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RACE, STEREOTYPES AND POLITICS 99are even scarcer than on those of the bellah, except for some party rhetoric inmonthly reports, which never omitted to say something likeThe sentiments of hostility clearly disappear, to make way for honest and loyalcollaboration between members of different groups. A team spirit blossoms at thehonourable sites of human investment. Most of them, having hardly passed the doorstepsof obscurantism, barely gaining conscience of belonging to a nation, havingjust shed a state of irresponsibility, are almost blinded by the eternally radiant perspectivesof our socialist option: Socialism. On the triumphant march towards thegoals of Socialism they progress like the others. Stumbling from time to time, butnevertheless progressing. 69I hope to make clear in the following chapters that this appraisal of localsentiments was utterly wrong.The slave trade to MeccaThroughout the first half of the twentieth century, slavery and slave trade remainedlegal on most of the Arabian Peninsula and as far as it was illegal, tradeand ownership remained lively despite continued efforts by the British Navypatrols in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. 70 Only in 1962, with the installation ofking Faysal, were slavery and the slave trade formally abolished in SaudiArabia. The history of abolition in Saudi Arabia in the early 1960s is entangledwith the history of Mali and with the history of some of the main political actorsin Northern Mali in the 1950s: Mohamed Ali ag Attaher Insar, Marouchett agMoussa and Sidi Mohamed ag Zokka. It should be stressed that the slave tradeto Saudi Arabia had both all of French West Africa and French Central Africaand Baluchistan in present-day Pakistan as its main sources. African pilgrims toMecca were not always sure to return home safely as they might end up beingenslaved. 71 There is enough evidence that people from West Africa were indeedsold as slaves in the Arab Peninsula. French commanders were well aware ofthe existence of this trade and did not deny its existence in internal administrativecorrespondence or even to the outside world. Those French officers whowere sent to accompany the pilgrims to Mecca as ‘pilgrim agents’ on what wasreferred to as the ‘official’ pilgrimage, such as Marcel Cardaire, Gabriel Ferraland Georges Brouin paid particular attention to the subject, stating as muchdetail on the trade as possible. But the final abolition in Saudi Arabia in 1962came partly about through an international media scandal over the last remnantsof slave trade to Saudi Arabia involving some Tamasheq chiefs and the Malian697071Arrondissement d’Aguelhoc, Revue mensuelle des évènements du mois d’août1964. ACK.A detailed presentation is beyond the scope of this work. See Miers, S. 2003.Ibid.: 339-352.