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REVOLUTION: TESHUMARA AND TANEKRA 225Awful is he who thinks he is superiorwho forgets the ties of his mother 69The poem does not only speak of the wrongs of society, it addresses thosewho propose a solution, the ishumar – ‘the young say it all without omission’. Itis clear the poet has heard the message of the revolutionary-minded, but he isnot without reserve towards this message – ‘not being serious is an evil’. TheTeshumara was not seen as a serious answer to the problems besetting Tamasheqsociety by all ‘bush dwellers’ for whose benefit the revolution was intended.Many regarded the ishumar with their illegal activities in smuggling andtheir revolutionary ideas as a possible cause of more problems, and condemnedtheir behaviour – awful is he who thinks he is superior, who forgets the ties ofhis mother. 70Egha, the motor behind the TanekraShame, honour and revenge are topics with which most anthropologists workingon the Mediterranean region are highly familiar. 71 The essence of mostwriting so far, is that these three concepts are intimately linked. My concernwith these topics is their explanatory value as the motor behind political andmilitary action undertaken by the Kel Tamasheq from the early 1970s to thesecond rebellion in the 1990s. I will first explain what egha means. The concepthas a broad range of meanings that are not easily covered with one term ortranslation. Above I have outlined only a few of the various new political andsocial ideas that took root in Teshumara culture. These various political viewsand projects were sometimes at odds with each other. Egha was the sole feelinguniting the ishumar in the idea that something had to be done.Egha can well be explained with the recent thinking on anger and revengedeveloped by Peter Sloterdijk. In his book Zorn und Zeit (Anger and time),Sloterdijk explores the creation in Europe of a moral economy, and a monetizationof some kind, of pride, anger and revenge, leading to their distillation ina discourse of debt and repayment – ‘anger transactions’ – in which anger andrevenge finally become debit and credit in an ‘anger bank’, where immediatelyexperienced anger is conversed in projects of revenge with a possibly higher‘return’ in the shape of ‘“programs” claiming world political meaning’. 7269707172Part of a poem by Hamayni ag Essadayane, early 1980s. Translated by Lamine agBilal and myself.Here, ‘the ties of his mother’ refers to the cross cousins – the iboubashen – to whomone owes both economic support and absolute loyalty.See for this subject: Black-Michaud, J. 1975; Blok, A. 1994; Gilmore, D.D. 1987;Jamous, R. 1981; Peristiany, J., ed., 1966; Peristiany, J. & J. Pitt-Rivers, eds, 1992.Sloterdijk, P. 2007: 74. My translation into English from the Dutch translation of theoriginal German.