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120 CHAPTER 3clusion by the state and oppression by ‘Soudanese’ administrators and politicians.This implicit positioning outside the Malian state is perhaps most visiblein Mohamed Ayoul’s letter. Although he overtly claims to be a Malian citizenhe also speaks of ‘our brothers the Malians, that is to say the Soudanese commanders’.The Soudanese commanders are Malians since they represent thestate, instead of the excluded Kel Intessar.These thoughts are exactly mirrored in Governor Bakary Diallo’s choice ofwords when speaking of Mohamed Najim and the Kel Adagh. First, the KelTamasheq are not seen as African. Although Diallo holds Najim to be of goodservice, he should be replaced by an African officer as soon as a suitable one isfound. Second, the ‘unintelligent’ Kel Tamasheq have been ‘spoiled’ and influencedby colonial administrators ‘who accustomed them to illegality andirregularity’. Through this influence, they are perforce allies of neo-colonialism.The same point of view is reflected in Bakary Diallo’s speech quoted in theintroduction. Diallo’s opinion that Najim is not an African tallies with the ideathat ‘white Africans’, the Arabs and Berbers, originate from outside the Africancontinent, and thus with their implicit otherness. This otherness is here expressedas a different ‘national psychology’. The Kel Tamasheq have a different,Berber, ‘psychology’. They are unintelligent, but cunning and anarchist,and one needs someone to know this ‘national psychology’ in order to controlthem. For the moment, the only ones available were educated Kel Tamasheq.But even these ‘civilised’ Kel Tamasheq had better be surveyed since theireducation could also serve them to express their still latent anarchism and predilectionto violence, as the Kel Intessar petitioners demonstrate. Those willingto, especially those who held these conflicts to be neo-colonial machinationscould easily read Mohamed Ayoul’s reference to the war in Congo and theAlgerian war of independence as subtle threats to national unity with outsidesupport. This view might well have been prevalent among US-RDA politicians.Thus, for the moment, the regime could not function in the North withoutmen such as Mohamed Najim, since ‘Africans’ did not know the ‘Berber psychology’.On this point, all parties agree. The accusation by the Kel Intessar thatthe Soudanese did not know their character is fully acknowledged in Diallo’sviews on the ‘Berber psychology’. The Kel Tamasheq and the ‘Soudanese’ didnot know each other and acknowledged their mutual lack of understanding inmessages to each other stating the difference in a mutually shared discourse on‘national character’, or ‘national psychology’, inherited from colonial rule.Stereotypes could take over. In June 1963, one month after the start of therebellion, both Mohamed Najim and Mohamed Mahmoud were transferredfrom the Adagh to other posts. Najim was replaced by an ‘African’ officer,Diby Sillas Diarra, who stayed in command until 1967. The distrust toward KelTamasheq civil servants, and their consequent absence in local administration,