On the Banks of the Karakoro By Jeremiah Addison Miller Submitted to the graduate degree program in the department of English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. _____________________________ Chairperson Joseph Harrington _____________________________ Byron Caminero-Santangelo _____________________________ Tom Lorenz Date Defended: March 16, 2012 ii The Thesis Committee for Jeremiah Addison Miller certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: On the Banks of the Karakoro ____________________________ Chairperson Joseph Harrington Date approved: March 16, 2012 iii Abstract On the Banks of the Karakoro offers readers intimate details of life in Mauritania, a little- known West African country saddled by the Sahara and underdevelopment. Heartbreaking, visceral, honest, and hopeful, the account of my experience as an English teacher with the Peace Corps is part memoir, part travel narrative, and part ethnography. Set in Kankossa, a town divided by the Karakoro, a seasonal river, I utilize every opportunity—my teaching experiences, fascinating characters, history, politics, and travel—to ingratiate the reader to the adust country and to explore, as I learn about them, the flashpoint issues of our time such as Islam, Al Qaeda, racism, colonialism, democracy, globalization, and development work. While so much of the world focuses its attention on Africa’s “problems” from distant offices, meeting rooms, and assembly halls, I illuminate the wildly rich dynamics of Mauritanian life from within mud walls, between trash-laden market streets, in vegetable gardens, and under Bedouin tents in a style that neither sensationalizes the experiences nor looks away from unpleasant realities. iv On the Banks of the Karakoro Table of Contents Overview 5 Chapter One – Leaving Home 8 Chapter Two – Family 34 Chapter Three Summary – Enduring a Coup 53 Chapter Four Summary – Rebuilding 54 Chapter Five Summary – Of Sheep, Wood Smoke, and Cheating 55 Chapter Six – Passing an Afternoon 56 Chapter Seven Summary – Total Oudane 71 Chapter Eight Summary – Token White Man 72 Chapter Nine – Deep with Sand 73 Chapter Ten Summary – Clean 130 Chapter Eleven – What Remains 131 Chapter Twelve Summary – Free and Fair 153 Chapter Thirteen – Family 154 Chapter Fourteen – People Doing Their People Things 176 1 Overview Mauritania is a country that does not exist for most. Its borders are more familiar— Senegal, Mali, Algeria, Western Sahara, and the Atlantic. Even if one recognizes the name, specifics are difficult to recall except that it carves out a portion of the Sahara. For Mauritanians, the country is largely a name, a consequence of colonial drawings on a map. Alliances are tribal rather than national. In the North, in the desert, Moors of Arab and Berber descent maintain loyalties to ancient hierarchies, and in the South, in the steppe, black Africans divide among Fulani, Wolof, and Sonike. Both groups herd their camels or cattle, sell their wares or their vegetables with minimal interference from Nouakchott, a capital born out of coastal dunes when Mauritania received its independence from France in 1960. Yet it is a microcosm for the wrestling match between westernization and Islamic traditionalism. In a country where electricity and running water is scarce, cellular phones and satellite televisions powered by car batteries, have joined livestock and date palm groves as status symbols. Gas-powered refrigerators provide ice for the traditional zrig that breaks the Ramadan fast. BBC Arabic delivers the world news over battery-powered radios. And Viagra is the latest phenomenon where diarrhea kills more children than any other disease. While the Iraqi and Afghan wars highlight those countries as loci for this struggle, Mauritania is no less immediate. Repeated coups and failed elections have left an unstable government and expanses of unoccupied land have encouraged nefarious groups to seek refuge there. Most recently extremists have targeted foreign tourists causing the Dakar Rally, a European off-road race, to relocate and the Peace Corps to evacuate. Mauritania is also a battleground for debates concerning international aid. Western powers largely sustain Mauritania through monetary and food donations, yet this parsimony has 2 created endless debt that gives these powers political leverage in the country. Against social will it is one of a few Muslim countries to recognize Israel. Similarly, political pressure has forced democracy onto a government that has only known tribal loyalties. Years of charity has also created an economy dependent upon aid. Where people once used traditional means to satisfy daily needs, they now import their wares. Prayer beads are plastic Chinese imports rather than carved wood or glass. Eggs and milk travel from Europe. Most rice comes from Asia or Mali. Fruit that Mauritanians could produce also arrives in trucks from neighboring countries. While international aid does not carry all the blame, Mauritania’s situation certainly adds to the debate concerning the value of western involvement in Africa. While numerous books debate these issues ad nauseam, most eschew the people who actually live in these places. The strategy I take in On the Banks of the Karakoro is to approach these larger issues through the people who live them. Kankossa, where I lived and worked for two years, emulates Mauritania. The market divides the town, north and south, between Moors and black Africans, a divide reinforced by a genocidal civil war in 1989. International agricultural projects have focused on Kankossa because of its proximity to the seasonal river. Only five hours from the Malian border, it also has a small Pan-African population that imports new goods and ideas. Consequently by focusing on narratives involving close friends or acquaintances from Kankossa and my travels throughout the country, the reader enjoys vivid details about daily life that slip easily into the more recognizable, global issues. In essence, Mauritanians—their cultures, ways of life, desires, and needs—create the place. As a volunteer, I existed in the middle, between the West and Mauritania, as a well- meaning American volunteer trying to understand and assimilate into a drastically foreign culture. The process was much like a coming of age. At the beginning of my service I returned 3 to infancy. My ability to communicate and care for myself in the country resembled that of a two year old, but as my experience deepened so did my success. By the end of my service, I lived independent of many of the crutches that I relied on in the beginning so that I slowly became an ambiguous character who worked tirelessly to fit in as an American in Mauritania ultimately to fail. To be clear, though, I am a character as much as my friends and serve as the readers’ eyes through which they can arrive at their own conclusions. Key to On the Banks of the Karakoro is the balance I maintain between my narrative presence and that of my friends. Through each chapter, the narrative builds, developing the characters and the places, to form a complex portrait of a country that has largely gone unnoticed in English-language literature. Readers will latch on to my struggle to attain happiness through acceptance and success in a country so distant from my own. On the Banks of the Karakoro will be the definitive work both educational and entertaining about a country that challenges the imagination and grows in international importance every day. 4 Chapter 1 – Leaving Home The trick of memory is that it changes. The trick of memory is that it doesn’t change. The trick of memory is that it exists apart from people and place. The trick of memory is that it doesn’t exist apart from people and place. The trick of memory is that people and place change. The trick of memory is that people and place don’t change. As I write about Mauritania, a country shaped by the Sahara’s battle with the Atlantic, and my experiences living there as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Kankossa, a town located south and central near the Malian border, the people and places I knew no longer exist. While my memories of Mauritania and the journals I keep still describe Mauritania and my experiences living there between June 2005 and July 2007, I know that the country began erasing those lines soon after I left. On August 6, 2008, a military coup d’etat led by General Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz overthrew Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, the country’s first democratically elected president since 1960, only a year and a half after he took office. Aziz stepped down in April 2009 only to win the presidency in the July elections. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) followed its execution of four French tourists in December 2007 on the Road of Hope outside of Aleg by exploding a bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in February 2008. The following year, it employed a suicide bomber near the French Embassy; it kidnapped three Spanish aid workers on the road from Nouakchott, the capital, to Nouadhibou, the deep-sea port; it killed an American worker in Nouakchott; it kidnapped and eventually killed a French citizen, Michel Germaneau, and kidnapped two Italian on the south- eastern border town of Kobenni. The rapid succession of events and the new government’s isolationist leaning prompted Peace Corps to evacuate its volunteers in 2009 and permanently 5 vacate the two floors that the national office occupied in Mauritania’s tallest building, a ten-story office building and hotel, in 2010. Since Peace Corps’ evacuation, the violence has continued. A car bomb slammed into military barracks in Nema, the country’s eastern-most city. In response, the government with the help of French and American intelligence sent convoys of weaponized Toyota Landcruisers across the Malian border to raze AQIM camps and towns providing them with supplies and support.