Atar

Atar is the chief place of the Adrar circle of Mauritania. It lies at about 230 metres above sea level on the route from Saint-Louis to Tindouf, some 420 km east of Port-Etienne. The Ksar has about 4,500 inhabitants, most of them Smacids, a tribe of marabouts. ¹

According to local tradition, Atar was founded in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The pilgrims' caravan to Mecca was then organised each year by the Idau 'Ali of Chinguetti, who gave the imamate to a distinguished member of the Smacids. The Idau 'Ali broke with this custom in favour of a Ghellawi. Outraged, a group of Smacids left the town and settled at an important Azougui settlement, now vanished but rich enough for the Portuguese to have set up a factory there in the fifteenth century. The EI2 entry says that this display of temper gave birth to Atar. ¹

Chinguetti remained the spiritual and religious capital of the Adrar, but Atar became the principal commercial centre. It provides a market for the great nomads and the southern outlet for the workers. Herders come there to sell camels and sheep and to buy tea, sugar, indigo and oil. Its large palm grove is also where the date-cleaning process known as getna is carried out at the harvest, which brings considerable wealth. ¹

In the early twentieth century Coppolani and his successor, Colonel Montane-Capdebosc, extended French influence north of Senegal, and concluded that no peace was possible in Mauritania while the mountains of the Adrar gave armed malcontents an ideal base. Atar, the capital of the Adrar, which the entry calls "the key to the situation", was the objective of Colonel Gouraud's column in 1908. After defeating the emir's warriors and the talibs of Shaykh Ma al-'Aynayn at the pass of Hamdun, Gouraud entered the Ksar on 9 January 1909 and received the submission of its chief Smacid, Sidia Ould Sidi Baba. Since then Atar, linked by road and air to Senegal and Morocco, has grown considerably in economic and commercial importance. ²