Word: nouakchott
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the four-day summit convened last week, there were some inevitable absentees. Mauritania's President Moktar Ould Daddah, for instance, had been overthrown by a military coup shortly before he was supposed to leave for Nouakchott Airport to catch a plane to Khartoum. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, as usual, preferred to stay home, sending in his place a quarrelsome delegation that threw the sessions into an occasional uproar by picking fights with neighboring Chad. Nonetheless, 35 leaders of the OAU's 49 member states were on hand, the largest muster in the organization's history...
Citizens of the quiet, sand-swept Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott (pop. 103,500) were trudging to their jobs early one morning last week when a brusque military order was broadcast: Go home. A political storm had blown up in the hot Sahara wind. Shortly afterward, as army Land Rovers equipped with machine guns appeared on street corners, the nature of the tempest became clear. Officers of the 15,000-man Mauritanian army, led by Lieut. Colonel Mustapha Ould Mohammed Salek, 42, had overthrown the regime of President Moktar Ould Daddah, 53, the mild-mannered strongman who had ruled the poverty...
...desert for fear of ambush; Polisario fighters as a result roam freely over much of the territory, boastfully but inaccurately declaring it "liberated." The guerrillas, though, have carried the war into both Morocco and Mauritania. Last June Polisario even attempted a mortar attack on the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott (see map). Although the guerrillas lost 200 men, including Polisario's founder, Mohammed Wall, 28, in the battle, they consider the shelling of the Mauritanian capital a great victory. They have brought Mauritania close to economic disaster with periodic attacks on the 450-mile rail line, which brings the country...
...crowded, fog-shrouded island, the trackless desert has always attracted Englishmen. A straight line leads from Sir Richard Burton crossing the Arabian desert in 1853 and Lawrence of Arabia down to Geoffrey Moorhouse. Burton had a simple thirst for the exotic. Lawrence was a complex mystic. Moorhouse, who left Nouakchott, Mauritania, in October of 1972 heading east into the Sahara, is a fortyish ex-journalist. In challenging the desert, he was intent on confronting his own fears and what he took to be personal cowardice...
...would not suddenly be snuffed out in the middle of the day unless the heavens were trying to say something important....When we'd stepped off the plane at Nouakchott, several people thought they were feeling exhaust from the airplane engines. But it was just an average Mauritanian afternoon, 114 and breezy....Much of the equipment Kern had brought to Africa was homemade, including a coelostat that incorporated a bicycle chain, part of a gun mount, and lead from melted car batteries.... Total eclipses are the ideal time for Vulcan hunts, since the sun is high...