The Ore Line and the Ouguiya

The halt at Choum is a few concrete buildings, a scatter of tyres and a lot of people sitting on their luggage. There is no timetable. Somewhere north of here a train has left the mines above Zouérate loaded with iron ore, and when it arrives it will be over two hundred wagons and more than two kilometres long, and it will stop for a few minutes. People climb up the ladders on the ends of the wagons and sit down on the ore. Twelve hours later they get off at the Atlantic, black from head to foot. Nobody charges them anything.

It is easy to file that under Saharan picturesque, and everybody does. What it actually is, is the working end of a decision taken in Nouakchott on 28 November 1974, and of a second decision taken seventeen months before it. Between the middle of 1973 and the end of 1974, a country of about 1.3 million people left the French monetary zone, issued a currency nobody had ever heard of, and expropriated the foreign consortium that owned its only industry. The train is what it bought.

The company that was the country

MIFERMA — Mines de Fer de Mauritanie — was constituted in 1952 to work the iron at Kédia d'Idjil, a mountain of high-grade haematite in the far north-east. It was a French-led consortium with British, Italian and German money in it, and the scale of what it built in a territory that had almost no built infrastructure at all is hard to overstate: a mine, a company town at Zouérate, an ore port at what was then Port-Étienne, and a standard-gauge railway across roughly 700 kilometres of desert to join them. Ore began moving in 1963. Within a decade it was supplying the overwhelming majority of the young republic's export earnings and a very large share of its tax revenue, on terms written when the republic was still a French colony.

A railway that had to avoid a border

The engineering carries the politics of its moment in one detail. The shortest line from the mine to the sea clipped a corner of Spanish Sahara, and Spain would not grant transit. Rather than accept the detour or the dependency, the builders drove a tunnel of about two kilometres through the massif at Choum so that the whole railway would lie on Mauritanian ground. After Spain left the region the line was re-laid on a surface deviation around the hill and the tunnel was abandoned; the trains now run past it. It is a small thing, and it is also the entire argument in miniature — somebody was willing to pay in rock and dynamite for a route that did not need anyone else's permission.

Sovereignty is usually described as a legal condition. In the Sahara in 1960 it had a price in metres of tunnel, and the people building the line paid it.

June 1973: leaving the franc

Independence in 1960 had left the monetary arrangements untouched. Mauritania used the CFA franc, issued by a regional central bank, convertible into French francs at a rate fixed in Paris, with the reserves held there — an arrangement that delivered genuine stability and delivered no monetary policy whatsoever. Under President Moktar Ould Daddah the government moved out of it. The ouguiya was introduced on 29 June 1973 at five CFA francs to the ouguiya, the country left the West African monetary union, and a central bank was set up in Nouakchott to run it. The new unit kept one deliberately awkward feature: it divides into five khoums rather than a hundred of anything, which makes the ouguiya one of only two circulating currencies on earth that is not decimal. Mauritanians have since had to absorb one more change, the redenomination of 1 January 2018, ten old ouguiya to one new — and in the market at Atar plenty of people still quote you the old price.

November 1974: taking the mine

The currency was the preparation. The nationalisation of MIFERMA was announced on 28 November 1974 — Independence Day, which was not an accident — and the assets passed to a new state company, the Société Nationale Industrielle et Minière. Compensation to the foreign shareholders was negotiated rather than refused, and the technical staff were not all thrown out; what changed was who set the price, who took the profit and who decided what the railway was for. SNIM survives, majority-owned by the Mauritanian state at a little under eighty per cent with Arab development funds holding the rest, still shipping something in the order of thirteen million tonnes of ore a year, and still the largest industrial employer in the country.

Then the war for it

What followed is the part that gets left out of the anniversary speeches. Spain withdrew from Western Sahara under the Madrid Accords of November 1975 and Mauritania took the southern third of the territory. The Polisario Front made the railway its target, because the railway was the state's income and it ran for hundreds of kilometres through open desert that nobody could guard. The line was cut repeatedly. On 1 May 1977 a column reached Zouérate itself, more than four hundred kilometres from the front, killed two French technicians and took six hostages; a second raid that October took more. France responded with air strikes flown from Senegal, Opération Lamantin, at the end of 1977. None of it worked. Defence spending consumed a budget that the ore had been nationalised to fill, the army removed Ould Daddah on 10 July 1978, and on 5 August 1979 Mauritania signed an agreement in Algiers renouncing all claim to the territory and walked out of the war.

So the ledger reads: the state won the argument about ownership and then spent five years and a government finding out that owning the asset and holding the ground the asset sits on are separate problems. Half a century on the line still runs, twice a day in each direction, and the ore is still the thing the country sells — alongside gold from Tasiast, and offshore gas that has only just begun to flow. The passengers on top of the wagons are riding for nothing because SNIM lets them, and SNIM lets them because SNIM belongs to the state, and the state made that so in November 1974 and then had to fight for it. It is worth knowing which of those facts you are sitting on for twelve hours.