SOULEYMANE DIALLO “The Truth about the Desert” Exile, Memory, and the Making of Communities among Malian Tuareg Refugees in Niger Souleymane Diallo · “The Truth about the Desert” Published by Modern Academic Publishing (MAP) 2018 Modern Academic Publishing (MAP) is an initiative from the University of Cologne that contributes to the digital humanities, in the field of electronic publishing. MAP is led by Prof Dr Gudrun Gersmann, Chair of Early Modern History. The MAP partners, the University of Cologne and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU), are funding the open-access publication of selected dissertations and post-doctoral monographs by humanist scholars of both universities. The main target of MAP is combining the support of highly awarded researchers at an early stage of their career with new digital formats of publishing in the humanities. www.humanities-map.net Souleymane Diallo “The Truth about the Desert” Exile, Memory, and the Making of Communities among Malian Tuareg Refugees in Niger Published by Modern Academic Publishing University of Cologne Albertus-Magnus-Platz 50923 Cologne Funded by the University of Cologne Text © Souleymane Diallo 2018 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Graphics, tables and figures may have different licenses. These will have been identified in the caption to relevant content. First published 2018 Accepted as a dissertation at the University of Cologne 2016 Cover image: A group of women Bellah-Iklan arriving in the refugee camp of Abala, southern Niger, 13/09/2014. Photograph: S. Diallo. Bibliographic information of the German National Library The German National Library lists the title in the German National Bibliography; to view detailed bibliographic information, visit http:/dnb.dnb.de. ISBN (Hardcover): 978-3-946198-32-1 ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-946198-33-8 ISBN (Mobi): 978-3-946198-34-5 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-946198-35-2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.16994/bai Production & publishing platform provided as part of the Ubiquity Partner Network Ubiquity Press Ltd, Unit 2N, 6 Osborn Street, London, E1 6TD, United Kingdom To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit: https://doi.org/10.16994/bai or scan this QR code with your mobile device: Content Acknowledgements IX Summary XI 1. Introduction 1 2. Fieldwork conditions and research methodology 21 3. Historical background 41 4. Refugee reflections on the social conditions of exile in Niamey and Abala 59 5. The refugees in retrospect in Mali 95 6. “The true history of Azawagh” (tarekhg wan tidit n Azawagh) 123 7. Adinat wi ataf nen atarekh (those who hold the culture, history, or tradition) 151 8. Conclusion—a “critical event” 181 List of Acronyms 187 Bibliography 189 Acknowledgements My gratitude, which goes to all those who have offered me help and advice during the many stages of this study, cannot be expressed in the few following lines but I nevertheless want to mention a few. My profoundest debt is to the Malian refugees who live in Niamey and the refugee camp Abala whose situation and accounts of their lives I explore in this study. I thank them for having welcomed and accepted me among them, and for manifesting such great interest in my research. I also want to thank the personnel of LASDEL in Niamey who introduced me to many refugees there. Professor Jean Pierre Olivier de Sardan generously invited me to LASDEL and facilitated my research in Niger. He always took time to offer me insightful suggestions and encouragement during my stays in Niger. Mahamane Daouda also greatly facilitated my access to and my research in the refugee camp of Abala. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) made this study possible through its many years of financial support. Professor Schulz enabled the com- pletion of the study through a DFG funded project based at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology of the University of Cologne. Alhousseny Coulibaly from Kidal filled me in on many details about the historical and social setting and issues discussed in this book. I am grateful to several friends and colleagues in Cologne, among them Carolin Maevis, Manon Diederich, Matian van Soest, Simone Pfeifer, Dr Patrick Desplat, and Giulia Gonzales in England for their encouragement and support, critical insights, and helpful suggestions during the period of time I worked on the dis- sertation. Manon Diederich gave valuable comments on earlier ruminations of the thesis, and Carolin Maevis and Giulia Gonzales commented on the entire pre- liminary version of the thesis with care and great thoughtfulness. Simone Pfeifer offered helpful suggestions on the first three first chapters, Matian van Soest on chapters 2 and 4, and Dr Patrick Desplat on chapter 4. Carolin, Manon, and Anna Krämer also helped me with formatting the final version of the dissertation. I am also grateful to Janine T Murphy, Susan Aurich, Professor Peter Ian Craw- ford, and Professor Dorothea Schulz for helping with language editing. To my supervisor, Professor Dorothea Schulz, I would like to express my end- less appreciation and respect for her guidance, fine ways of thinking and ques- tioning, and above all, the interest and confidence she placed in this project. Her influence on this work has been profound. My family, relatives, several friends in Mali, and Kaya’s family in Niamey gave me great emotional support and a sense of connectedness during the entire time of conducting the research for and writing of this study. I hope I could respond to at least some of the hopes and expectations they placed on me while doing so. Cologne, April 2017 Souleymane Diallo Summary This publication examines the diasporic living conditions and their effects on Tuareg refugees’ self-understandings, changing socio-political hierarchies, cul- tural practices and religious identity formations in Niger. It focuses, in particular, on male refugees’s responses to the loss in social status and respectability induced by adverse conditions of exile. Unlike most others, it is not a study of a Tuareg polity with a traditional emphasis on the nobility, whose loss in power, and status, and alterations in nomadic and semi-nomadic life style in the course of twentieth century due to droughts, and famine induced exile, and the persecution or sim- ple neglect of northern populations by the Malian central state have been docu- mented by scholars over the past decades. Instead, this book offers an ethnography of two Tuareg groups of inferior social status, and examines arguments and social practices by which the two refugees groups in Niger redefine themselves as two social collectivities in response to their living conditions in exile. It argues that by presenting themselves as collectives, the refugees groups redefine their inferior social status in the Tuareg society left back home in northern Mali. One protagonist group is composed of free-born non-noble, white or red Tuareg, who fled Mali to settle in urban Niamey between 1963 and 2012. The sec- ond group of refugees comprises the unfree Bellah-Iklan who came from Menaka region and live since 2012 with several other non-Bellah-Iklan refugees in Abala, southern Niger, in a refugee camp administered by the UNHCR. In spite of sig- nificant differences between the situation in Niamey and Abala, in both settings, a situation of material deprivation and rampant structural or enforced unemploy- ment, and experiences of being treated with hostility or arrogance, as foreign, dependent and supplicant undermine male refugees’ sense of dignity, male honor and respectability, fuel intergenerational struggles over economic and moral re- sponsabilities and obligations, and intra-marital conflicts. These conditions prompt the refugees with vassal social status background to imagine all white free-born Tuareg as a homogenous social collective, “a Tuareg people”, and through this, the informants in urban Niamey seek to become equal to the noble groups at the top of the social structure by blurring intra vassal cleav- ages and variations between free-nobles and the nobility. In their part, the unfree born, Bellah-Iklan refer to their living conditions in Abala, common history of servitude, and subjection, their racial and also their religious identity as well as marginalization within the Malian nation-state, as reasons to renounce member- ship in the Tuareg ethnic group, and to claim a common identity as “Black people of the desert” in the exile situation. Through this claim, the Bellah-Iklan reflex- ively downplay intra-Bellah-Iklan cleavages and redefine themselves as morally superior and the powerful group in relation to the free white Tuareg, implying a significant inversion of power vectors between the former Tuareg masters and the former slaves. X Summary While this book analyses in fine detail these refugees’ arguments in several chapters, one chapter examines how both groups of informants define their mem- bership of the social collective they express attachment through daily practices. In Niamey, these daily practices consist of visiting each other, listening to Tuareg music by Tinariwen, speaking Tamasheq, their language back home, clothing, through endogamy, mutual solidarity, and the desire to return back home in the future. In Abala, the Bellah-Iklan express their membership to the social col-