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130 CHAPTER 3Diallo gave a very vivid image of the Malian vision on French colonial policiesin the Sahara, and its social and political outcomes:The colonial regime has entailed a prejudicial policy towards the nomads, of whichthe consequences are now fully visible. The colonial maniacs, in love with exotism,wanted to preserve the nomads for anthropologists, berberophile ethnographers, andOrientalist scholars exasperated by the XXth century, for whom an island of menuntouched by the pollution of progress had to be found, so they could inhale thedelicious perfume of antiquity from time to time. Thus, while everywhere else thefirst act of the colonial regime was to suppress slavery, France authorised the whitenomad to keep his black slave called “bellah”. The nomad was dispensed frommilitary service and education. (...) Nomad society, as it is left to us by the colonialregime, undoubtedly poses us problems in light of the objectives of our sociopoliticalprogramme. (...) Our objective is to know the problems that we, in referenceto the colonial regime, will call the nomad problem. 39Photo 3.1Bakary Diallo (with sunglasses),Governor of the Gao Région, in 1963.[Source: Klemm, H. & H. Klemm, Die Enkel der Könige. Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt.Courtesy of Mrs. H. Klemm.]39Typescript of speech by Gouverneur de la Région de Gao, Conférence régionale descadres politiques, administratifs, août 1962. AMATS dossier no 6.