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REVOLUTION: TESHUMARA AND TANEKRA 193description I give here of the new Teshumara culture of these days is far fromexhaustive. The subject merits a book on its own. I will here only highlight andexemplify some of the main social, economic and cultural changes to give anindication of the scale of change. The second part of this chapter describes thepolitical reflexions within the Teshumara culture and the creation of the formalisednationalist movement that prepared for this 1990 rebellion. The MalianKel Tamasheq generally refer to this movement as Tanekra, the uprising. Threeelements will be central in the description and analysis of the Tanekra movement.The first element is the Tanekra conception of nation and state. Whereasthe Kel Tamasheq community has been imagined – in Benedict Anderson’smeaning of the term – for centuries as a community of people related by(fictive) blood ties, the movement chose to imagine the nation as a communitybound by territory. To some extent, I will invert Benedict Anderson’s argumentthat nations, through primordial kinship terms, imagine themselves as old, whilethey are in fact new constructions. 1 In this case, social cohesion of the nation-tobehad always been expressed through kinship ties. However, the Tamasheqnationalists carefully avoided imagining their nation according to these ties asthey perceived them as an obstacle to national political unity. Instead of throughthe language of kinship, national sentiment was expressed primarily through thelanguage of territory. Despite nationalist discourse and ideas of territory, conceptsof kinship, expressed through the tewsiten – the clans and tribes – keptstructuring political practice, interfering with the ideology of Tamasheq unity.Political thinking along clan lines eventually led to the near collapse of themovement in the ‘Tamanrasset War’ of 1985. The second element is the Tamasheqconcept of egha, hatred and revenge of stained honour. The Tanekramovement was multiform in its outlooks and goals. It was, however, kepttogether through a common hatred for Mali and the desire to avenge the wrongdoingsof the state in previous decades. Egha was not the sole motivation to jointhe movement, but it was the binding factor for all Kel Tamasheq. The movementmade explicit use of memories of Alfellaga and the feelings of hatred ithad left to muster support for the movement among young men. A third elementis the possible legacy of the Keita Regime. The political ideas of the KeitaRegime on social change were partly incorporated in the political ideology ofthe Tanekra movement. The Keita Regime tried to actively and ostentatiouslyreform Tamasheq society. But where it failed in immediately imbuing socialism,the children educated in the schools of the Keita Regime inadvertentlymight have internalised certain socialist ideals despite their hatred for ‘Mali’. Iwill first sketch the political ideals and concepts of the Tanekra movement, andthen I will describe its organisation and internal struggles.1Anderson, B. 1991: 141-54.