2023-09-03 16:59:00
In Tamaya (Mauritania)
It is 3 am and the air is feverish. Two lighthouses streak across the sand. Then another pick-up breaks through the night, and a third, further behind. There are soon hundreds of 4x4s following one another in the darkness, each lifting as much sand as it flies. It blows hard on this February night. The day soon rises in the sky, replaces the carpet of stars harnessed to an almost full moon, and a few drops of rain appear. Some will say that it brings luck as it is unusual. Mohamed Salem rejoices: he has taken the lead.
At 10 a.m. sharp, a new gold panning zone will be born. Authorities have made an appointment whoever wants it in Tamaya, an area of about forty square kilometers in eastern Mauritania, where anyone can legally come and dig and look for their gold. It is the latest site to be open to researchers since the start of the Sahara gold rush in 2010. First in Sudan, then in Chad, Libya, Niger, Algeria, Mali and now in Mauritania: fever has gripped the desert. Millions of young people have been digging the rock for more than ten years with a dream of wealth in mind.
Mauritania is the last country in the rush: elsewhere in the Sahara, gold panning sites are now known. Here they hatch like couch grass
Gold is found everywhere in the Sahara, and this since ancient Egypt: the first accounts of gold panning in the world are from the Sahara, at the time of Ramses IV, on the border between present-day Sudan and Egypt. But the Nubia of that time was quickly forgotten: the American far west, the Amazonian rivers and above all the myth of Eldorado swept away everything. It took until 2009 and the rediscovery of gold in Sudan for the Sahara to once again become a place of gold panning. The sites have continued to multiply since, the stories of nuggets too. The “feverish” Sudanese came to Chad when the first ingots, Chadians in Niger, Malians in Mauritania… A migration from east to west has taken place in this sector which brews billions under the table. The new wild west. Mauritania is the last country in the chain: elsewhere in the Sahara, gold panning sites are now known. Here they hatch like couch grass. This morning at ContemptGPS coordinates 20.433528, -15.506683, the rush begins again.
Tamaya is a gold zone of about forty square kilometers in the east of Mauritania — Adrien Brugerolle map.
From the back of the pick-up, Mohamed Salem saw a cloud of dust forming on the horizon as he approached the area. He comes from Lahrach, a small rural town in the south of the country, not far from Senegal.
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#Mauritania #gold #fever