Mokhtar Daddah died a penniless president

He has a street named after him in Nairobi. Moktar Daddah Street links Moi Avenue at Ufundi Plaza to Loita Street.

Mokhtar Ould Daddah was the founding president of Mauritania and ruled the country from 1961 to 1978. Daddah, also the first to attain higher education in his country, was so honoured at the height of the pan-African movement that swept Africa in the 1960s and of which Jomo Kenyatta was part.

Daddah and Jomo were part of that pioneering breed of leaders who took their countries to independence, with Mauritania attaining hers from France in 1961; Kenya’s from Britain two years later.

But unlike his peers who ‘inherited’ territorially defined countries, notes The Guardian, Daddah almost created Mauritania after fighting for its recognition from the more powerful, neighbouring Morocco, and lay the first stone for its capital, Nouakchott.

Daddah was overthrown in a military coup in July 1978, a month before Jomo was killed by “death” in Mombasa. 

As president though, Daddah, a lawyer from an aristocratic Muslim lineage, was hailed for unifying his ethnically mixed, dispersed and partly nomadic people under his iron fist by enlightened rule: He balanced the minority agricultural south and a largely nomadic Moorish centre and north via his single party state.

Daddah’s mistake was using an ill-equipped army during the costly annexation of Western Sahara - a Spanish colony which was and is still being claimed by Morocco and Algeria, to date.

That led to dissatisfaction and eventual ouster in a bloodless coup by Lt Col Mustafa Ould Salek.

Daddah was detained for more than a year without trial in a remote old fort by the leaders of the Military Committee for National Recovery (later the National Salvation Committee), but was allowed to travel to France for treatment after intervention by French president Giscard d’Estaing, the kings of Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and some African leaders, who provided him and his family, now penniless, with a flat in Paris.

In his absence, Daddah was sentenced to life and hard labour for treason, violation of the constitution and undermining national economic interests.

He spent 22 years in exile with his French wife, Marie-Therese Gadroy, whom he married while studying in France in 1959.

The father of three was allowed to return to Mauritania in July 2001, but died forgotten in Paris in 2003. He was 78.

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