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132 CHAPTER 3made sedentary life less hazardous. The most western Arrondissement of Ti-n-Essako was rightly seen as totally unsuitable for sedentary life, since the plainsof the Tamesna had no permanent or even temporary water wells. Even if someKel Adagh settled in villages, this was only on a temporary basis. To the annoyanceof the administration, nomads would settle during the dry season, cultivatingsmall gardens, only to leave again after the rainy season had started.Commandant de Cercle Diarra noted in August 1967:Many settled nomads, who consider nomadism these days as a holiday, have abandonedthe villages and their gardens in favour of the tents, thus compromising thesuccess of the first part of our agricultural plan. We have been obliged to redistributethe abandoned gardens among the workers who remained, especially to a bellahfraction which made demands for a collective garden. 41Nevertheless, some nomads settled for at least part of the year. Places likeAguelhok, Boughessa, Telabit and Anefis, until then mere names on a map,became real villages after 1964. A few figures give us an idea of this process. In1967, the village of Aguelhok counted 122 inhabitants. 42 Kidal town grew from460 inhabitants in 1960 to 1,945 inhabitants in 1967. 43 However, it is unclearhow many of these inhabitants were sedentarised nomads and how many werecivil and military servicemen and their families who were strongly present inthe Adagh after the 1964 rebellion. The earliest reliable data we have for thenumbers of sedentary inhabitants and the numbers of nomadic inhabitants in theAdagh after independence dates from 1974. In that year the census counted atotal of 15,489 people, of whom 3,544 were sedentary villagers and 11,945 nomads.But the number of town dwellers is likely to have been inflated by thenumber of drought refugees who took up nomadic existence again when conditionswere favourable. In Kidal city, it seems the only settled Kel Adagh werethe goumiers with their families, amounting to 417 people, and 146 formerslaves who had settled in town. In Aguelhoc and Telabit there lived, in all, 76villagers of unspecified origins. In Tessalit there lived 808 town dwellers, ofwhich the majority is likely to have been of Algerian origins. 44Above I have briefly sketched the outcomes of the French colonial educationalpolicies in the North. The Malian attitude towards educating the KelTamasheq was entirely different. It was perceived as a first necessity to bringthe Kel Tamasheq within the modern progressive world, liberating them from41424344Cercle de Kidal, Revue mensuelle des évènements du mois d’août 1967. ACK.Arrondissement d’Aguelhoc, Revue mensuelle des évènements du mois de mai1967. ACK.Rapport du Commandant de Cercle de Kidal sur le problème d’eau face à la sédentarisationdans l’Adrar, 02/06/1967. ACK.Répertoire des villages 1974, Région de Gao. ACK.