Besides being seen as racist slaveholding warmongers, the Kel Tamasheq, and nomads in general, were perceived as anarchist. This will be the last important stereotypical discourse on the Kel Tamasheq dealt with here. The last, less important stereotype, laziness, will be dealt with briefly in the next chapter. The idea of nomadic anarchism stems from two main characteristics of nomadic society – its social-political structure; and nomadic existence itself. At heart, it all comes down to the question of blood and soil. Pastoral nomadic societies are organised along the lines of expanding lineages (see Introduction). A member of a given society organised along these lines is prone to see herself as part of ever larger bodies of organisation, which form a whole at the top level. Euro- pean administrators and their sedentary African heirs however, were inclined to first look for the largest unit and then work their way down to the smallest group – the family unit. This up-side-down look at nomadic societies earned them the label ‘segmentary societies’. In other words: Fragmented, scattered, unbound, anarchist.105 Indeed, nomadic social organisation leaves room for de-
cisions on the smallest level, necessary for the optimal exploitation of the scarce resources in their environment, but this does not mean anarchy. In Tamasheq society, and in many other nomadic societies, hierarchy binds the freedom of the individual. As has been argued in the introduction – social order is created by who you are in relation to others in your lineage, the origins of your lineage and the status attached to it.
A second argument put forward in ideas on nomad anarchy is sheer nomadic existence itself. Here I will allow myself a degree of speculation since it is hard to underpin exactly why nomad existence is found so disturbing by those who are not nomads. It is, I think, not so much mobility itself, as it being the rule and not the exception in nomad existence that is disturbing for the sedentary mind. In sedentary societies social order is created through the appropriation of space. In village-basedMandesociety, social relations are regulated on the structure of the village. Social positions are reflected in spatial organisation, age and land tenure, which, in turn, are reflected in the local tale of origin, and the local ver- sion of the Sunjata epic.106 ‘Who you are’ is partly defined by ‘where you are’
and ‘whose land you are on’. This does not hold for nomadic societies. Tama- sheq society hardly knows the equivalent to dugutigiw, the Mande term for ‘owners of the land’. The imenokalen, the ‘attributors of land and water’ are few
105 For a discussion on segmentarisation in Tamasheq and Bedouin societies, see (among many others) Behnke, R. 1980; Pandolfi, P. 1998.
in numbers and their tenure is as symbolic as their ‘estates’ are enormous.107 This is not at all to say that nomads do not have any form of spatial organisation or land tenure. On the contrary, land tenure systems are specific and elaborated. But land tenure is only significant in economic organisation, not in social or- ganisation or identity. Tamasheq groups might have the right to use certain areas first, or they might ‘own’ a well they have dug, but they cannot simply forbid others to cross this area or to use this well. Trespassing does not exist because of the absence of land that has been divided up and legally distributed. One’s position in space and landownership are crucial to the sedentary mind, but insignificant to the nomad with respect to belonging and social organisation (but very significant in land use itself). ‘Who you are’ is defined through ‘whom you are related to’. This fundamental difference in spatiality might well explain why sedentary governments (and there are no others) are inclined to see nomads as anarchist. They do not stick to one place, they own no land, thus they have no space and they are therefore unorganised and asocial.
Epilogue
The social-political relations between the Kel Tamasheq and the Government and broader populace of Mali became governed by a set of preconceived stereo- typed negative images of the other which were created in the colonial period, but which were largely based in ideas and images with much longer historical standing. Essentially, the Malian Government came to see Tamasheq society as inherently racist with a divide between unscrupulous white masters able to sell their black slaves into servitude in the Middle East, inherently anarchist per- force their nomad way of life, and prone to violence and military rebellion against the authorities. That the Kel Tamasheq were also seen as lazy and irrational in their economic endeavours will be dealt with at great length in the next chapter. In turn, the Kel Tamasheq, certainly the Kel Adagh, saw the Malian Government if not directly as black slaves, then at least as the untrust- worthy deceiving descendants of slaves who had not kept their promises re- garding home rule and local autonomy for the Kel Tamasheq, and who unjustly and unrightfully sought to rule where they had no right to do so. These visions would form a major handicap in the effective political relations between the Kel Tamasheq and the Malian Government that will be the focus of the next chapter.
107 I here follow the interpretation of the etymology of the term amenokal given by Dida, B. 2010.
3
Mali’s mission civilisatrice
In his influential work The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, Merwin Crawford Young describes the late colonial phase of the 1950s in Africa as gilded years, in which the colonial governments, for the first time confronted with a question of legitimation towards their colonial subjects, created the rudimentary basis of a welfare state – education, public health and other infrastructures – to the benefit of the local population.1 For the first time,
African subjects reaped some benefits from the colonial system. Especially in comparison with later post-independence regimes, so Crawford Young argues, Africans who witnessed that period tend to look back in favour. I will not try to refute or defend the idea that the late colonial period can be justifiably gilded. Although many of the nomad inhabitants of Soudan Français now indeed look upon the late colonial period as a golden age, the interview I close this chapter with shows another sentiment toward the French, one of abandonment and treason. I do however hope to make clear that, in the 1960s, the Kel Tamasheq were in a situation to compare colonial rule to the new US-RDA regime and that this comparison then did not fall in favour of the new rulers.
As has been discussed in the first chapter, the new regime was essentially positive about Mali’s political and economic future. This positivist high mo- dernist belief in the national capacity stood contrary to social and economic realities in Northern Mali at the moment of independence. Of course, most of Northern Mali’s desert region is very difficult to develop when development is not based on mining or industry. But as far as the new regime was concerned, the colonial regime simply had done nothing to improve economic or social conditions in their Saharan territories, where this could have been done. This would certainly change under the new regime, which was determined to bring
1 Crawford Young, M. 1994: 211.
all its subjects the benefits of modernisation. Government and the party pre- sence were to be strengthened, the feudal rule of the tribal chiefs was to be crushed, schools had to be created to uplift the ignorant masses, production needed to increase, and therefore the nomads had to be transformed into pro- ductive sedentary ranch farmers. This ambitious project came down to doing what the French had neglected to do: Truly ruling the Kel Tamasheq. This ambitious project could provocatively be described as a mission civilisatrice, to avoid calling it internal colonialism. It is not an exaggerated observation that the Keita Government saw the Kel Tamasheq and Bidân as a kind of ‘barbarian others’ who needed to be integrated in the fabric of national society, while being closely scrutinised as possible traitors of the Malian nation. This double attitude did not make for easy relations between rulers and ruled.
It has been argued by a number of scholars and by some Tamasheq poli- ticians that the Kel Tamasheq did not understand what independence would mean. In an article published in 1987, three years prior to the second rebellion, Hélène Claudot-Hawad made the general argument that most Kel Tamasheq saw ledepadas (independence), as a new form of colonisation.2 More specific-
ally, Pierre Boilley has argued that the Kel Adagh had not clearly understood what the colonial elections and the 1958 referendum on the Communauté Française had been about and did not realise quickly enough to what sort of organisation and to what sort of situation these elections would lead.3 In a ‘Manifesto from the Malian Tuareg appealing to France and the international conscience’ written after the start of the 1990 rebellion, the author starts by assessing colonisation and decolonisation.
As of 1958, we observed the progressive departure of French troops to Algeria with- out understanding its meaning; we had to witness their total retreat from our territory and their replacement by others whose existence we had not known about, to hear the word ‘independence’ pronounced.4
I will argue that this argument does not hold true when examined in detail. Not only were the political elite involved in independence politics, but so was the average Kel Tamasheq who knew that independence was imminent and that a US-RDA-led Mali would be the incarnation of this independence. However, they hotly debated whether or not they wanted to be part of the new political configuration, and if so, under what conditions, in the full but erroneous con- viction that conditions could be set. This debate was especially pronounced
2 Claudot-Hawad, H. 1987. 3 Boilley, P. 1999: 283-284.
4 Anonymous, ‘Nous Touaregs du Mali. Le génocide du peuple touareg. Manifeste des Touaregs du Mali, en appelant à la France et à la conscience internationale’. (n.d. (July) 1990), 2-3. Private Archives.
among the Kel Adagh where it continued even after the establishment of the Malian state at a moment of internal political change: The succession to Attaher ag Illi as the amenokal of the Adagh.
This chapter will focus on the administrative and political relations between the Keita regime and the Kel Tamasheq throughout the 1960s. The US-RDA’s high modernist social economic policies were unrealistic and unwanted, and they proved to be a failure in the end for more or less the same reasons as they were a failure elsewhere in the country: Too few material and financial invest- ments, and too much reliance on willpower. But perhaps more so than else- where in Mali, the patronising attitude of the regime toward the population, in- formed by existing stereotypical ideas, caused a build-up of tension that would in the end form one of the root causes of the rebellion. The regime’s lack of understanding of local work ethics, gender relations, social dynamics, and poli- tical power structures led to a wavering policy that was much resented among a population bent on preserving the colonial social-political legacy. The Kel Tamasheq, especially but not only the Kel Adagh, saw the US-RDA policies and rule as either an unjustified and unwanted meddling in local affairs, or at least as a discrimination of the Kel Tamasheq over other Malians. This last opi- nion was certainly not unfounded. In the Adagh, the international setting further complicated the already tense relation between the Kel Adagh and the Malian administration. While the Malian regime felt itself surrounded by possible neo- colonial adversaries in general, these adversaries were actually present in north Mali, where the French Air Force continued to use a military base until 1961 while Algerian FLN fighters were located at a training camp right next to them, at the invitation of the Keita regime. This is what the local administrators seem to have feared the most: The active meddling of the French army or the FLN in Northern Mali, stirring the local population to revolt. The tension was further enhanced by the spread of rumours. In a context where a political frame of reference based on long standing experience with the other is lacking, and where most thinking is directed by stereotypical images and uncertainties, ru- mours are both an indication of the lack of mutual trust and enhancing distrust.