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80 CHAPTER 2history to explain and justify their actions. From its beginnings in the late1940s, the tension between the Kel Tamasheq and ‘Mali’ has been expressedthrough local and/or imported ideas on race. Both the Kel Tamasheq and theMalian political elite, as well as more common citizens used, and still use,concepts of race in their construction of ‘the other’.In his influential book Desert Frontier, James Webb argues that the Westernusage of the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ as racial markers ‘seem to be a distantand refracted borrowing from the Arabo-African past’. 15 Webb rightly warns usof the dangers that lie in extrapolating European and American histories andhistorical constructs of race to the Sahel, to which could be added the danger ofconflating Southern African histories of race and race construction. But Webbalso hints at the possible common histories in the construction of racial identitiesin the European and Arab-African world. This idea is endorsed and furtherdeveloped by Amir Idris in his writings on racial discourses and slavery in theSudan. 16 The question of conflagration of these racial discourses is especiallyimportant in the postcolonial Sahara and Sahel. In other words: Can a term suchas ‘race’ be used to describe the social realities and discourses of the presentdaySahel, and if so, how can it be historically analysed? This question has sofar been most elaborately dealt with for Northern Mali by Bruce Hall in his PhDMapping the River in Black and White: Trajectories of Race in the Niger Bend,Northern Mali. 17 Hall retraces the history of Arabic racial discourse in theSahara and Sahel since the 17 th century, and their final intermixture with Europeanracial discourses in the colonial period. With Webb, Hall argues that ecologicalchanges in the region since the 16th century worked in favour of nomadpastoral groups to the disadvantage of sedentary communities, leading to thepolitical and military dominance of the former over the latter. This dominancewas partly legitimated in a racialist discourse on cultural and religious differencesborrowed in part from the thinking of Ibn Khaldûn on the origins ofphenotypical difference. Ibn Khaldûn refuted the ‘Ham thesis’, linking theorigins of race to the story of Noah’s curse of his son Ham, but his thinking wasracial in that he linked phenotypical difference to cultural, religious and mentalinferiority, positioning the inhabitants of the most extreme zones, the Africansand the Slav populations of Europe close to animals. He explained this inferioritythrough the classic Greek theory of seven climatic zones, and the detrimentaleffects of living in the most northern and southern climates. Of course,this theory presented a major hermeneutical flaw in failing to explain the rise ofIslam in such an intemperate climate as the Arabian Peninsula, which is refuted151617Webb, J. 1994: xxvi.Idris, A. 2001.Hall, B. 2005.