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REVOLUTION: TESHUMARA AND TANEKRA 195sation; gender relations; and cultural expressions, notably a new musical andpoetical genre called al-guitara, now known to audiences worldwide as ‘desertblues’. I will show that the changes in Tamasheq societies in this period werefar from homogenous. Various routes led to various new ways of life.OriginsCultures do not come into existence at one given moment. They develop slowlyand it is hard to pinpoint their origins. Nevertheless, it would be convenient topoint to a few points in space-time. The first is the late 1940s, when MohamedAli ag Attaher Insar travelled the Middle East with a few of his tribe’s youngmen to have them educated abroad. Mohamed Ali was not the only one to travelto Mecca. Since the late 1940s, throughout the 1950s and up till present, manyKel Tamasheq moved permanently to Saudi Arabia where a large Tamasheqcommunity still exists. Many travellers had religious motives in the 1940s, butin the 1950s political motives came into play when a number of Kel Tamasheqmoved to Saudi Arabia as they did not want to live in an independent Africancountry where they would form a minority. Just as in the early colonial period,the pilgrimage to Mecca became a flight, a hijra to the sacred land of Islam.Since the 1970s, economic reasons became more important as labour demandsin Mecca and Medina grew under the ever-increasing number of pilgrims, asthey did in the oil-rich Saudi kingdom in general. A second movement fromanother place of origin occurred in the late 1950s, when a number of KelTamasheq migrated from Soudan Français to Southern Algeria where theylooked for employment in the construction sector. These men found work at thesites where the French built their future nuclear test bases: I-n-Ekker, Regganeand Takormiasse. 4 The French did not trust labour from North Algeria as itmight be infiltrated by the FLN. Young Kel Tamasheq from the Adagh and theAzawad were easily recruited and made good money on the construction of thevery base they would later use as their refuge during Alfellaga. During and afterAlfellaga, a substantial amount of Kel Adagh migrated as refugees to SouthernAlgeria. A number of them returned, but an estimated 500 families wouldremain in Southern Algeria after the end of the rebellion. These families becamea semi-sedentary community between the Algerian border cities with Mali andthe Algerian Hoggar. These disparate groups formed the first nuclei of whatwould become a large Tamasheq diaspora after the drought in the 1970s and1980s.The most important group of ishumar however, the ones who stood at thebasis of its conception as a culture and a way of life, were those Kel Adaghborn between the late 1950s and early 1960s. The major legacy of Alfellaga was4Tschumy, J. n.d., CHEAM 3937.