France granted Mauritania independence 1960. Most of the post-colonial era has involved trying to eliminate slavery, get people out of poverty, and squabble with Morocco over borders. (Mauritania took over part of Western Sahara in 1976, and people trying to emigrate from Mauritania, whether to escape slavery or find economic opportunities, are often detained by the Moroccans and dropped off in remote desert areas – good luck getting home!)
In 1984, Maaouya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya became Mauritania’s leader. He was enough of a dictator that he was eventually overthrown in a coup, despite a few elections that were just democratic enough to satisfy outside observers but not enough to make the people happy. There was a coup, then an election, then another coup, then another election. The current president is General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, elected in 2009. He was shot by his own troops in 2012, but the CIA World Factbook says that the shooting was accidental.
As a small, poor, and forbidding country with low literacy, there are few accessible materials in English about Mauritania. I turned to academic texts and ended up with Mauritania: The Struggle for Democracy
The wealthier class of Mauritanians are known as Moors, Bidan, or Arabs. (And yes, whenever I came across the word “Moors”, I heard George Costanza yelling “It’s the Moops!”). They lower class are the Haratin, also known as Blacks. Traditionally, the Bidan owned the Haratin. Freed Haratin tend to be poorer and less educated than the average Bidan, but that’s not saying much.
The discovery of oil in Mauritania made the country worse off, not better. It’s a great example of a paradox known as the resource curse: instead of mineral resources making a country better off, they may make it worse off because the resources leave the country, the money is squandered or stolen, and expectations are crushed. And, in fact, many hoped that Mauritania would become another Saudi Arabia even while the country was sliding further into poverty.
If trade is to get a country out of poverty, it has to start with an independent business class – people who are out to make money for themselves by taking risk, not by colluding with an oil company. There have to be mechanisms in place to keep wealth in the country, not have the oil exported to China and the money exported to Swiss bank accounts. Brazil has entrepreneurs on both the Mom & Pop level and among grand global multinationals. Mauritania has neither.
Foster’s book is mostly about history and political theory, not finance and economics. He is skeptical about many democratization ideas, arguing that they are elitist and driven by moral considerations rather than the practical. He thinks it is a good idea overall, though, especially as a way to create a motivation for people in younger generations to learn about governance and institutions. If all wealth and power goes to a handful of people and the only way to get a share is with a coup, then that’s what you’ll have. Mauritania has a visible Al Qaeda (and may have a hacker group that has disrupted global networks in the name of Islam), so governance and opportunity there have regional and global implications.
Mauritania’s population and economy are so small that this is unlikely to be an investment for anyone other than an oil company. Still, learning about it has added to my understanding of the region, the whole goal of this project.
