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310 CHAPTER 7The last competitor was a Kel Tamasheq nationalism that originally wassimply against something: Kel Tamasheq and Bidân incorporation in Mali. TheOCRS sought to keep the Sahara under French tutelage. The Nahda al-Wattaniyyaal-Mauritaniyya sought to incorporate the Bidân and (partly) Tamasheqinhabited parts of Mali in either Mauritania or Morocco. Even those Saharanleaders who participated in party politics and elections in Soudan Français didso in an attempt to curb the political power of the Southern political elite.Although the demands of the ifulagen, the fighters of Alfellaga in 1963, wereonly partly clear, it was clear what they did not want: to be part of a state ruledby ‘black Africans’. Tamasheq nationalism only reached maturity in the 1970sand 1980s when it was developed by the members of the nationalist movement,the Tanekra, who made clear what they wanted: an independent Tamasheqstate. Their demand found its full expression in the rebellion of the 1990s. Afew things stand out when looking at the Tamasheq national idea as it wasimagined in the 1970s and 1980s by the ishumar. The first seeming anomaly isthat a people who organised society and politics on the basis of fictive kinshipties based its nationalist ideal on territorial notions and, more surprising still,that these territorial notions were based on the pre-existing states they sought tosecede from: Mali and Niger. The Kel Tamasheq indigenous to Algeria, BurkinaFaso and Libya never joined the liberation movement. Already during the1980s the Kel Tamasheq from Mali and Niger, once united under the name KelNimagiler, had broken up along the lines of exactly these states. That theygarbled the names of Mali and Niger to form their own name as a politicalentity shows how strongly the political geography of the existing states wasalready grafted on their political imagination. Their competing idea of aTamasheq nation had already lost out, as it had to be imagined within existingterritorial structures. There were nevertheless very specific reasons why ‘soil’was taken as the binding national factor, instead of ‘blood’. The Tamasheqnationalists perceived the already existent use of kinship ideology in Tamasheqsocial political organisation as a major obstacle to successful political unificationof the Tamasheq nation. Indeed, the social-political structure of the KelTamasheq in tewsiten – clans – kept hindering the nationalist movementthroughout its existence as various clan-based factions fought for politicaldominance within the movement. These fights started in the mid-eighties,continued during the rebellion, and even after the rebellion violence betweenclans continued to haunt Tamasheq internal politics.Another development is that the Tanekra nationalist movement incorporatedcertain ideas on the nature of Tamasheq society and the need to reshape it,which its predecessors – the political leaders of the 1950s and the fighters ofAlfellaga – had actively resisted. The US-RDA had sought to curb the power ofthe tribal chiefs, a power created or strengthened during the colonial period, and