“But I Am Confident: God Will Not Leave Us This Way”: From Slavery to Post-Slavery in Nouakchott’s<i>bidonvilles</i>, Mauritania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the urban growth of Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania, between 1960 and 2016. Growth was shaped both by in-migration driven by recurrent droughts, and by the end and subsequent transformation of slavery. Living in Nouakchott’s poor, unplanned bidonville neighborhoods influenced how slaves and slave descendants saw themselves, especially in relation to former masters. Some joined impoverished but non-servile cultivators and herders working in the informal economy. Others used Islam to claim their former masters’ continuing protection. Still others used the urban environment to negotiate new social roles and relationships. Since the 1990s, bidonville life has also shaped how hundreds of thousands of voters expressed themselves at the ballot box. In 2007, this power extended to electing the President himself. This history illuminates how the intertwined transformations of Nouakchott as an urban living space and slavery as a social institution explain Mauritania’s contemporary “post-slave” identity, tensions, and political volatility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".