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RACE, STEREOTYPES AND POLITICS 75African cultures. When visiting Timbuktu, Ibn Battuta already remarked (andscorned) the relative freedom in gender relations that are now seen as almostunique to Tamasheq culture. 3 It is the men who veil their faces in front ofwomen, and not the other way around, which astounded both Arabs and Europeans.European administrators cherished Tamasheq ‘chivalry’ but condemnedtheir ‘nomad laziness’. On the other hand, these days, rich Saudi tourists visitNorthern Mali and Niger to see the people who still live the honourable nomadcamel-breeding life their Saudi grandfathers had lived, as one of them told me.The nomadic pastoral existence of the Tamasheq ancestors was already extolledby Ibn Khaldun as an explanation for the military and moral superiority of thenomadic Berber tribes over their sedentary Arabised neighbours. 4On the other hand, the Kel Tamasheq too have their preconceived ideasabout the Europeans, and about their neighbours. The idea of the European, incolonial times as well as now, is best summarised in the term reserved for them:Ikufar, infidels. Although militarily superior to the Kel Tamasheq, Europeanswere (and still are) seen as ethically and morally inferior as they do not adhereto Islam. However, to some Kel Tamasheq in the late twentieth century, the ruleof the ‘infidel’ was preferred over that of the ‘slave’. Indeed, to many KelTamasheq of free origins, ‘black Africans’ were peoples who had long beensubjected to Tamasheq rule. Ever since the Moroccan invasion and subsequentfall of the Songhay Empire at the end of the sixteenth century, the Kel Tamasheqhad not been subdued to a sub-Saharan polity. On the contrary, after thequick demise of Moroccan rule in the area, it was the Kel Tamasheq federationswho ruled the Niger Bend and present-day Northern Mali. In Tamasheq ideason power, black peoples could not rule over the Kel Tamasheq. At best theyruled themselves and were left alone or were partners in business. At worst theywere Kel Tamasheq dependents and victims to slave raids. 5Politics regarding, rather than involving, Tamasheq society from the 1940sonwards revolve around a complex set of stereotyped images. The image theMalian leaders projected on the Kel Tamasheq was partly inherited from theircolonial predecessors, and was complemented with already existing localstereotypes held by those people who were in contact with the Kel Tamasheq inthe Niger Bend. To paint the image at its most colourful and with the broadestof strokes: The Kel Tamasheq were thought of as white, feudal, racist, proslavery,bellicose and lazy savage nomads, who were used as the vanguard ofFrench neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist projects in the mineral-rich Sahara.As for the populations of the Niger Bend: Until the 1940s they lived in fear that345Ibn Battuta, C. Defremey & B.R. Sanguinetti (1858) 1982.Ibn Khaldun & B.M.G. de Slane (1851) 1978.Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. 1976.