Moktar Ould Daddah

Daddah was born at Boutilimit into an important marabout family of the Ouled Birri tribe, attended elite Islamic academies, and worked for the French colonial administration as a translator. ¹ As a law student in Paris he graduated as the first Mauritanian to hold a university degree, and he was admitted to the bar at Dakar in 1955. ¹

Named acting president of the new Islamic Republic at independence on 28 November 1960 and confirmed in the first post-independence election of August 1961, Daddah established an authoritarian one-party state under his Mauritanian People's Party and followed a policy of "Islamic socialism" with many nationalisations. ¹ His 1975 charter called for Mauritania to become an Islamic, nationalist, centralist and socialist democracy, and his presidency was consumed by the Western Sahara war after Mauritania joined Morocco in dividing the territory. ¹

A military coup deposed Daddah on 10 July 1978. ¹ After a period of imprisonment he was allowed to go into exile in France in August 1979, where he organised the Alliance for a Democratic Mauritania in 1980; from 1985 he lived with his family at Nice. ¹ He was allowed to return to Mauritania on 17 July 2001, and he died in Paris on 14 October 2003. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article's infobox names Daddah's religion "Sunni Muslim", the French article's infobox names Islam, and Wikidata carries Sunni Islam as a single value; no article text attests a school for him personally — the English text gives his marabout family and his Islamic schooling, which are background and formation — so the museum records his faith as unknown and preserves the Sunni reading in the data file. ^{3 4 2} The French article's lead gives his death on 15 October 2003, one day later than the English and Arabic articles and Wikidata; the variant is recorded in the data file. ⁴

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.