Tidjikja
| Tidjikja تجكجة |
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 Commercial street and mosque in the old town. The white man's robe is called Derra'a |
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| State : |
 Mauritania
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| Region : | Tagant | ||
| Department: | Tidjikja | ||
| Coordinates : | 18 ° 33 ′ N , 11 ° 26 ′ W | ||
| Height : | 399 meters above sea level | ||
| Residents : | 18,586 | ||
| Time zone : | GMT ( UTC ± 0 ) | ||
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Tidjikja ( Arabic تجكجة, DMG Tiǧikǧa , also Tižigža ) is the capital of the administrative region Tagant in the southern center of Mauritania . The oasis settlement in the western Sahara lies on the edge of one of the largest date palm groves in the country. During the French colonial period , the former village was expanded into a military base and administrative center.
location
Tidjikja is located at an altitude of 440 meters on the Tagant Plateau, a plateau with little vegetation ( hassania : ḍhar ) bordered all around by a steep rise , which consists of solid sand plains, hammada , areas with sand dunes ( erg ) and individual rocky elevations. Tagant means “forest” in the Berber language , the name originally referred to a landscape further south in the more favorable climate of the Mauritanian Sudan zone . The Tagant Plateau is located north of the only asphalt road that connects Mauritania in a west-east direction from the Atlantic to the Mali border. About 140 kilometers east of Aleg , in the town of Çangrâfa, an asphalted side road branches off to the north, which serpentines behind the former French colonial base Moudjéria over the rocky edge to the plateau. Nbeīka is the only larger village on the 140-kilometer route between Moudjéria and Tidjikja. The Tichitt trade center, which was important in the Islamic Middle Ages, is located 255 kilometers east of Tidjikja along a bad road. There is another connection for all-wheel drive vehicles to the city of Atar, 470 kilometers to the north .
history
Stone Age sites show that the plateau was in the 1st millennium BC. Was settled by a sedentary population that raised cattle and goats with the beginnings of agriculture. Countless rock paintings from Berber pre-Christian times until after the beginning of Islamization in the 10th century have been preserved on rock formations . Tidjikja was founded around 1680 by the Idaw ʿAli, a Berber tribe from the Adrar region who had been forcibly displaced there and emigrated south to the Tagant. Aḥmad ʾl-Amīn aš-Šingīṭī offers a brief account of the establishment of the settlement in his book Al-Wasīṭ fi tarāǧim udabāʾ Šingīṭ ... , which was published in Cairo in 1911 : According to this, there was a pious blind man among the emigrants who had two oueds and the group intended to camp, sniffed the earth with his nose only to announce that these places were unsuitable. It was only when they arrived in Tidjikja that the honored man declared the land to be blessed and asked his followers to settle down. So they started cutting down trees and clearing the thicket. For this activity and to build the stone houses, the Idaw ʿAli hired a local tribe, whom they paid off with dates every year (at least until 1897, when the author left the region).
The date palm oasis grew into one of the largest in Mauritania; the place would otherwise have benefited from the trade between the Moroccan Wadi Draa and the Sudan region, without, however, gaining the importance of the other trading locations . It houses a small collection of old Islamic manuscripts. Medieval centers of Islamic learning in which larger libraries were established were Chinguetti , Oualata and Tichitt.
Around 1900, the French colonial empire reached with its northern border as far as the Senegal River . The French military leader Xavier Coppolani was given the order in 1902 to take over the territory of Mauritania into the colonial areas in a peaceful way ("pénétration pacifique"). In the same year he signed a peace treaty with the influential Marabout von Boutilimit and began setting up small military posts. The advance of the colonial troops in the Brakna region was resisted by Mauritanians under the leadership of the Emir of Tagant, Bagār ibn Swaid Aḥmad. He was the leader of the Idawish tribe, whose fighters had to retreat northwards after heavy losses. In April 1905, the 97-year-old was hit by French bullets. The resistance in southern Mauritania was broken. The French established one of the first military camps in Tidjikja. There Coppolani was killed by insurgents in June of the same year. This ended the phase of peaceful penetration, the anti-colonial resistance began to intensify and shifted to the northern Adrar region, where the center of Sheikh Ma el-Ainin was, whose agents are held responsible for the death of Coppolani. Tidijikja became the capital of the "cercle du Tagant", the French Tagant region. The successful "pacification" was officially announced in 1920 and the Mauritania military area was declared a colony.
The country gained independence in 1960, and Tagant remained a backward province even after that. In the 1970s, numerous nomads in the region were forced to flee the desert to the small towns or to the dry savannah further south due to several years of drought , while others moved to the state capital Nouakchott . According to the census in 2000, 13,532 residents lived in the village. In 2005 a calculation resulted in 14,751 people, for 2010 18,586 inhabitants were calculated.
Cityscape
Tidjikja is separated by a wide sandy oued of the same name, which runs from northwest to southeast, into an old town part in the north and a newer part in the south. The access road coming from the south runs west of the town center and ends at the northern edge of the settlement at the airport. A ruin of the old French colonial administration lies in the newer district west of the street. The roughly square building made of field stones mortared with clay has two long rectangular room sequences in plan, which are located on both sides of a central aisle and are surrounded by an arcade on all four sides. This climate-friendly construction can no longer be found in today's administration buildings on Hauptstraße.
Beyond the dry valley (Oued) in the old part of town, a street turns right and leads past the bus stop for collective taxis (taxi brousse) to the market center. The market is busy in the mornings, but the range of groceries and housewares is limited. There is still a nomadic tradition in the manufacture of leather goods. Some shops offer the widespread armrest cushions ( Surmije ), small tobacco pouches ( Beit ) and the rare male saddles for camels ( Rahla ) . A generously planned regional university is located to the northeast of the center.
The residential buildings are predominantly single-storey and consist of clay-plastered field stones or, in the case of new houses, of hollow cement blocks. Most of the houses have no windows facing the street, the living spaces are grouped around an inner courtyard surrounded by a high wall, through which light penetrates through the open doors.
A mosque dates from the 17th century. After several renovations, the minaret that protrudes over the shops in the market can be seen. Closer to the Oued, a ruined building has been preserved, which contains several triangular niches made of raised stone slabs in its facade; an old decorative motif, which can also be seen in Tichitt and which until a few decades ago was found more often on facades, especially above the entrance doors and on interior walls.
The place is dominated in the northeast by a rocky hill, on the other sides of the flat, undulating sand dunes and solid sand plains with isolated acacias extend . The date palm groves are close to the groundwater as narrow strips along the dry valley in the east of the city. The water is mostly drawn up by hand using a draw well ( Schaduff ) . In a few places, vegetables are grown on small, irrigated plots. Outside the oasis gardens, after the rainy season that lasts until September / October, millet can be grown without water in an earth-moist depression .
The airport's asphalt runway is 1,600 meters long and 29 meters wide. There are no regular flight connections.
Sports
The AS Armée Nationale football club is based in Tidjikja.
sons and daughters of the town
- Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Louly (1943–2019), President of Mauritania
- Dimi Mint Abba (1958–2011), singer and Ardin player
Individual evidence
- ^ Rainer Oßwald: The trading cities of the Western Sahara. The development of the Arab-Moorish culture of Šinqīṭ, Wādān, Tīšīt and Walāta (= Marburg studies on Africa and Asia . Vol. 39). Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1986, p. 355.
- ↑ In the final chapter: The dispute about Šingīṭ and its delimitation. After: Wolf-Dieter Seiwert (Hrsg.): Maurische Chronik. The peoples of Western Sahara in historical lore and accounts. Trickster-Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 119.
- ↑ Anthony G. Pazzanita: Historical Dictionary of Mauritania. 3. Edition. Scarecrow Press, Lanham (Maryland) 2008, p. 503.
- ↑ 2005 population estimates for cities in Mauritania. Mongabay.com
- ^ Mauritania: Les villes les plus grandes avec des statistics de la population. World Gazetteer
- ↑ Thomas Krings : Sahel. Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger. Islamic and traditional black African culture between the Atlantic and Lake Chad. DuMont, Cologne 1985, p. 238f.
- ↑ Tidjikja. World Aero Data