Tuareg Tribe: The Incredible History of the Tuareg People In The 1800s

Tuareg Tribe

By the end of the 1800s, the Tuareg Tribe were slowly losing power over the huge area they had been living in. The French started to move from Senegal into West Africa, then into North Africa. This placed the nomads in the middle of two parts of the same foreign power, which wanted to connect its holdings on either side of the continent.

The Tuareg Tribe were one of the groups that fought colonization the hardest and longest. They were determined to keep their independence and freedom. The River Tuaregs killed many of Bonnier’s men at Takoubao in February 1894, but Colonel Joffre took control of the city of Timbuktu anyway.

In the east, Madidou, the amenokal of the Iwllemmedan, made a treaty with Lieutenant Hourst of the French Navy in 1896. Hourst was coming down the River Niger, and Madidou’s group gave up and surrendered to the French in 1902. This meant that by the early 1900s, the French controlled both sides of the Niger. At the same time, troops from Algeria were slowly moving south across the Sahara. The Flamand-Pein mission took over the city of In Salah on December 28, 1899. At the same time, the Eu mission set up shop in the deserts of Tidikelt and Touat. 

In 1901, Lieutenant Colonel Laperrine took command of the Saharan Oases and established the Saharan Companies. On May 7, 1902, Lieutenant Cottenest broke through the Hoggar and defeated the Tuaregs in the Battle of Tit. Not long after this fight, the famous Kel Ahaggar warlord Moussa ag Amastane gave up and let the French take over. 

At Timiawin in April 1904, Laperrine, who was coming from the north, met Captain Théveniaud, who had left from the banks of the Niger. This was the first time that troops from Sudan and Algeria worked together. However, the real occupation of the Adrar des Ifoghas didn’t occur until 1908. Additionally, the Convention of Niamey in 1909 established the border between Algeria and French Sudan.

However, the French still faced significant uprisings, which prevented them from effectively suppressing the Tuaregs. Firhun, the amenokal of the Iwllemmedan, led one of them in 1916, while Kaocen of the Kel Air led the other. Through the Sanussiyya order, Kaocen became friendly with both the Ottoman Turks and the Germans. Lastly, Kel Ajjer didn’t lose control of the city of Djanet until 1920.

The traditional chiefs ran the colonial government because the French never had more than a small physical presence in this vast area. It was their job to gather their people for the census and use that information to figure out how to pay their taxes. 

In the same vein, justice was generally based on customary law. During the colonial period, there were not many changes or improvements to the territory, and schooling was still in its early stages. The French government’s primary responsibility was to keep things in order, both inside and outside of France. In its early years as a colony, its primary concerns were combating the rezzous, primarily from Morocco to the south, and ensuring the arbitration of internal disputes.

Even so, colonization did have some important results. The creation of administrative borders across the Sahara broke up the Tuareg lands, which had been the basis for economic activities, relationships, and social and political ties. This had a huge impact on Tuareg society’s ability to work together. 

As new power relationships were set up, old ones between masters, relationships of dependence within the country, and relationships of dominance over the nomadic peoples of the Sudanese Sahel were all broken up. 

When a whole group of people were pushed to the edges of new economic systems brought about by colonization and they still hadn’t gotten used to the new social and political structures of the settled population (who were being educated and made more open to outside influences), it took a long time for the Tuaregs to catch up. 

At the time of decolonization, when the Tuareg people were already on the outside of a growing society, the French left them in this terrible position. In 1963, the Tuaregs of the Adrar of the Ifoghas rose up against Mali’s new government. Other Tuareg groups did not join this first uprising, though, and the new Malian army put down the rebellion with a lot of killing. 

Because of this, the Tuareg groups in the Sahel came to not trust the government. At the same time, in Mali and Niger, the new regimes took over the military and administrative systems left over from the French and began a new kind of colonization of the nomad populations. The Tuaregs were not part of these states’ structures; not many Tuaregs joined the military or the highest levels of government. 

The troops managed their areas and didn’t see many building projects. These already tough conditions got a lot worse during the frequent droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, which killed off a lot of animals and made pastoral nomadism less viable. 

Many hundreds of thousands of Tuaregs fled to nearby Algeria, Mauritania, and Libya, but they had to live on the edges of cities in the Sahel without any resources and in dangerous conditions. A large number of young men went to Libya because they knew they could find work there. 

Many of them joined Colonel Moammar Gaddafi’s forces and participated in Libya’s external campaigns, primarily in Chad and Lebanon. Young Tuaregs used these events to get military training in case they wanted to rebel in the future. They also got together publicly and formed the Front populaire de libération du Sahara arabe central (FPLSAC) in September 1980. In 1990, the FPLSAC began its rebellion. 

The killings by the army at Tchin Tabaraden in Niger outraged people all over the world, but Iyad ag Ghali’s armed attack on Menaka in June 1990 marked the real beginning of the uprising in Mali. Then there were dozens of attacks on Mali’s military sites in the Adrar of the Ifoghas. 

President Moussa Traoré, Mali’s dictator, was already fighting democratic opponents in the south of the country. To gain more power in that area, he signed the Tamanrasset accords with the Mouvement populaire de l’Azawad and the Front islamique arabe de l’Azawad on January 6, 1991. However, these agreements, forged too quickly, yielded no results.

On March 26, 1991, Banako overthrew Moussa Traoré’s government. In the north of the country, the troops and the different groups of Tuaregs were constantly fighting with each other. 

There were many complex reasons for these divisions within the group, including disagreements about the fight’s ultimate goals, personal rivalries and strategies, differences in geography and family ties, social conflicts within the group, and opposition to the traditional structures of chieftainships and dominant lineages. 

After months of negotiations, the Mouvements et Fronts unifiés de l’Azawad and the new Mali government under Amadou Toumani Touré signed an agreement on April 11, 1992. This agreement was called the Pacte National (National Pact), and it happened right before Alpha Omar Konaré became the first democratically elected president of Mali. 

The Pacte nationals allowed the rebel fighters to become part of Mali society. The Pacte National also conferred a unique status on the north, resulting in significant decentralization. Because of this, there was less and less danger, and the ceremony of the Flamme de la Paix (Flame of Peace) on March 27, 1996, when the rebel groups said they were breaking up, was a sign of the return of peace to Mali. 

Things happened in Niger in a similar way. On May 15, 1992, the Front de libération de l’Aér et de l’Azawakh signed an initial cease-fire agreement with the state of Niger. This was after many attacks in the north of the country, especially in the Air Mountain. This didn’t last, so in March 1993, there was a second cease-fire. Mano Dayak’s leadership in the Coordination de la résistance armée finally brought the rebel movement together after it split into several fronts. In February 1994, Dayak laid out his political platform. 

There were long talks between Burkina Faso, France, and Algeria that led to the signing of a peace deal on April 24, 1995. But it wasn’t until November 28, 1997, that the last Tuareg rebels in the Union des forces de la résistance armée, who were working with the Toubou rebels, signed a deal with the Niger government. When the Tuaregs rose up, they didn’t question the state borders that Mali and Niger still had from when they were colonies. 

Instead, they aimed to better integrate the nomad groups excluded since decolonization into politics, the economy, and society. In both countries, achieving this required the Tuaregs to become full citizens, recognizing their culture as an integral part of the country’s identity, and ensuring the Tuareg regions were truly open to everyone.

By the end of the 1990s, hundreds from the Tuareg Tribe had joined the regular forces of both states, and people in the South were starting to understand that nomad societies were an important part of their countries. These goals appeared to be imminently achievable.

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