ABSTRACT
The population of Nouakchott numbers around 745,000 inhabitants, and accounts for approximately one quarter of Mauritania’s total population. It is the capital city of one of the multi-ethnic countries of the Sahelo-Saharan region, and was created almost ex-nihilo in 1957, three years before the independence of Mauritania. Its growth is symptomatic of the recent transformation of the Mauritanian way of life, which particularly affected the demographically dominant Moorish ethnic group (the BC1An). This Arabicspeaking population, which was still 95 percent nomadic at the dawn of the twentieth century, is now 80 percent sedentary. Thus the urbanization of Mauritania is almost contemporaneous with the birth of a multi-lingual nation, the establishment of a modern state and the entry of Africa into the global world.
