[FRANCE24] With their faces obscured behind prodigious indigo turbans and their uncanny navigational skills in a primordial landscape, the Tuareg are perfect Orientalist fantasy material and the French have been working that narrative for over a century.From the line-etched logo of the famously difficult Dakar Rally, to tourist brochures offering encounters with les mysterieux hommes bleus du Sahara, the mysterious "blue men" are portrayed as "aristocrats of the desert, proud as princes" with a fierce fighting record in a fierce terrain.
"It started with the colonial imagination of looking at a group of people and deciding that one group is more 'interesting' compared to the other," said Mamadou Diouf, director of the Institute for African Studies at Columbia University, New York.
"It was the French who invented the title 'the blue men' because of their clothes and their ability to appear and disappear in the Sahara and it was very much part of the French colonial ethnology," explained Diouf.
More than a century after the French conquest of the Sahara, much has changed in the terrain that stretches across present day Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
But following last week's liberation of the northern Malian city of Kidal - marking the end of the first phase of the intervention in Mali - the French discourse on the Tuareg has a ring of déjà vu.
This time, the narrative centres on the latest incarnation in a long list of postcolonial Tuareg rebel groups - the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad).
With the Islamist militants retreating to the remote Ifoghas mountains near the Mali-Algeria border, the French-led mission has reached a difficult phase in terrain far from the Malian capital of Bamako. Once again, the Tuareg are being sought for their desert navigational skills, this time in the crackdown against al Qaeda-linked militants.
"They are important allies for Bamako," said Pierre Boilley, director of the Paris-based CEMAF (Centre d'Études des Mondes Africains) who believes that without the MNLA, the war against terrorism in the region is doomed to failure.