What do the Touareg want?
http://www.andymorganwrites.com/what-do-the-touareg-want/
ANALYSIS: Secular nationalist? Loyalist? Die-hard Islamist? – what are the currents of opinion among the Touareg of Northern Mali? (First published in Al Jazeera English eMagazine, Jan 2013)
Touareg boy watching Camel Race, T. Essako
What do the Touareg want? Well, find me a person called ‘the Touareg’ and maybe he or she will tell us. You might as well find ‘the English’ or ‘the Japanese’ and ask them what they want while you’re at it.
A nation or people rarely if ever think as one. In the case of the Touareg, difference and disharmony is exacerbated by their vast desert habitat and dispersed nomadic lifestyle, both of which tend to foster an allegiance to blood and tribe that is stronger than their attachment to nation or ideology and militate against collective thought or action.
It can be argued that the very notion of a people called ‘The Touareg’ is an invention of 19th century explorers and anthropologists, who adopted this supra-tribal and alien, i.e. Arab, collective noun to group together the Amazigh or Berber speaking nomadic tribes of the southern Sahara. Before ‘Touareg’ there were only different clans loosely affiliated by their language and cultural habits; Taitoq, Kel Ghela, Kel Ajjer, Kel Gress, Kel Fadey, Kel Ferwan, Ifoghas, Taghat Mellet, Iwellemeden, Chamanamas, Kel Antessar, Daoussahak…the list is long.
And all these clans were further sub-divided into sub-clans and sub-sub-clans. Within one of the six large confederations – the Kel Ahaggar, Kel Ajjer, Kel Aïr, Kel Adagh, Iwellemeden and Kel Taddemakkat – clans and sub-clans were organized into a complex hierarchy of nobles, vassals, warriors, artisans, marabout and slaves. This intricate social structure, which is well nigh-impossible for an outsider to grasp instinctively, underpins modern Touareg politics, despite the considerable erosion of the old clan system in the past century or so.
This historical backdrop, coupled with the fact that the Touareg share their living space with other ethnicities like the Arabs, Fulani and Songhoi, all of whom have their own layered clan structure, makes the Sahara one of the most complex places on earth for an outsider to understand.
