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CONCLUSIONS 311to promote the interests of the lower strata of society: the bellah and imghad.These policies had not been successful at the time. They had formed a majorcause for the discontent and subsequent violent rebellion of the Kel Adagh in1963. But only a decade later, with the Keita Regime gone, the new Tamasheqrevolutionaries not only sought to liberate their country from ‘foreign occupation’,they also sought to liberate it from tribal structures and ‘feudal’ leadershipand social relations. The prejudices once held against them were now part of aTamasheq image of self. In the end, the attempt to rid society of its ‘feudalchiefs and social relations’ failed as much as the attempt to liberate the countryfrom Malian rule. After the ‘fratricidal war’ between the competing rebel movementsMPA and ARLA in 1994, and especially after the initiative for a lastingpeace in Northern Mali in October 1994 initiated by the tribal chiefs of theBourem Cercle, the power of the tribal leaders was even strengthened at theexpense of the Tanekra revolutionaries. The failure of the movement to incorporatethe bellah as a social group would eventually lead many of them tojoin the Ganda Koy, a vigilante movement that sought to end the Tamasheqrebellion in violence and ethnic cleansing.Stereotypes, nation and raceThe discursive shape the conflict between the Malian state and nation and theKel Tamasheq and Bidân took, forms part of a problem that haunts all of theSahel, a problem often seen as one of ethnicity, but locally phrased in terms ofrace.Soudan Français consisted of a number of different cultural and politicalspheres. One can safely say that the further apart geographically, the lesscontact these spheres had. Besides, in particular respects, these spheres weregoverned differently. Northern Mali remained under military administration until1947 and particular social and cultural relations, especially regarding slavery,forced labour, and military recruiting, were judged differently on the basis of aracial perception of nomad society. When true interaction is lacking, ideas andattitudes towards each other are mostly informed by stereotyped images thatwere partly based on a perception of the colonial racial differentiation in administration,and partly on much older pre-existing stereotypes. The image theUS-RDA leaders had of the Kel Tamasheq and Bidân was that they were‘white’, feudal, slavers and ‘colonial darlings’. The image the Kel Tamasheqand Bidân had of the Southern US-RDA elite was that they were ‘black’usurpers of a power they had no right to have and which would upset socialstructure and power balances within society. The ‘bellah question’ of the 1940s;the Tamasheq involvement in the slave trade to Saudi Arabia in the 1950s; andcollaboration in attempts to incorporate Northern Soudan Français in other