Former finance minister Soumalia Cissé, also a candidate in Mali’s presidential elections wrote “May God bless Mali" after announcing his decision, on Twitter, to conceding defeat in person to President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

Mr Cissé’s is an extremely rare gesture in a continent where election aftermaths are riddled with disputes, legal tussles, riots and violence, turning competitive elections into the most potent trigger of conflict from Cote d’Ivoire to the Democratic Republic of Congo and from Kenya to Zimbabwe.

Election observers also gave the election a clean bill of health, with the European Union and US observers declaring it “credible and transparent.”

But Mali’s August 2013 election was preceded by a highly complex and multi-layered 18-month conflict, described by some analysts as a “racial war.” Obviously, the election will not end Mali’s crisis overnight.

But a resounding electoral victory, with just under 40 per cent of the vote, in both rounds of the recently concluded elections, is a mandate for President Keita to embark on post-election national healing, stabilisation and reconstruction.

When the eminent pan-Africanist W.E.B DuBois declared that “the problem of the 20th century is the colour line,” he definitely did not have Mali in mind.

However, many analysts see the conflict that preceded Mali’s recent election as a problem of “the colour line”— a protracted “racial war” between Mali’s “black African” majority, which also controls the national government and the military, and the “light skinned” Arab-Berbers, especially the Tuareg, who have waged a series of armed insurgencies against the Malian state since the exit of the French colonialists in 1960.

The best intellectual articulation of the “racialised” character of the Malian conflict is by the Duke University historian, Dr Bruce S.

Hall, author of the award-winning book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (June 2011).

“From Sudan to Mauritania,” writes Dr Hall, “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 with predatory and uncivilised banditry.”

He concludes that “the mobilisation of local ideas and histories of racial difference has been important in generating and intensifying, civil wars in the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.”

Malians liberally invoke the racial discourse in social exchanges about the “racist attitudes” of one group towards another, often drawing on longstanding grievances over histories of slavery and racialised violence.

Mali’s pre-election conflict unfolded in three distinct waves:

The first wave

The first wave of the conflict started in January 2012 as a “Tuareg rebellion” and as part of a series of insurgencies by the nomadic Tuareg that hearken back at least to 1916.

This racialised conflict pitted the “black” government forces against the secular-nationalists coalesced around the Tuareg dominated National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), a political and military organisation founded in Azawad/northern Mali in October 2011 largely by Tuareg militants believed to have previously fought in the Libyan army and returned to Mali after the war.

At the start, the MNLA was militarily backed by two Islamist militias, the Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith) and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

The uprising was fed by three interlocking developments.

First, as a domino effect of the Arab Spring, the death of Muammar Gaddafi and the end of the Libyan civil war led to a massive influx of heavy weaponry and arming of Tuareg nationalists.

Malian Arab and Tuareg mercenaries returning from Libya also swelled the ranks of the separatists who, inspired by the Arab Spring, renewed their long-standing demand for the independence of their desert state of Azawad.

Also driving the rebels was a deep sense of grievance and frustration over claims of racial exclusion of the Arab and Tuareg people by successive governments in Bamako.

Over the years, this disaffection was behind no less than four ethnic rebellions involving the Tuareg since Mali gained Independence from France in 1960.

Malian refugees, mainly Tuaregs and Arabs now in refugee camps strewn across northern Burkina-Faso and Mauritania blame their plight on Mali’s “colour line.” “It’s because of our light skin that we are here,” said one female refugee.

As such, President Keita’s newly elected government has to address decades of poverty and deep sense of exclusion that have radicalised Tuareg politics and reinforced their feelings of difference from Mali’s other ethnic groups.

As for now, the election has not healed the wounds of racial hatred and discrimination.

“The way the Malian state treated our people, before it was chased out of here last year, we cannot allow that to happen again,” says a widely cited Tuareg clan chief in Kidal, Installah Attaher. The Tuareg nationalist militias are still in control of much of Kidal region.

Also widening Mali’s colour line is an equally deep-seated sense of grievance by the “black” African population, mainly the Bambara who dominate the Mali army. The Bambara and other “black” Malians have an axe to grind with the Tuareg “whites” over centuries of slavery and racial discrimination.

Despite the recent election, many Malian “blacks” suspect that the Tuareg still hold a sense of superiority over them derived from their fair skin.

The “anti-white” sentiments among “black” Malians cut across the Sahel belt. In refugee camps across the Burkina Faso border, memories of Tuaregs enslaving the blacks continue to ignite tensions.

There are reports of local black Burkinabe staff, who are ethnically related to the Malian Bambara in the camps, refusing to work with the Tuareg because of shared memories of the Tuareg pastoralists raiding and pillaging black African sedentary agriculturalists, turning them into slaves.

Worse still, this discourse of racial discrimination is still playing itself out in the Tuareg caste system. “Bella,” dark-skinned members of the Tuareg who were once slaves, still occupy the lowest positions in Tuareg society.

In addition to fleeing the brutality of the Malian army, Tuareg refugees claim that they escaped their homeland for safety from armed Bella militias who are also targeting anyone with “light skin.”

President Keita’s newly installed government must move quickly to end Mali’s “resource curse,” which is deepening the colour divide.

Although this country of more than 14 million people and a $10.6 billion economy is Africa’s third largest gold producer, widespread poverty has largely contributed to unrest in the north.

Bamako must now ensure that the country’s fabulous wealth of mineral resources does not strengthening the “colour line” by exacerbating social inequalities and poverty within and between communities.

The second wave

In the wake of the uprising, president Amadou Toumani Touré assembled Bamako’s senior commanders to reassert the authority of the Malian state.

But the ill-equipped and indiscipline government troops quickly fell to the heavy weapons of the separatists, never seen before in the previous conflicts, losing most of the towns in the north, including the three biggest cities of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal.

This defeat triggered the second wave of Mali’s complex conflict. The Malian military forces, frustrated by the difficulties they encountered in trying to contain an uprising by Tuareg rebels, staged a coup.

On March 22, 2012, a month before a scheduled presidential election took place, the armed forces, led by Captain Amadou Sanogo ousted president Touré, alleging widespread corruption, poor handling of the insurgency and lack of equipment for the forces.

However, the conflict between Mali’s army and politicians was partly resolved in April 2012 when Burkina Faso’s President Blaise Compaore, appointed by Ecowas as a mediator to resolve the crisis, brokered an agreement granting amnesty to the mutineers and requiring both Captain Sanogo and president Touré to step aside and hand over power to the National Assembly of Mali Speaker, Diouncounda Traoré.

Meanwhile, Tuareg separatists and Islamist groups exploited the instability created by the coup and the withdrawal of government forces to gain control of vast swathes of territory. The Tuareg nationalists coalesced around the MNLA or the Azawad National Liberation Movement.

In June 2012, MNLA declared Azawad’s independence from Mali. Notably, the idea of a Tuareg state hearkens back to the French colonialists who toyed with the idea of giving the Tuaregs their own independent desert state as a source of oil.

Although the idea never got off the ground, it sowed the seeds of the vision of a Tuareg state in the desert.

But the withdrawal of the government forces from much of northern Mali left behind a power vacuum that fed spiralling tensions between the nationalists and the Islamists, culminating in the battle of Gao, which the MNLA lost.

At least four main Islamist militias battled for control of northern Mali: Ansar Dine, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA), AQIM and a mostly Arab militia calling itself the National Liberation Front of Azawad (FNLA).

The Islamists pushed the Tuaregs out of all the major cities of northern Mali, except Kidal. Mali was sucked into the international jihadist wars. In early June 2012, Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou lamented that Afghan and Pakistani jihadists were training Azawadi Islamist rebels.

The triumph of Islamist militias created panic among the Tuareg nationalists, leading to a softening of their irredentist ideology and marking a turning point in the battle for the soul of the Malian nation.

Then came the French intervention.

In January this year, France stepprd into the Mali crisis, sending in 4,500 forces to halt an Islamist advance to Bamako Ahead of the elections, the Tuaregs found a bigger enemy than the government to fight – the Islamists.

Despite Mali’s divisions along colour lines, the Tuaregs prefer to remain in one Mali rather than in an Islamist state. In the words of a widely cited Tuareg woman, “If it’s a choice between one Mali, and being part of an Islamic state under sharia law, we choose one Mali.”

In February, the Tuaregs renounced their claim of independence for Azawad and embarked on negotiations with the Malian government on the future status of the territory.

This change of attitude within the ranks of Tuareg separatists led to a peace deal between the government and Tuareg rebels, signed on June 18 this year, setting the stage for a ceasefire that greatly contributed to the largely peaceful election.

Healing the nation

International goodwill and a convincing victory in both rounds of the recently concluded elections aside, Mali’s new president now has the near-impossible task of disarming the militias and getting the soldiers back to the barracks; forging lasting peace with the Tuareg separatist MNLA; cleaning up the corrupt bureaucracy in Bamako; tackling the humanitarian crisis relating nearly a million Malians displaced within Mali and across the borders; and bringing Islamic terrorists to heel.

This calls for action by the new government at five levels:

The foremost item in the new government’s to-do list must be the restoration of stability and democratic political order, especially in the north. It has to make nuanced and balanced choices on how to win the well-armed rebel fighters to its side and keep them constructively engaged.

The choices are: Integrate them into its armed forces or fast-track the generation of gainful employment for the fighters. Its best chance is in creating jobs for the fighters owing to the military’s resistance to the integration of the militias into the army.

Moreover, because a coup by restive soldiers still remains perhaps the most immediate threat, Keita’s government must have the army on its side and keep it under a clear and assertive civilian oversight.

Second on the new government’s agenda-list should be national reconciliation and peace-building.

In April, ahead of the election, President Keita’s predecessor, interim president Dioncounda Traoré, launched a 33-member Dialogue and Reconciliation Commission, which the new administration should use as a framework to start dialogue with all the warring parties in the Malian conflict.

Third, the new government must immediately embark on dealing with widespread corruption and waste and straightening governance and probity systems in Bamako.

The largely peaceful election, the first since 2007, creates an opportunity for the new government to rein in corruption that was cited as a cause of the last military coup and the ensuing crisis.

Traore’s election rival and new opposition leader, Soumaila Cisse, has promised to create a proper opposition for the first time in Mali’s history to keep the government in check.

These developments are likely to attract external support, badly needed to address post-conflict reconstruction and deal with urgent humanitarian issues.

Fourth, the 18-month war in Mali has left in its trail a debilitating humanitarian crisis, involving some 375,000 people displaced within Mali, and 175,000 others in refugee camps in neighbouring countries in an addition to some 2 million Malians facing serious food security issues.

The new government will require the help of every good Samaritan in town to resettle the internally displace persons (IDPs) and refugees, restore economic activities, livelihood and services and repair infrastructure, particularly in the north.

Related to the above, the election is widely seen as a crucial step in the resumption of $4 billion in aid halted by the international community following last year’s coup.

It is expected that the US, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank will resume development aid suspended in support of Ecowas and the AU’s suspension of Mali in response to last year’s coup.

This will go a long way towards restoring the capacity of Mali to safeguard its own security and to play its role in combating terrorism within its borders and across the entire Sahel region.

Peter Kagwanja is the chief executive of the Africa Policy Institute (API). This article is part of the Institute’s Citizen Security Project.