21 March 2007 - 14:57
I went to the National Museum yesterday. Mauritania’s only museum is divided into three parts: archeological stuff, cultural stuff, and an exhibition room, which is currently being used to display an exhibit about West African cloth.
The archeological section of the museum was interesting – it gave a brief history of civilizations in the area (which was very brief, since there haven’t been many), displayed old tools and artifacts that have been found in Mauritania (including pieces of the oldest balance found in Africa), and gave information and showed diagrams of some of Mauritania’s ancient cities. The parts about the ancient cities was interesting because people still live in all of the sites of ancient ruins that they listed, and I have visited a couple of them – Rachid and Tichitt, which are both in the Tagant region – so I had first-hand knowledge about the sites, and had even walked through the ruins of the cities. Additionally, in climbing in mountains around the Tagant, I had found several grinding bowls, grinding stones, and large pieces of pottery that looked exactly like those on display in the museum cases.
The cultural room was also pretty neat. It was supposed to be about traditional Mauritanian culture, which apparently doesn’t include Africans. Every single display and photo in this room was of white Moors, who only make up one-third of the population in Mauritania. Not a single mention was made of the black Moors (the former slaves) or Africans, who inhabit the southern half of the country. While the complete one-sidedness and total exclusion of two-thirds of the population was rather disappointing, the displays were nicely done (donated from Japan, said the stickers) and pretty informative. I personally didn’t learn very much, since I spent two years living with people who still cling to the nomadic life and live much the same way as they have for the past several centuries – most of the “traditional culture” on display is still in existence in the northern part of the country, which I experienced every day, and especially when I participated in vaccination campaigns in the countryside, chasing down nomadic families in the desert to vaccinate their children.
And then there was the fabric display at the end. It was amazing to see how rich the wealth of textiles in West Africa is – there were more different types of traditional cloth than I even knew existed here. It seemed that every ethnic group represented had their own unique means of weaving, dyeing, sewing, embroidering, stamping, and displaying cloth, and most of it was done by hand, even the items produced in recent years. After seeing all the different types, I think my favorite is still the hand-woven, mud-dyed cloth produced in Dogon Country in Mali, which I am fortunate enough to have found at a decent price there.
All in all, it was a pretty interesting and enlightening (as to the blatant state-sponsored racism evident in the displays) experience.
