This is a draft of a forthcoming article on the current crisis
in Mali. The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference
has been important in generating, and intensifying, civil wars
that have occurred in all of the countries that straddle the
southern edge of the Sahara Desert (or Sahel) since the end of
colonial rule. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories
deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an
older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery
and non-blackness (i.e. Arab-ness, Tuareg-ness, Fulbe-ness,
etc.) with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces
the development of arguments about race over a period of more
than three hundred and fifty years (1600-1960) in one important
place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, the Niger
Bend in northern Mali. Using local Arabic documents held in
Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral
interviews, the book demonstrates that local arguments about
racial difference long pred