Tichitt

West Africa’s oldest settlements, and seven towns said to be stacked below

Tichitt stands at the foot of the Tagant Plateau in south-central Mauritania, below a long sandstone escarpment that marks the northern edge of the Hodh basin and the old lake bed of Aoukar. Two very different histories meet here.

The older one lies along the cliffs of the Dhar Tichitt. Around 2000 BC, agropastoral communities archaeologists call the Tichitt culture began building settlements of stone on the clifftops, and evidence found by researchers including P. J. Munson, Augustin Holl and S. Amblard suggests they were farming millet from the start. These are the oldest surviving archaeological settlements in West Africa and the oldest stone-built villages south of the Sahara, thought to have been raised by the proto-Soninke and possibly forerunners of the Ghana Empire. They left hundreds of rock images of animals and hunting scenes. Around 500 BC, as the climate dried, the people abandoned the cliffs.

The younger history is the town. Tichitt was founded in the 12th century as a caravan stop on the trans-Saharan route linking Oualata to Chinguetti and on toward Sijilmasa, one of four ksour, along with Ouadane, Chinguetti and Oualata, that grew rich on the caravans and became centres of Islamic learning. Its oldest people are an Afro-Berber group still called the Imasna, the Azer dialect of Soninke was spoken here from the days of the Wagadou Empire until the early 20th century, and the name may come from a Tuareg term meaning the language of the blacks. Legend says seven towns have been built one on top of another on the site.

Like its sister towns, Tichitt has dense, narrow, winding lanes between the blank outer walls of courtyard houses, built in a distinctive decorative stone architecture around a mosque with a square minaret, a way of building adapted over centuries to the extremes of the desert. Early in the 20th century it was self-sufficient, with several thousand people, and dates are still its main crop.

The desert has been taking it back. Desertification and drifting sand have emptied many of its houses, and in 1999 torrential rains brought floods that damaged 80 percent of the town. UNESCO inscribed it in 1996 with Ouadane, Chinguetti and Oualata as the Ancient Ksour, and the sand remains the greatest threat to these pearls of the Sahara. A small museum keeps the village's past, and a dirt airstrip lies a kilometre to the southeast.