Mauritania is a country in northwest Africa, with an Atlantic coast, bordered on the west and north by Western Sahara, with a short northeastern border with Algeria and a much longer eastern and southern border with Mali, and a shorter southwestern border with Senegal. I keep on wanting to type ‘Mauretania’ with an ‘e’, but strictly that is the Roman-era kingdom and province that covered parts of what are now Morocco and Algeria. In Arabic, the name of the country Mauritania is spelt firmly with a ي, so the letter ‘i’ is appropriate in English.
It became independent from France in 1960, and had a succession of strongman leaders and military coups, combined with defeat in a war against Western Sahara. Things seem to have settled down a bit now, with the current president Mohamed Ould Ghazouani having won elections twice. The territory is mostly desert, but most of the population lives in the tropical south, near the capital Nouakchott.
In 2018 I met a very pleasant elderly gentleman at a breakfast in Brussels, who turned out to be Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, elected president of Mauritania in 2007 and then overthrown the following year in a military coup (whose leaders included the current president). Cheikh Abdallahi died in November 2020, of heart problems rather than COVID.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mauritania.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Desert and the Drum | Mbarek Ould Beyrouk | 369 | 49 | 114 |
| Dangerous Love | Ray Norman | 225 | 33 | 12 |
| The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga | Mohamedou Ould Slahi | 127 | 13 | 35 |
| Travels in Mauritania | Peter Hudson | 38 | 21 | 7 |
| Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery | Samuel Cotton | 29 | 25 | 6 |
| Barzakh: The Land In-Between | Moussa Ould Ebnou | 28 | 10 | 8 |
| Under An African Sky: A journey to the climate frontline | Peter Hudson | 19 | 6 | 2 |
| Angels of Mauritania and the Curse of the Language | Mohamed Bouya Ould Bamba | 13 | 5 | 3 |
Mauritania is pretty obscure from the literary point of view, if not quite at the level of Turkmenistan.
A very clear winner this week. The Desert and the Drum is about a young girl who runs away from her tribe to the city, stealing the sacred drum. Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, a Mauritanian writer himself, had sseveral other novels which scored respectably on Goodreads and LibraryThing, but were unknown to StoryGraph.
Dangerous Love: A True Story of Tragedy, Faith, and Forgiveness in the Muslim World, by Ray Norman, is an autobiographical Christian book about forgiving the men who shot and seriously injured the author and his daughter.
The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga is about a man looking for his camel.
Travels in Mauritania and Under An African Sky are non-fiction about different aspects of travelling in the country.
Silent Terror is an investigation of slavery, as still practiced in parts of Mauritania.
Barzakh: The Land In-Between is science fiction, about a future archaeologist examining the history of Mauritania.
Angels of Mauritania and the Curse of the Language is about a family undergoing crisis in Noakchott.
Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained Angels of Mauritania and lost Barefoot through Mauretania by the anthropologist Odette du Puigaudeau, which seems to be better known than her actual anthropology textbook based on that trip. Thanks to her falling off the end, we have (unusually) an all-male list this week, for the first time since the Republic of Congo.
The one disqualification that I hesitated about was Gassire’s Lute, a West African traditional epic translated into German by Leo Frobenius and from there into English by Alta Jablow, and published in 1971 in an edition illustrated by Hugo-winning artists Leo and Diane Dillon. As far as I could tell, more of it is set in what’s now Mali rather than Mauritania.
Google tells me that the best known women writers from Mauritania are Mubarkah Bent al-Barra (Bat Bint al-Bura), Aïchetou Mint Ahmedou, Mariem Mint Derwich and Salka Mint Sneid. Unfortunately none of their books are logged on any of the three sites I look at here; in fact, I could not even find any for sale on Amazon.fr.
Next up: Slovakia and Ireland, then New Zealand, then Costa Rica.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel | Laos | Turkmenistan | Kyrgyzstan | Hong Kong | Singapore | Lebanon | Palestine | Oman
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba | Nicaragua | Paraguay | El Salvador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo | Sierra Leone | Libya | Liberia
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus | Bulgaria | Serbia | Denmark | Norway | Finland
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea