Unemployed Intellectuals in the Sahara

The Teshumara Nationalist Movement and the Revolutions in Tuareg Society

Bibliographic Data

ID9327652
AuthorsBaz Lecocq (corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume49
IssueS12
Pages87-109
Publication date2004-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Review of Social History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020859004001658
OpenAlexW2039020119
LanguageEN
Citations received20

In the past four decades the Tuareg, a people inhabiting the central Sahara, experienced dramatic socioeconomic upheaval caused by the national independence of the countries they inhabit, two droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, and prolonged rebellion against the state in Mali and Niger in the 1990s. This article discusses these major upheavals and their results from the viewpoint of three groups of Tuareg intellectuals: the “organic intellectuals” or traditional tribal leaders and Muslim religious specialists; the “traditional intellectuals” who came into being from the 1950s onwards; and the “popular intellectuals” of the teshumara movement, which found its origins in the drought-provoked economic emigration to the Maghreb, and which actively prepared the rebellions of the 1990s. By focusing on the debates between these intellectuals on the nature of Tuareg society, its organization, and the direction its future should take, the major changes in a society often described as guarding its traditions will be exposed

Emigration · Ethnology · Independence (probability theory · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · African Studies and Ethnography · African Studies and Geopolitics · Gender Studies · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Law

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