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6 INTRODUCTIONcategorised as ‘black’. This social classification into five groups still form thebasis of description of Tamasheq society by many present-day researchers, althoughmore and more reluctantly so.Actually, it is not at all clear what it exactly means to be a member of any ofthese groups nowadays. Slavery was formally abolished in 1905 in French WestAfrica, and Tamasheq slaves were gradually emancipated since the 1940s, aswe will see in Chapter 1. At present, slavery formally no longer exists at all,although the emancipation process is still incomplete. 6 The imghad deny anyform of actual dependency on the nobles. At most they pay an honorary tribute,the tiwse, the worth of which is trivialised by the giving party, and sometimeseven by the receiving party. This does not mean however, that anyone deniestheir existence as a social category. To the contrary, being imghad or not is ofthe utmost importance in Northern Mali ever since the 1960s, and it gained evenmore importance during the rebellion of the 1990s as a form of self-ascription.However, what it exactly means to be imghad is an issue of hot debate andopinions differ. It is not even clear whether a social group called ineslemenactually exists. The exact meaning of the word is ‘Muslims’ and all Tamasheqare Muslims. True enough, some tewsiten are in one way or another connectedto a Muslim identity, such as the Ifoghas who claim shorfa status (descent ofthe prophet Muhammad) or the Kel Essuq who are generally connected withreligious study such as fiqh and therefore called alfaqiten, a Berber plural of theArabic faqîh. But the strict hierarchical distinction made between ineslimen andother tewsiten is difficult to make. At present, the social political meaning of theword amashegh – noble – is very unclear. In present-day Northern Mali theterm seems to be reserved to denote small groups of Ouillimiden, tewsiten ofthe former ruling elite of the Ouillimiden confederation that ruled NorthernMali in the 19 th century. They are often referred to as ‘Bajan’s (their leader)imushagh’ or, when speaking French, ‘les Touaregs’. Formerly an external ethnonym,the word is now internally used to denote exactly the one quintessentialgroup imagined to be Tuareg in the global imagery of consumption.It is only clear that one is born into either group and that these groups standin a certain hierarchical relation to each other. What that hierarchy looks like orwhether it should be there in the first place is another matter which is, as hasbeen said earlier, hotly debated within Tamasheq society.I would like to propose another way of looking at this system of hierarchicalstrata, one not based on the old colonial parallel to feudalism. As I see it, themain criteria for classification of the existing groups are the following threeoppositions: Free – unfree; strong – weak; and lineage – non-lineage.6Lecocq, B. 2005.