For almost all African people, decolonization meant to recognize their identity and to affirm their right to self-determination. However, as most nationalist insurgency movements in Africa, the Tuareg separatist movement failed to reach its goals.

Teshumara, the economic, cultural and then political movement of the Ishumar, was the only hope which permitted the Tuareg to organize a rebel movement (tanekra) during the years they lived in exile. The exile and the living in other countries (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Burkina Faso) as laborers or soldier under Kaddafi‟s Army (also in refugee camps or in the periphery of the cities), from a political and historical perspective, involved the Kel Tamasheq in the "modern world".

During these years a cultural revolution and the transformation of political organization happened. These migrants shaped a new culture, the Teshumara, touching all aspects of the life of its participants, the ishumar (from French unemployed). They created and organized a political movement which both sought to change Tamasheq society on the whole and to establish an independent Tamasheq state. The movement, called tanekra (the uprising), was created in 1974 and finally started the second rebellion in 1990.

However the "Unemployed Intellectuals" as Lecoq called the Ishumar, were not able to reach their goals and split into various fraction and little independent movements at the beginning of the 1990s. This work discusses the major upheavals and their results from the viewpoint of the „„popular intellectuals‟‟ of Teshumara living today in Italy.