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78 CHAPTER 2cribed as a ‘courting culture’; men veiling their faces for women and not theother way around in contrast to other Muslim societies; and the hierarchicalstructure of society, often (wrongly) compared to the European feudal system,with a heavily racialist dimension to top it up: ‘White’ nobles ruling over‘black’ slaves. It all helped to transform the Kel Tamasheq from real people intothe quasi-mythical ‘lords of the desert’ in the best of Orientalist traditions asdescribed by Edward Said. 7The myth of the ‘lords of the desert’, defiant and proud of their culture andtraditions, had a tremendous impact on colonial policy towards the KelTamasheq during the third phase of colonial rule, that of ‘development’ duringthe 1940s and 1950s. The colonial administration saw no problem in applyingdevelopment policies in the heartlands of Soudan Français. But its policy was‘protective’, in Donald Horowitz ’ meaning of the term, towards the culture andtraditions of Tamasheq society. 8 In his analysis of the general colonial attitudetowards ethnicity and ethnic groups, Horowitz describes a distinction beingmade by most colonial authorities between ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ ethnicgroups, the first embracing colonial modernity, the second being reticent towardsit. The ‘modern’ groups are then perceived as ‘degenerated’, astray fromtheir traditions, while the ‘backward’ groups are seen as proud bearers of originalculture. In this particular logic, ‘backward’ groups are then seen as in needof protection from modernity to preserve their way of life. This model of reasoningis perfectly applicable to the case at hand.Local French administrators certainly developed this protective attitude towardthe Kel Tamasheq in the 1950s. Service in the Sahara attracted a certainkind of men. Former Commandant de Cercle Jean Clauzel has nicely evaluatedtheir attitude toward the Kel Tamasheq as ‘a double state of mind with partlycontradictory orientations – a preoccupation with surveillance, attraction andsympathy’. 9 In some cases this attraction and sympathy resulted in civil ormilitary officers ‘going native’. In general it led to a resistance to any changethat would destroy their subjects’ ‘traditional way of life’. It also meant theadoption of what the French thought to be the Tamasheq perception of theirneighbours. This perception can be described as racist. According to this visionthe Arabo-Berber ‘white’ Kel Tamasheq, living their harsh nomadic life in theSahara, were naturally of a higher order than the ‘black’ inhabitants of SoudanFrançais, and saw themselves as their natural lords and masters. This supposedlyindigenous view of social and racial relations can be sensed in colonial789Saïd, E. 1978.Horowitz, D. 1985.Clauzel, J. 1992: 99-116.