Land Tenure
Under construction…
From 1983 to 1986 I was employed at the Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison to run a multi-year USAID funded study of land tenure along the Mauritanian side of the Senegal River. In the course of that project I and a team of five graduate students interviewed many people in a number of locales including the Boghe region, the Kaedi region, and the Mbout region. The Foum Gleita dam was being planned at that time to block the Gorgol Noir river, inundate a large area and irrigated a series of downstream (from the dam) perimeters. The project was funded by German and Saudi donors. The Senegal River basin, into which the Gorgol Noir flows, was itself planned to be impacted by a dam fairly near its mouth designed to halt the salt tongue tide and improve irrigation possibilities upstream so that irrigated perimeters could replace the traditional flood recession regime of the middle Senegal river basin. The studies also involved an effort to understand the dynamics of massive civil unrest (1988) involving the deportation of many thousands of black residents due to an attempted coup and the prospect for revenues accruing to Bidan (white) entrepreneurs building irrigated perimeters in the areas vacated by those deported from the country. Many of these issues are covered in my book, Risk and Tenure in Arid Lands (1992).