Word: mauritania
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...Moslems, one million Christians, the rest pagan animists. The Negroes alone speak 120 different languages. Just outside the teeming modern city of Abidjan, villagers still slaughter small children and toss their disemboweled bodies into the river to make sure of a good year's fishing. Until this year, Mauritania, whose Berber people call themselves "whites" (Bidanes), felt itself too poor to have a capital of its own: it shared Saint-Louis, which was the capital of black Senegal. In Dahomey, which means "The Belly of Dan," after an ancient king who ate his victims, the fiercest warriors were once...
...delegates from French Africa to attend a conference in Paris last January, none were more lavishly treated than the four gentlemen from Mauritania-the ore-rich land that stretches, twice the size of France, from south of Morocco to black Senegal. Resplendent in blue turbans, the four Moors were feted and flattered for four days straight. They seemed to have no quarrel with Mauritania's status as a semi-autonomous political entity inside French West Africa. And since they included two council ministers, a tribal sheik and the powerful Mohammed Ould Fall Oumer, Emir of Trarza and absolute ruler...
...Mauritanians' action was inspired not so much by hatred for France ("No one," the Emir assured the press, "can say that Mauritania has been exploited by France. On the contrary, it is for her a burden") as the Moors' fear of being part of a tighter West African Federation that might be dominated by Negroes. Mauritania's pro-French Premier Si Moktar Ould Daddah promptly branded them "traitors," begged France not to judge his country by the doings of a few "wild men." Nevertheless, as both Rabat and Paris realized, the four defecting delegates had given Mohammed...
Mohammed's sudden claim to Mauritania and his anger over the Sakiet bombing had no logical link except that of history. But Mohammed made clear their linkage in his own mind by juxtaposing the two subjects in an interview this week with French newsmen. Morocco, he told them, "cannot maintain its present policy of restraint if the Algerian problem does not receive a solution which gives satisfaction to the national aspirations of the Algerian people and recognizes their liberty and sovereignty." In a defiant gesture of solidarity with Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba in his quarrel with France...
...Goulimine's mayor, the governor of nearby Tiznit, and most other Moroccan officials around Ifni are former Liberation Army leaders. On the wall of the governor's office was a map of "Greater Morocco" showing not only Ifni but also all of Spanish West Africa and French Mauritania as part of King Mohammed V's realm...