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134 CHAPTER 3Fasobara and the Service Civique have left bitter memories among all Malianswho lived those days, as they resembled the colonial forced labour and thedeuxième portion. However, to the Kel Tamasheq of free origins, both fasobaraand the deuxième portion were unknown since they had been exempted fromforced labour and military recruitment of any kind in colonial times. To them,the state demands in labour were an entirely new experience, and so were theworks they were forced to do: Building houses and tending gardens. What madethings worse from a Tamasheq perspective, was that the regime forced womento work as well. In an ideal Tamasheq discourse on work and activity, womenof free descent do not work. Only younger women of lower social status mightbe active as goat herders. Women are only responsible for putting up the tents(which are theirs) and cooking. The house slaves provide all other necessarylabour. If these are absent, men and boys fetch firewood and water, tasks that ina Mande household would be women’s labour. Although in reality manyTamasheq women worked, labour divisions and practices were still differentfrom those in the South. This was much to the contempt of southern administrators.As one Lieutenant Mamadou Traoré, Chef d’Arrondissement in Ti-n-Essako observed:Here, men are revolted by manual labour. Their efforts are restricted to watering theanimals and fetching water. In certain classes and by weakness of character, theyvoluntarily consent to perform household tasks instead of their spouses. (...) Previouslyisolated from the outside world, the nomad woman is now involved in certainactivities: Fetching water and tending the animals. She evolves more rapidly thanthe men do. 47Thus, women were put to work making clay bricks at the sites of humaninvestment. This practice seems to have been put in place after February 1964,when the Malian army installed the ‘zone of retreat’ (see Chapter 3), concentratingthe civil population – especially the women – in urban centres. This isstill remembered with great resentment in the Adagh.Mali put women in prison. He [Mali] forced them to make bricks. If they didn’tmake bricks, he killed them and flogged them. Tamasheq women who, before, didnot even pick up with their own hand what was in front of their eyes! 48The fact that women were forced to work was not the only source of resentment.Forced labour on the sites of human investment was exactly seen assuch, and this experience was then put to words in the local discourse ondomination: That of slavery. This in turn would upset the Southern administratorswho felt attacked in their dignity.4748Rapport de synthèse de fin d’année 1972 de l’Adjudant Mamadou Traoré, Chefd’Arrondissement de Ti-n-Essako no 007\SC\A.TKO. ACK.Conversation with Mohamed Lamine ag Mohamed Fall. Kidal, 23/05/1999.