ASC-075287668-2887-01

RACE, STEREOTYPES AND POLITICS 83social status, (former) slaves and casted craftsmen. This is parallel to the use ofthe term sudân in Arabic. But contrary to the Arabic use of the term bidân, inTamasheq the term ‘white’ (imoulan) is not used in racial discourse. Instead,Tamasheq makes use of the terms shaggaran – red – and sattefen – bluish black– to denote people of noble status and a particular phenotype. According toBrhane, a similar colour label is used in present-day Mauritania, where the termKhadriyîn (Arabic khadr, green) is used to denote a group of haratin who havebeen manumitted in ancient times and who have since acquired slaves themselves.28 Hence a similar colour to the Tamasheq sattefen – bluish black – ishere used to denote a social group in between free and unfree. It can be concludedthat local terms to describe racial and/or social status cannot easily betranslated into Western racial concepts of skin colour. Yet, during the colonialperiod this is exactly what happened. What follows is a complicated languagegame, but it is of importance to understand as it explains the mixture of racialconcepts that at present are at play in Northern Mali.To the colonial administration, Tamasheq society combined two races in onesocial order: ‘Blanc’ and ‘noir’. Through their own racial perceptions based onphenotype and skin colour, European explorers and French conquerors sawthose inhabitants of the Sahara, who would locally most likely be denoted asshaggaran, red, as blanc, while failing to ‘see’ the locally constructed racialdifference between sattefen – bluish black – and koual – black. Thus, while thelower strata of society were perceived as noir, the upper strata of society thatwould locally be seen as sattefen were simply seen as ‘racially impure’. Thisidea of racial impurity of the upper strata of society can already be found in theoldest ethnographic descriptions of the Kel Tamasheq, such as those of HeinrichBarth and Henry Duveryier, and they persisted throughout the colonial period.In 1951, the French Colonial Administrator Lieutenant Barthé noted about theTamasheq nobility of the Niger Bend, which would most likely be qualified assattefen, that ‘many are black and generally do not have the noble appearance ofthe inhabitants of the [Algerian] Hoggar’. 29 Through his own racial bias, anddespite a hundred years of ethnography, the French commander still translatedshaggaran as blanc and only blanc as noble. The French racial discourse hadhad a profound impact on local perceptions and constructions of race in SoudanFrançais. Bruce Hall argues that in pre-colonial days, not only Arabo-Berberfamilies had constructed a racial identity based on Islam and lineage. Songhayand Fulani elites in the Niger Bend also considered themselves as different from‘blacks’, albeit their claim was less thoroughly developed. But the French refusedto acknowledge this self-perception as ‘not black’, since their perception2829Brhane, M. 2000.Barthé, L. 1951, CHEAM 1911.