Nouakchott

Nouakchott is the capital and family home at the center of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s life in Mauritania, but in his account it is also a place repeatedly altered by separation and secrecy. His family moved there while he was finishing primary school; as an adult he worked in the city, returned to it in custody, and later came back to his family after release. The contrast between these ordinary connections and the concealed transfers conducted in his name makes Nouakchott more than a setting: it is both the place from which his family lost him and the place to which the narrative repeatedly measures his distance.

Family Home and Early Life

Slahi was born in Rosso, on the Senegal River, and moved with his family to Nouakchott as he was finishing primary school. His father, a nomadic camel trader, died not long afterward. The family was large: Slahi had eight older siblings, with three more born later. His father had taught him to read the Koran, which Slahi had memorized as a teenager, and his academic strengths, especially in mathematics, helped distinguish him. Nouakchott was therefore the setting for the family life that preceded his departure abroad, even though the account gives few details of its neighborhoods or domestic routines at that time.

In 1988, Slahi left for Germany on a scholarship, becoming the first member of the family to attend university and the first to travel by airplane. His departure carried the family’s hopes for financial support. Years later, that expectation would be taken up by his younger brother Yahdih Ould Slahi, who assumed Slahi’s position as the family’s European breadwinner. The family’s movement between Nouakchott and relatives abroad thus forms an important counterpoint to Slahi’s own forced movement: one was a route of study and support, the other a sequence of concealed transfers that his family could not see.

Work and Return to the City

After returning to Mauritania in 2000, Slahi worked in Nouakchott as a computer and electronics specialist. He was first employed by a medical equipment supply company that also provided Internet services. In July 2001 he joined Aman Pêche, a family-owned import business whose partners wanted him to help develop the company and manage its electronic equipment. He set up an office and installed its air conditioning. This practical work, rather than any clandestine activity, is how the manuscript locates him in the city before the attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the American government’s attention toward him.

His work also brought him to the Presidential Palace. On a Ramadan workday, his company sent him to assess a project to network the palace’s telephone and computer systems. Slahi had arranged to meet the project coordinator early, but waited for hours outside a closed office, sometimes falling asleep while sitting on the floor. When he was eventually taken into the palace, his name had been checked against the visitors’ list and he was admitted with clearance. The episode established a stark contrast: he could enter the country’s most important official workplace for a legitimate technical assessment, even as American authorities regarded him as a terrorism suspect.

After that day’s work, Slahi returned to his home. Police came again and said he was needed for questioning. He asked them to wait while he showered, took his keys, and drove his own car to police headquarters. He told his mother not to worry and expected to return soon. Instead, he disappeared from the family’s view. The city’s familiar domestic and professional spaces had become the last visible points in a disappearance whose real route was kept from those who expected to find him in local custody.

A Covert Arrival

The account of Slahi’s return to Nouakchott under guard turns the city into a destination he can see but cannot freely reach. The small plane carrying him approached at low altitude along the coast, using the beach as a guide. From the window he saw sand-covered villages and the city’s outskirts after a sandstorm. He described the suburbs as crowded, poor, and lacking essential infrastructure, and recognized the Kebba ghetto as a place he already knew, now appearing more desolate to him. The low flight brought the landscape close enough for him to distinguish people moving below, but offered no way to call out to them or explain why he was returning.

Slahi had last seen his country in August 1993. He was now coming back as a terrorism suspect, expecting to be hidden in a secret place. He wanted to tell the people below that he was innocent and unchanged, but his voice, as he described it, remained oppressed. The city plan had changed so much that he could not readily recognize the place. This disorientation makes the return doubly estranging: Nouakchott was his home, yet he could not orient himself in it, and his arrival was controlled by people who would deliver him to Mauritanian authorities rather than to his family.

The plane landed near the back of the airport, where the Mauritanian Inspector and another man were waiting. Slahi hoped the Airport Police Chief, whom he had known and once helped in Germany, might appear and speak in his favor. He did not. The Inspector instead arranged for his guests to be escorted to a hotel for the rest of the night. In this sequence, the airport is not a threshold Slahi crosses by choice but a controlled handover point. The city is physically close to the arriving detainee, while the people and institutions who might connect him to his earlier life remain beyond his reach.

Family, Concealment, and Communication

For almost a year, Slahi’s family was led to believe that he remained in Mauritanian custody. His oldest brother, Hamoud Ould Slahi, regularly went to the security prison with clean clothes and money for his meals. In reality, about a week after Slahi had voluntarily reported to police, a CIA rendition flight had taken him to Jordan; he was later moved through Bagram Air Base to Guantánamo. Meanwhile, his family continued paying for his upkeep at the Nouakchott prison, and prison officials accepted the money without revealing that Slahi was no longer there. The city’s prison thus became an invented location for the family’s efforts to care for him, while the actual route of his detention remained concealed.

Yahdih learned the truth from a 2002 issue of Der Spiegel, which reported that his brother had been held for months in a wire cage at Guantánamo. His anger was directed at the local authorities who had assured the family that Slahi was in their custody and safe. The news exposed the distance between what the family had been told in Nouakchott and what had happened to Slahi beyond the country. The deception was not merely a matter of missing information: it caused the family to spend money and make visits on the false understanding that these acts reached him.

The city later became the gathering point for the first telephone call between Slahi and his family. In June 2008, his mother, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and aunts assembled at the International Committee of the Red Cross office in Nouakchott. The family wore the flowing robes they would normally wear to a party, but had gathered to speak with a son and brother they had not heard from in more than six years. The International Committee of the Red Cross acted as intermediary after the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo approved the call. Slahi spoke with Hamoud for forty minutes, asking about marriages, siblings, and children. Hamoud said afterward that his brother had not changed.

Several years later, calls continued under the same arrangement, although they had become Skype calls, allowing the family to see one another as well as speak. They remained infrequent: Slahi was allowed two calls a year, and Yahdih asked the Red Cross whether a third could be arranged. By then their mother had died, on March 27, 2013. Nouakchott remained the family end of a communication channel that could cross the distance to Guantánamo only on restricted, scheduled occasions.

The City as a Measure of Distance

Nouakchott gathers together the different scales of Slahi’s experience: the family home, the technical work that supported his ordinary life, the palace where he conducted a legitimate assignment, the airport where he was covertly handed over, and the Red Cross office where his family eventually heard his voice again. These are not equivalent spaces. At work and at home, Slahi could move through the city as a resident; during his return under escort, he could see its outskirts but could neither address the people below nor choose where he would go. Later, his family could gather in the capital to speak with him, but only through an approved call arranged from the prison system that held him far away.

The city’s significance therefore lies partly in how the narrative sets proximity against access. Slahi’s plane brought him physically close to home after years away, yet that nearness did not restore his freedom or reunite him with his family. The prison visits and payments continued in Nouakchott while he was already abroad; the later calls reversed the direction of contact without undoing the separation. For his family, Nouakchott was where they waited, searched, and gathered. For Slahi, it remained the recognizable yet changed home he saw from a low-flying plane and the point of return that detention repeatedly withheld.