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REBELLION: AL-JEBHA 291are, the more the image of the other becomes hostile and, especially, reduced. Itis not only negative, it is almost void of substance as substance involves nuance.This process of stronger essentialisation and the drawing of fixed boundariesof self and other, followed by a nuancing of images and the reopening ofboundaries when the opposing parties felt the need for reconciliation, can beseen at work in the discourse accompanying the conflict between the GandaKoy and the Kel Tamasheq.The Ganda Koy’s problem was on what stereotype and criteria the constructionof the Kel Tamasheq other should be focused. Tamasheq society isheterogeneous and so are the other societies of the North. Apart from the KelTamasheq, Bidân and Songhay, the North is inhabited by the Fulbe; Bambara;Dogon; and Bozo. Nevertheless, one thing was relatively clear: the rebellion,and thus the problems of the other inhabitants of the North, had been organisedand started by the Kel Tamasheq and Bidân from the Northernmost part ofMali, the Adagh and Azawad. From these groups, only the upper strata ofsociety had been involved. The rebels could thus easily be ‘othered’ on criteriaapplicable to these groups only. The first was their racial appearance, their‘whiteness’. Most Ganda Koy discourse focused on the Kel Tamasheq as ‘whitepeople’. Historical discourse on the relations between the Songhay and the KelTamasheq played an important part as well. The Kel Tamasheq were not onlyportrayed as white, but especially as slavers who had enslaved the Songhay inpre-colonial times. Ideas about Tamasheq racism and practices of slaveryresurfaced in Southern Mali with the rebellion. In May 1992, the Ivorianjournalist Venance Konan tried to find the reasons for the rebellion while travellingin Mali. Although he may not have found them, the quotes from his interviewsgive a rare insight into the thinking of the average Malian on Tamasheqsociety, and its divisions between blacks and whites, masters and slaves. Hisown words too might give an impression of what the average West Africanintellectual might have thought on the same issues.From Saint-Louis to Addis Ababa, there runs a line above which people are whiteand feel different and superior to blacks. How often has one not heard Moroccans,Tunisians and Algerians say “you Africans”. The peoples to the north of this line,one should not hide it, have always been and, in some cases, still are slavers. TheTuareg today still have black slaves. In Bamako, they have told me various storiesabout the relations between Tuareg and blacks and between Tuareg and their slaves.Masters who break the arms of disobedient slaves, bella slave students obliged toserve them. (...) Seydou Boiré, a geographer who lived for a long time in Tamasheqcountry gave me a rather instructive case: “One day, we drank tea with a Tamasheq