The small oasis of Touezekt is located in the north-eastern Mauritanian Sahara in the immediate vicinity of the provincial capital of Atar, which in turn is around 500 km away from the provincial capital of Nouakchott on the Atlantic. Atar has an airport and is therefore the starting point for most tourists on their journey to the famous desert town of Chinguetti. The road usually leads past Touezekt. But it is precisely there that El Khalil Sidi Dah has opened a small museum. In this museum, he documents Mauritania’s rich cultural heritage. The founder of the museum is a merchant by trade; he later trained as an archaeologist in order to be able to expertly research and protect the numerous archaeological sites in this region, as they are repeatedly looted and destroyed by locals and tourists alike. El Khalil Sidi Dah has now recovered around 4,000 archaeological objects: arrowheads, flint implements, stone mortars and pottery dating from the Neolithic period (around 6,000 BC) to recent times. Its collection includes precious historical books and manuscripts, as well as relics of the colonial past and evidence of the local tribal societies. All in all, this extraordinary private museum documents 8,000 years of human history, thanks solely to personal commitment. In order to convey an awareness of this historical dimension to the local population as well as to tourists coming from Europe and in this way to promote the protection of the still unexplored archaeological sites, the museum must be made known beyond the Touezekt oasis. The Jutta Vogel Foundation is providing support for this by, among other things, financing the necessary information signs that are to be erected at important traffic points. It is also helping to produce an information leaflet in Arabic and French.
