ABSTRACT
In preparation for the beginning of the caravan season of 1925, Mulāy al-Maḥdi sent his envoy to collect a debt in silver coins from a trading partner located some 500 miles away on the southern desert edge. 1 He also entrusted him with money to purchase ostrich lard in that distant Malian market of Nara. Mulāy al-Maḥdi, a resident of Shingīṭī, was a Tikna trader originally from the Wad Nun region of present-day southern Morocco. He had settled in the northern Mauritania oasis in the late nineteenth century, joining a small Tikna community that thrived on the organisation of trans-Saharan trade between northern and western African markets. At age eleven, his son, Mulāy Ḥāshim, was initiated on his first caravan to the family profession. 2 In 1936, when the French colonial economy offered better opportunities than caravanning, the teenager migrated to neighbouring Senegal. Over the course of fifty years there, he rose from peddling cigarettes in the countryside to owning several wholesale stores and managing a gas station in the capital city of Dakar. When I first interviewed Mulāy Ḥāshim, he still regretted that the only thing he took with him, when he was deported during the conflict between Senegal and Mauritania in 1989, was his identity card and a wad of currency he had collected since the introduction of paper money.
