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292 CHAPTER 6chief. And he said to us, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, that it washis dream to bridle a black man and to ride him as a horse”. 70The Ganda Koy interpreted the Tamasheq rebellion as an attempt to regaincontrol over the Niger Bend and its inhabitants on a basis of their racial superiority.The author of Ganda Koy’s pamphlet ‘La Voix du Nord nº 00’ gave thisexplanation for the outbreak of revolt in clear terms.Not one armed rebel-bandit claims the Azawad, but he seeks recognition of the rightto dominate black peoples. (...) The armed rebels-bandits are racists, slave-drivers;they consider all blacks as slaves, as inferior beings. Even their intellectuals holdthese ideas. They refuse to live together with blacks. At best they tolerate blacks. 71Ganda Koy spokesmen made statements of the same kind in the nationalnewspapers.Again, it will never be said in the records of history that the Songhay people (theyexist) have meekly accepted to being delivered, their hands and feet bound, to theslave-drivers of the desert, spurned straight from medieval obscurity; pro-slaverssince they are only driven to this so called Tuareg rebellion by feudal, slave-driving,racist motives, and low mercantile considerations. 72The second element of Ganda Koy othering discourse was Tamasheq and Bidânsocial organisation. The societies of the Adagh and Azawad, be they Bidân orTamasheq, were hierarchical, hence feudal, and especially nomadic. The idea ofthe lazy, anarchist, unattached nomad who should be sedentarised and civilisedwas as alive in 1994 as it had been under Modibo Keita. Analysing the problemsof the North, an anonymous administrator in Gao gave his view of Tamasheqsociety and its problems:We have already mentioned nomadic existence. It was long deformed by the Western,particularly the French, press. One brings to mind the pride of the “blue men ofthe desert” in support of the Tuareg lobby. With regards to this subject, the picturepresented by a European development worker who lived in Kidal for a year speaksvolumes: “It is true that the Tuareg are proud, but proud of what? Everything but ofwork which they think is debasing. Rather, they are proud to beg, steal and kill”.There is evidence that gardening yields high profits in Kidal. The Tuareg are accustomedto gifts and it is rare to find Tuareg who think that, in lack of livestock,they could commit themselves to agriculture or other forms of production. 73Set in a language of reason and analysis, we rediscover all stereotypes of nomadunproductiveness and the type of character nomadic existence produces: Lazi-70717273Konan, ‘La libération des sédentaires’, Ivoir Soir, 27 & 31/05/1992, in Libertitres no14 (July August 1992).Anonymous I, ‘Extrait du no 00 de La Voix du Nord: Organe de combat des peuplessédentaires’ (n.p. n.d.).‘Ganda Koy l’oeil du Caïn de la IIIème République’, Le Tambour, 27/09/1994.‘Pourquoi une rébellion touarègue au Mali?’, Le Républicain, 14/12/1994.