In 1978, the eminent Africanist and oral historian Jan Vansina spearheaded a project in Tripoli, Libya to record oral testimonies from former mujahedeen, those who took up arms against Italian occupation of the Libyan territories before the Second World War. Dozens of historians trained under Vansina in Tripoli on the techniques of oral history before they embarked on a collection of stories throughout the Libyan interior. Collected from various regions, these oral histories tend to reflect the nationalist identity of Qaddafi’s Libya, but they also provide a rare perspective on the social history of community and resistance on the battleground of the Italian colonial hinterland. This paper will present a reading of a portion of the oral histories with an eye to uncovering other layers of identity. In reading the accounts of individual decisions to take up arms against a European aggressor state, can we escape the tendency to find a proto-nationalist discourse? How do the accounts collected in the Oral History Project of Libya reveal layers of identity in the Libyan interior that defy national categories? Establishing pre-national identities carries particular weight today given the difficulties of finding a unified Libyan identity in the aftermath of the recent political upheavals. This presentation highlights the multiple layers of identity embedded in the postcolonial memory of resistance and collaboration.