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92 CHAPTER 2The bellah questionOne of the main prejudices held against the Kel Tamasheq by the Malianregime and population at large is that they were slavers, slave raiders andslaveholders. 46 Even today, in Mali and especially Niger, the issue of slavery inTamasheq society is not resolved and continues to play a role in local politicsand in the popular image of the Kel Tamasheq. In both countries exist organisationsof former Tamasheq slaves furthering their economic, social andpolitical interests, apart from the rest of Tamasheq society, and in some respectsan independent cultural or ethnic identity. In Niger the Association Timidria,created in the early 1990s by former Tamasheq slaves, propagates that in Nigertoday slavery still exists on a large scale. With the support of Anti-SlaveryInternational (The Former British and International Anti-Slavery Society), Timidriaclaims their rights through written reports, lawsuits and ritual liberation,to the embarrassment of the Nigerien Government. 47 In Mali, the AssociationTemedt, an organisation with goals and a constituency similar to that of Timidria,was created during a conference of ‘black Tamasheq’ as they called themselves,in Ménaka in August 2006. 48 The historicity of Ménaka as the placewhere the politics of bellah emancipation started exactly sixty years earlierwould surely have not escaped the minds of the conference organisers. Althoughthe impact of Temedt seems smaller than that of Timidria, both organisationsform the current expression of the historical and actual importance ofdiscourses and politics of race and slavery in, and especially about, Tamasheqsociety, and their profound impact on state-society relations and rebellion inNorthern Mali.The stereotyped image of the Tamasheq slaveholder certainly held sometruth in the late colonial period, during which the new Soudanese elite formedits opinion of the Kel Tamasheq. Besides being a basis for prejudice, the emancipationof the former Tamasheq and Bidân slaves, the bellah and haratin,became one of the US-RDA’s major campaign themes in the North during the1950s. In addressing their emancipation, the US-RDA hoped to gain the votesof the former slaves and to profile itself as the champion of social equality andliberty. It also served to attack the main reason for prolonged French colonialdominancy, the mission civilisatrice française. This subject became known as‘the bellah question’.464748The ‘bellah question’ is explored in greater depth in Lecocq, B. 2005.Tidjani Alou, M. 2000. See especially Galy, K.A. & M.L. Dandah 2003.Based on the Minutes of its founding conference, the bylaws of the AssociationTemedt and a Press release sent to me by the Association Temedt as MicrosoftOffice Word documents. Private Archives.