ABSTRACT
The light was blinding, the dust whirling, the heat suffocating. Toumame, the 12-year-old daughter of the herdsman Mohamed Ould Salem, in whose tent I lived during a stay among nomadic pastoralists in the south-eastern frontier provinces of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in January and February 2012, looked at me with a mixture of curiosity, alienation and wonder. Moments earlier, I had asked her to explain what a drought is. A question which I found pertinent, given the fact that what was widely anticipated to become the most severe period of prolonged water scarcity since the so-called Great Sahelian droughts, which had menaced the region in the 1970s and 1980s, was currently gaining momentum.
