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RACE, STEREOTYPES AND POLITICS 79reports and was then internalised by both the Kel Tamasheq and the Malianadministration.RaceThe area that we now commonly refer to as the Sahel (Arabic for coast), hasbeen known from the earliest Arabic sources to the end of the colonial era asBilâd as-Sudan: Arabic for ‘the land of the blacks’. This is the clearest and mostobvious indication that race has always played an important role in the constructionof social identities and realities in this part of Africa. It is onlyrecently, through analysis of the discourse of justification in the genocidalconflict in Darfur, that issues of racial identity construction in the Sahel havebeen reaccepted in Western academia, albeit reluctantly. 10 But the problem isnot new. Chad has been ravaged for decades by a civil war between the Araband Tubu FROLINAT and the peoples from the South. In Mauritania, ‘white’Bidân drove ‘black’ riverain Mauritanians across the Senegal River, whileneighbouring Senegal did the same with Bidân on its territory in 1989, andagain in 2000. 11 In Sudan itself, in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘white’ Arab tribessuch as the Baggara and Rizeiqat, armed by, and under protection of, the state,raided the Bahr-el-Ghazal and Equatorial provinces for ‘black’ Nuer and Dinkaslaves as part of a state policy to submit the Christian or Animist ‘black’ Southto the ‘Muslim Arab’ North. Among African scholars, notably from Sudan, theimportance of this issue and its connection to histories of slavery and slavetrade has been recognized since at least the 1990s. 12 Jok Madut Jok rightlysuggests that in Sudan the ‘boundaries between “races” and ethnic groups arenot so clear cut, at least to the outsider’. 13 Thus, racialist perceptions influencingpolitical and social relations between local populations are not unique toNorthern Mali. They can be found in the whole Sahel zone from Mauritania toSudan. Even the Swahili coast had its racial problems in the late colonial andearly independence period. 14 It will be argued here that the Sahel is not only apostslavery and postcolonial society, but also a society where racial discourse isat least always latently present.Let it be perfectly clear from the start that I do not use race as a category ofanalysis. Let me state it as plainly as possible that I here present race and racismas discursive categories, and as distinctions used by some of the players in this1011121314Sharkey, H. 2008.Lecocq, B. 2009.See for example Idris, A. 2001; Madut Jok, J. 2001; Nyombe, B. 1994; Sikainga, A.1996; and Sikainga, A. 1999.Madut Jok, J. 2001: 88.Glassman, J. 2000.