrar and Tagant oases, fresh in the summer harvest and dried or as paste through the year; they are what a household offers first. Camel's milk and zrig, soured milk thinned with water and sweetened, are drunk widely, and Atlantic fish arrives from Nouadhibou along the same line as the ore, grilled or fried and sold cheaply when a consignment lands.

Bread is baked daily in small bakeries, a French habit that survives across Mauritania, and sweet pastries turn up in the shops. Green tea closes everything: brewed strong with mint and heavy sugar on a charcoal stove, poured from a height between pot and glass, and drunk in three rounds. Alcohol is illegal in Mauritania, so tea, water and soft drinks are what is served.