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200 CHAPTER 5common practice by all bureaucrats who could. It should be noted that the fewhigh-ranking officials of Kel Tamasheq origins were no better in that respect.Many a villa in Bamako and Timbuktu, indicated by the public as ‘chateaux dela sécheresse’, rose on the foundations of embezzled relief aid. What foodarrived in the refugee camps and drought-struck areas, arrived too late and wasoften of a kind or quality unfit for human consumption. But when it arrived, itpassed from the hands of the providing agencies into the care of the localauthorities who were in charge of its distribution. Again, corruption took its toll.Most of the offered foodstuffs were not freely distributed as was intended, butsold by functionaries at local markets at high prices. Aid that was freelydistributed was distributed unequally between the sedentary population and thenomads. The monitoring groups from the US Center for Disease Control surveyingthe famine in the Sahel and reporting to the US Government concludedthat:Survey data from 3,500 children emphasise the fact that undernutrition in the fourcountry area is to be found more among nomads than sedentary persons, and more inthe North than in the South. Children from nomad clusters ranged on the average tento seventeen percent below the threshold while those from sedentary or Southerngroups were approximately three to seven percent below. The existence of pocketsof extreme undernutrition is supported by data from all countries but particularlyfrom Mali where up to 80% of children from one nomad cluster were acutely undernourished.The above statements on the nutritional status of children must be consideredconservative. 19Information on what happened on the ground in Mali was scarce. Mostagencies and governments relied for information on the few journalists whowent to the Sahel and managed to get access to the refugee camps. Their accountsmay have been scant, but not necessarily incorrect. Le Monde reporterPhilippe Decreane might have been the best informed, given his networksamong former colonial officers in France. 20 Invoking the pre-colonial relationsbetween nomads and sedentary populations; racial issues; the OCRS; and eventhe 1963 rebellion in the Adagh, Decraene concluded that ‘Bamako’ was takingthe opportunity to settle ‘the nomad problem’ once and for all.The army can have its way in the 6 th Région. The area is geographically isolated andsparsely inhabited. There live only about a dozen Europeans, and the ‘sand curtain’veils the region from the rest of the world. Who manages to pass through thatcurtain is met with the silence of the Government officials. (…) Our guide refuses usaccess to the food warehouses. Some shops sell the relief aid grain supplies. It is1920Kloth, I. 1974. Nutritional Surveillance in West Africa. Atlanta: US Public HealthService, Center for Disease Control. In: Sheets, H. & R. Morris 1974: 132.Decreane started his career in journalism as Africa correspondent for Le Monde in1958 and became the director of the former colonial institute CHEAM in 1983.