Mauritania

"When we happened upon this band of merry, mischievous girls, our wanderings in the desert came to a halt. They were sisters, cousins, neighbors, I don’t know any more, and they lived in the same camp with five or six tents. The girls showed a touching appreciation of their chibani, the old chief of their clan, their grandfather. 'He’ll die soon and we’ll never see him again, nor anyone like him,' was the opinion of my interpreter when we headed back to our crazy world, forever stripped of this wisdom based on simplicity.

(…) One day, we accompanied Fatis to her workplace at the Zouerate mine, on the fringes of the Sahrawi Desert, at Mauritania’s northern border with Algeria and Morocco. A few months ago, groups of African migrants from Agadez in Niger or Gao in Mali were dropped off near the mining town by Tuareg people smugglers. Especially at night, the lights of the gigantic mine can look convincingly like a Western town for anyone who hasn’t ever set their eyes on one: 'There you are, we’ll leave you at the border and we’ll go back. Finish the journey on foot, you’ve arrived! That’s Las Palmas! You’re in Europe!'"

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard