NKTT, The Sprawling Wasteland

I am getting mad. Literally. I can't stop thinking that well into the digital age we still have to struggle with living in a mega garbage dump, misleadingly called our capital city. Nouakchott is a funny linguistic anachronism and a city apart by modern standards. If you take the pains of touring the country trying to find someone to tell you what "Nouakchott" means, you will, to your great disappointment and dismay, find out that no one knows. It's a name without a referent, just to begin with. But in a deeply conservative culture like ours, names tell about people and their characters, the same way that language in general has the power to give life or take it away. It still matters back home whether someone "daa lek" or "daa aleik" at breakfast, meaning whether he curses you or prays God for your good. Whatever happens to you all that day long will be the outcome of the kind of words uttered at breakfast, we persist to think. It follows, and rightly so, that Nouakchott is a city without a name and consequently without a life.

What would you make of a coastal city without tourist resorts or distraction facilities? What would you make of a core urban magnet that alienates and excludes its dwellers more than it includes and accommodates them? A quick and short tour will give everybody a sense of the recipe of failure that we call NKTT. Dull scenes of shanty impoverished areas accompany you all the way long, irrespective of where you're heading. Endless sea of rubbish-strewn shacks flood the horizons on both sides of the road, and if you are so unfortunate to let go with the main road you will be lost to the human misery ahead of you. The same inadequate living conditions leave you with the impression that you're in the middle of a hostile mega slum that keeps expanding as you drive along. Regardless of where go, to Ryad, Toujounin, Dar Annaim, Tayaret or any other district, it's the same sight of urban degradation, of people of all ages and sexes crammed into crowded squalid areas that look like make-shift camps of the kind we see in tsunami-hit regions in southeast Asia. I'm not talking here about the quality of life and the poor management of the urban space by the authorities, that's another story. Only insiders and city dwellers know and experience the full drama of that story. What I have in mind is the sheer feeling of helplessness and loss you share with the people who inhabit these shanties and who are left to apparent chaos and lawlessness. For you to weigh the devastating impact of this life, you have to experience it firsthand. To take my words for truth, you need only to drive overnight in Bouhdida or let say in any another place in the southern and southwestern poverty belt, extending from Dar-Elbarka to Ryad. The feel would be something like you're thrown into the abyss of hell.

This doesn't mean that districts like Capital or Tafragh Zeina or Ksar are in any way different from the rest of the city. To me, each villa or palace is a big prison, where the inmates can not venture out. If you can bring yourself to forget for a moment the luxurious comfort inside these villas, you will certainly agree with me that city life outside is no more different. Same windy sand roads, no public places, no health clubs, no public green places; in short, no city life. It's may be a paradox that Nouakchott is good at nothing except that its hostile to all, rich and poor. The haves and the have-nots can live in different houses but they still share the same sprawling slum. I hope that the shocking poverty of some districts would not make you lose sight of the broader picture. Poverty is bad but its existence did not stop booming cites around the word from seeing daylight. At no time in the year is this truth more visible than during fall time when the dusty streets of NKTT turn into torrential mud-rivers carrying cholera and a host of other diseases . In the downpour, the city turns into a huge swamp unfit for life for the poor and the rich alike, actually forcing them to flee for the countryside where they are reduced to nomadic and rural life.

And yet we can not speak of Nouakchott without shining a light on the poor who in their thousands were the most scarred by life in this unwelcoming city. These are the ex-peasants and herdsmen who were carrot-and sticked into fleeing the countryside for Nouakchott. It's they who bore the brunt of the city's violent history. I'm referring again to those who lived in the squatters, illegal shanties that were accurately called "kebba" or "Gazra". Not only they were denied the right to clean drinking water, electricity and flush toilets but also were coerced and displaced by the state. You remember how the police demolished thousands of shanties who were the dwellers of "Kebba and Gazra" and bulldozed very thing to the ground. This "tsunami-like" horror was not a necessary sacrifice to remodel the city on some other prosperous international capitals. The plan was not to construct multi-story buildings, businesses, offices and malls. It was to sell their lands to bunch of influential rich. These people owe us to keep the memory of their displacement and dignity alive. Even though the state gave them legal status, it left them to start their lives from scratch in what would become Riyad, Arafatt, etc. These are the most suffering of NKTT dwellers who struggle everyday to make ends meet.

You may allege that I'm blowing things out of proportion abit, that it's still too early to pass a judgment on Nouakchott, which is now only forty eight year old. All this would have sounded Ok to me had we been in the middle ages and still needed pioneering technological breakthroughs to develop hi-tech boom cities. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. We're now in the postindustrial era where we can make hypercities rise from the ground up in less than a month, provided we have the political will and the financial resources. By contemporary standards, forty eight year old cities worldwide are prosperous urban spaces which have come of age financially, institutionally and in terms of infrastructure.

The dark cloud which hung for decades over the lives of NKTT residents may be easing now. We've heard that President Ely is drafting plans to build a new city center with modern standards and rumors are fast-circulating that a new international airport will be alive and kicking soon. Just imagine how would our down town look like, had each of our previous presidents built one and only one high-rise building. We would now boast of a different "CAPITAL".

I leave you on this note.

mom