Hidden in Plain Sight: Haratine in Nouakchott's "Niche-Settlements"

....Is it possible to speak of degrees of invisibility? If so, the haratine of Nouakchott, the sprawling coastal capital of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, certainly count among the most invisible of tens of thousands of poor inhabitants scattered in its multiple shantytowns (kebbes).1 Haratine are mostly former slaves or their descendants; they constitute many of the city's migrants from rural areas as well as a first and second generation born and bred in urbanity. This paper focuses on a subgroup of these haratine-men, women, children who chose to live outside the more conspicuous kebbes and "popular" districts, and take up spaces between villas in prosperous neighborhoods. There is no formal name for these tiny groups, which by nature of their insertion into the fabric of wealthy communities are rendered socially invisible to their bidan ("Moorish") neighbors.2 Here, I refer to them as "niche-settlements"-niches that have become home to the "most invisible of the invisible" of Nouakchott's poor.