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| Kiffa | ||
| province | ||
|---|---|---|
| Mauritania has no parent region. | ||
| Residents | 110.714 (2013) | |
| height | 94 m | |
no tourist info on Wikidata:  | ||
| location | ||
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Kiffa is a city in the south Mauritania on the western edge of the Erg Aoukar about 600 kilometers from the coast.
background
Kiffa is on the edge of the desert, in the Sahel. The sparse vegetation turned into lush pastures after rain and led to the settlement of Berber herdsmen who lived and live here nomadically. The men then followed the vegetation with their flocks of sheep and goats to the south and far beyond Mali. In the meantime, large parts have settled down. In the 20th century, especially since the Second World War, the city has grown rampant. In economic terms, not much is happening here, as there are hardly any investments due to the tense security situation.
Kiffa pearls
This form of glass art was first described in 1949 by the French ethnologist R. Mauny. Kiffa was a center of this traditional craftsmanship until the 1970s. Some authors assume that this type of glass bead was common in Mauritania since the 9th century.
The colorful glass beads, created with enormous artistic skills and ingenuity, were made exclusively by women according to secret family recipes and worn as bracelets. They were made with the simplest materials and tools available: powdered European glass beads or fragments thereof, bottle glass, ceramic shards, tin cans, twigs, steel needles, gum arabic and open fire.
The glass, finely ground to a powder, was mixed with a binding agent such as saliva or gum arabic that was diluted in water. The decorations were made from a colored glass slurry (i.e., crushed glass mixed with a binder) and applied with a sharp tool, usually a steel needle. The pearls were then heated over an open fire in small containers (often sardine cans) in order to easily melt the glass powder and thus permanently bond the pearl. The whole thing happened without form. This production method is unique and has probably only been seen in Kiffa.
Kiffa beads were made in various geometric shapes. There were monochrome blue, red and polychrome cone, diamond, cigar and spherical pearls. The decorations could be jagged, eye-like or dot-shaped patterns. The color sequences observed in traditional pearls with decorations are always the same, i.e. red-yellow-black-yellow-red and / or white-blue-white. Often the front is also decorated, and it is believed that different families had their own style. All of these pearls had amulet-like properties for those who wore them. The colors, shapes and the many different intricate decorative patterns had specific meanings that are mostly forgotten today.
The term kiffa bead (kiffa bead) was coined by American pearl collectors in the 1980s.
Today there are again some manufacturers whose quality is far from that of the old ones.
getting there
By plane
There is also an airfield in Kiffa, but like almost all others in Mauritania, it is not approached from Europe. So there is only the flight to here Nouakchott and then on the road to Kiffa.
- 1 Kiffa Airport (مطار كيفة, IATA: KFA)
By bus
Of Nouakchott There are regular buses to Kiffa and beyond Nema.
In the street
Kiffa is crossed by the RN3 national road that runs from Nouakchott to Nema leads.
