This article offers a critique of widely disseminated portrayals of northern Malian Tuareg by outside media, which tend to portray all Tuareg as warriors and criminals and to project pseudo-scientific concepts of “race” onto relationships between Tuareg and other Malians, recalling the now discredited colonial “Hamitic Myth” in Rwanda. It also analyzes local oral historical accounts that present themes of Mali as both a protected fortress and welcoming crossroads, a country that both resists and absorbs intruders, and that also express concepts of identity based on language, culture, and flexible social affiliation. The article is based partly on interviews with internationally known local musicians who function as mediating “third voices,” and concludes with a discussion of wider implications of these findings for notions of voice, authority, and the mutual construction of ideas of Africa.
