Books set in Mauritania

About the literature of Mauritania

Mauritania is often called a land of a million poets, and its desert towns of Chinguetti and Walata are known for their old manuscript libraries. Writers have long worked in Arabic, and Hassaniya, the country's spoken Arabic, is the language of much oral poetry. French is also used, as are Pulaar, Soninke and Wolof, which are recognised as national languages. Very little of this has reached English translation, so few books by Mauritanian writers are available to English readers.

Timothy Cleaveland's Becoming Walata: A History of Saharan Social Formation and Transformation traces Walata, a medieval caravan town in the southeast, and its scholars, traders and social hierarchies from the trans-Saharan trade era onward. Cleaveland is an American scholar, so this is an academic study rather than a story, but it gives a detailed picture of one of those manuscript towns.