The only proper road that crosses from Mali to Mauritania is called the Highway of Hope, a pompous name for a tongue of asphalt that crosses thousands of kilometers of dunes and scree. Dahabass Soumaré, 19, arrived on her back to remote Nouadhibou. “At last,” he thought, “there is only one jump left towards Europe. If everyone wants to go there, it will be because there will be something good.” But the city that was supposed to be his springboard to the Canary Islands turned out to be a trap and this young, uneducated farmer from the Kayes region was trapped in it. Without money, without work, without being able to move forward or backward. Today he lives poorly with 11 other boys like him in three humble rooms they call homewhere the only furniture is shared mattresses lying on the floor.
Nouadhibou is the city of broken dreams. One in three of its 150,000 inhabitants are foreigners, young people from Mali, Senegal or Guinea who came to this merciless corner of Mauritania, isolated from the world by the desert and connected to it by the sea, many with the longing for Europe. On the map, everything looks easy. Getting to the Canary Islands takes three or four days of sailing in one of the thousands of imposing canoes that populate its artisanal port, which in the last three months has become the epicenter of migrant departures from Africa to the islands. However, things don't always go well. The Spanish Civil Guard and the coast guard comb its waters and the Mauritanian Police have confidants throughout the city. A ticket to paradise costs about 1,500 euros, compared to 500 from Senegal. Closer, more expensive and a lot of people to pay. Everything is bought and sold in Nouadhibou, even wills. The EU will allocate 210 million to turn Mauritania into a barrier to irregular emigration to the Canary Islands.
An icy wind runs through its sandy streets at night. Since they don't even have blankets to cover themselves, Dahabass and his friends sleep dressed, in sweatshirts that pretend to be from famous brands but are fake, and they hug each other to keep warm. “It's bearable until two o'clock, but at dawn it's deadly, you can't even rest,” says Bacar, 28, one of the few who has found work, as a cook. With his meager income he pays room rent to a wealthy Mauritanian and buys spaghetti and rice to eat from time to time. Since they left their native Mali with eyes and heads full of Europe, they have not tasted a single piece of meat. In front of his homelocated in the pretentious neighborhood of Baghdad, a neighbor has built a mansion with columns and balconies of neoclassical scrolls.
“Without the complicity of the authorities it is impossible,” says Yunus, a young Mauritanian with curly hair who tried his luck in 2023, reached the Canary Islands and was expelled back to Nouadhibou. He set sail from the artisanal port in a canoe manned by Senegalese fishermen and saw with his own eyes how the captain bribed an agent to let them pass. Others leave from remote points of the city to avoid surveillance. In recent months, the former Spanish enclave of La Güera, located a few kilometers away, belonging to Western Sahara and under the control of the Mauritanian Army, has become a meeting point for ghosts. It is enough for a boat to sail there stealthily and pick up the young people who, in groups of four or five, have been arriving under the cover of night.
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During the day, young Malians spend time playing cards or drinking tea to stave off hunger, waiting for a stroke of luck, for a change in the direction of the wind. They don't even dare to walk for fear of being caught by the police. Nouadhibou is bursting at the seams with houses like this, crowded rooms from which the luckiest emerge every morning and return at sunset, those who have a job to earn the four or five euros a day that allow them to last a little longer. Through this city flows the manna of Mauritania, the precious treasures that abound in its land and its waters, iron and fish. But these Africans with a lost look, slaves of the 21st century who cook, build, fish or guard, barely get the crumbs.
Ibrahima Cissé drives a dilapidated car as a clandestine taxi driver. He fled his native Mali when war came knocking at home, making him one of the 70,000 refugees who have entered Mauritania since October due to the worrying deterioration of the situation in his country. He shares a room with two friends in a house in the Cinema neighborhood where they have running water for only half a month. “We don't know why, we pay the rent religiously, but that's how it is,” says Cissé while he shrugs his shoulders. Abdoulaye and Seydou Coulibaly, who crossed like lightning to Nouadhibou from Kati, also in Mali, nod in agreement. Months ago they got tired of asking for work in the neighborhood. Too many unanswered questions. They are migrants and their friend is a refugee, but all three wear the same old clothes and suffer identical hardship.
Of the 12,000 people who will arrive in the Canary Islands in 2024, at least 60% are Malians, according to sources from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). A drop in the ocean that floods Mauritania. The war being fought in Mali is without quarter. Last year, the Armed Forces and their allies, Wagner's mercenaries, intensified the offensive against jihadist groups, affiliates of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and Tuareg rebels. The murders of civilians continue, the population of the northern regions, stigmatized and persecuted for their alleged complicity with armed groups, flees in disarray.
A good Samaritan allowed Aicha Wallet and her brother Mahmoud, from Timbuktu, to settle in a wooden hut located on a plot of land in Nouadhibou. Their children grow up there in despair: they cannot return to a country at war and they have nowhere to go. They speak Tamashek, a strange language in these parts. Every day, Mahmoud mixes with the river of young Africans who sit and wait at a roundabout in the center of the city for someone to come by and hire him for a few hours. But he's too old. “It's very difficult to live like this, we don't even have water,” he says. Aicha works as a translator. She has become the pillar of the family.
Sometimes, the canoes that arrive in the Canary Islands are stolen. And not only in Nouadhibou. From the beach of the country's capital, Nouakchott, where the fish are landed every afternoon, one or two disappear a week. As if the sea had swallowed them. Nounou Abderramán, a small shipowner, knows his destiny well. “What we are experiencing these days is tremendous, many people are leaving to emigrate. They put their lives in danger. “One of my boats vanished one night,” he says while putting on his will spill, the typical Mauritanian costume. On the sand, as evening falls, activity is frenetic.
Thousands of Senegalese are employed in the fishing sector in Mauritania, which grants some 500 annual licenses to cayucos from the neighboring country. The Malians are inland people, but the fishermen of Saint Louis know the sea and are the ones who usually drive the boats to the Canary Islands. “In Senegal there is very great control and the weather conditions complicate travel in winter. The passers have settled in Nouadhibou because from here it is only a three or four day journey if everything goes well,” says Elhadji Kebe, who works for the Senegalese honorary consulate in this city.
A Mauritanian police officer who collaborates with the Spanish security forces in Nouadhibou and speaks on condition of anonymity confirms the intensity of the departures and arrests in recent months. “We have a lot of work, but the relationship is magnificent. We have dismantled several networks,” he explains. To try to stop arrivals to the Canary Islands, Mauritania and the EU have just signed an agreement that provides for an investment of 210 million euros in this country and implies a reinforcement of immigration control. But not everyone celebrates it. Dozens of people have tried to demonstrate in Nouakchott in recent days. “We don't want our country to become a prison for immigrants,” says Bachir, a young Mauritanian. The topic is sensitive and controversial.
But Nouadhibou is relentless. Even the memory of the most unfortunate does not last long. On the right bank of the only road that leads to the city, sand and oblivion have devoured the improvised cemetery of one of the worst migrant shipwrecks that the city has ever experienced. It was one morning in 2019. More than 60 bodies were recovered from the water and rocks after a wave caused a distressed canoe to capsize. The sign that announced the cemetery has not fulfilled its function for a long time. The letters have been erased and rust has destroyed the four drums that delimit the space. A few meters underground, only nameless bones.
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