Vote for me and I will make you happy that you don't have a woman and you will not cry

The first round of elections are over, allowing me a month or so reprieve from bullhorn-strapped cars driving around town at all hours of the night blasting one of the following, in decreasing order of frequency:

• No Woman, No Cry
• That relatively new Shakira song
• Something Mauritanian (I can't distinguish one song from the next)

Conceivably, these roving noise machines could be used to spread the message/platform for one of the plethora of candidates. Mostly, according to translation by a few Mauritanian friends, they promised that voting for "so and so" will make your life nicer and happier. Coupled with Bob Marley's classic song of, um, not crying about not having a woman(?) or Shakira's latest muy caliente tune (I've heard this so many times I'm just going to assume it's the national anthem), I personally can't fathom why you'd even consider other candidates.

Sarcasm aside, things did seem to go off pretty smoothly in NDB. One of my friends up here is a reporter for a national paper, and he was covering the election for our fair city. Unfortunately, I was/am forbidden to have anything to do with politics around here, and was discouraged from even showing my face anywhere near the voting locations. Respecting the rules, I bravely lent him my camera so he could snap a few for the "Nouakchott Info."

The Wali (governor) of Dakhlet Nouadhibou casting his vote.

The obligatory interview.

Men queuing outside of a voting station.

Women queuing outside of a voting station. Cultural note: men and women never stand in line together. Their genitals might accidentally touch.

EU election supervisor.

Should you be interested in poorly researched facts, here's what I know. There are somewhere in the realm of thirty parties running candidates for the series of three elections in Mauritania. This election covered the mayor and a few legislative posts. The parties are largely divided along racial lines. Some represent people who were in power before the 2005 coup, some are Islamist, and 95% have thrown the word "Democratic" into their name. Considering I hang out with mostly black Mauritanians, most of the political arguments to which I was privy concerned whether or not they should vote for a black candidate or the person who had been mayor of NDB before the coup. It is reported that he A) didn't put up with people who didn't take their job seriously - this includes corruption, and B) was responsible for most of the city's modernization that has occurred to date.

Candidates are given roughly two weeks to campaign, immediately followed by elections. Specifically, campaigns commenced on the 3rd of November, and ended with yesterday's elections. Campaigning consisted of the aforementioned car-noise-bombing and the ubiquitous erection of enormous tents. The tents also produced an impressive volume of Bob Marley, but other than that, I really never saw anything happening in them. Ads ran in newspapers, and unfortunately I have almost no access to television, so I didn't have a chance to see how it was used.

I personally know one of the legislative candidates who was running for the DIN - Democrates Independants de Nouadhibou - party. When I pressed her on the pertinent issues to which a voter should be attuned, however, she had no answers. At that time (three days into the campaign) they had yet to identify a platform. I also know one of the main campaign organizers for the DIN, who, asked about his party's platform, gave the following explanation (to translate and paraphrase):

"There are the people who held power before the coup. They are running in an attempt to reclaim that power. There are also people at the other extreme who are running solely because the first group should not have power. Our party [the DIN] is moderate. We are interested in the well-being of the people of Nouadhibou, and not simply in power or defeating the other parties."

Reading the look on my face (the one that said, "you really didn't answer my question at all"), he smiled and admitted that the mayoral candidate is an old friend, and that his heart's not really in the election so much as it's in helping out a friend. I don't condemn that, but I'd like to underline that this is a major campaign organizer in one of the most popular parties.

Anyway, I wasn't nearly as involved in observation and information gathering as I intend to be for the next set of elections (somewhere around January-February). The campaigns came and went rather quickly. Filter me out and extrapolate what you will about new found democracy. I think things went pretty well, but it became strikingly clear that just handing choice to people doesn't mean that they're going to make an informed decision.