‘A gift from heaven’: the TikTok traders of Mauritania’s meteorites

Growing desertification is putting traditional livelihoods at risk in western Africa and encouraging the search for rare stones

By 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.

Hanoun holds a fragment of debris he says is from Mars