Growing desertification is putting traditional livelihoods at risk in western Africa and encouraging the search for rare stones
B
y night, Lamine Hanoun works as a hospital guard in Bir Moghrein, near Mauritania’s border with Morocco-occupied Western Sahara. By day, he twiddles his phone, checking TikTok and Facebook, which he uses to sell meteorites to the rest of the world.
In this former French colonial garrison town, network signals come and go like the dusty wind. On a recent morning when the connection disappeared again and the Starlink at the local customs office was unavailable, he drove his silver Mitsubishi GLX to the town’s outskirts.
Sitting cross-legged on a blue tarpaulin sheet under the shade of a leafless gum arabic tree, the 40-year-old Moor tore a page from an old diary to feed a twig fire heating his teapot as he told the story of how he got into the trade.
