The mid-century political discourse on the African continent appears to be largely absolved from a critique of settler colonialism, presumably because the colonizers’ departure has generated a condition that could be identified, albeit not inaccurately, as postcolonial. This paper concerns itself with liberation; it seeks to write about liberation within a socio-political milieu that is purportedly already liberated. The distinctive forms of anticolonial praxis developed by the Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg), the Indigenous peoples of the Sahel-Sahara, evinces what Robert J. C. Young had pointedly articulated about the postcolonial as simultaneously operating as the colonial. Despite, and indeed as a result of, independence from the colonists, the Kel Tamasheq find themselves torn across five distinct state territories: Mali, Niger, Algeria, present-day Burkina Faso, and Libya. In the mid-twentieth century, as colonial forces withdrew from Africa en masse, their parasitic relationship with the land was believed to have come to a close. Nevertheless, the seldom discussed case of the Kel Tamasheq, whose aspirations for Indigenous unity and sovereignty have yet to be fulfilled, exhort us to treat national liberation and Indigenous sovereignty as distinct, rather than commensurate, notions. During the surge of liberation that swept the continent in said epoch, the stark and oppressive nature of national boundaries became glaringly evident to the Kel Tamasheq. Emerged during this time was a formidable new adversary to Indigenous unity: the nation-state. This perception, in turn, gave rise to a new resistance movement, an ever-present addition to the Kel Tamasheq social stratum. Dubbed the ishumar, this emergent group sought to resist, sometimes with guitars, sometimes with firearms, the Balkanization of the Sahara by their respective nation-states. To conceptualize this conjuncture, I draw upon Kel Tamasheq cosmology, which tightly yokes together land, bodies, and language, and argue that the political project of the ishumar, the teshumara, was an ineluctable outcome of their land-based philosophy in action. This paper therefore presents a study on the ishumar's decolonial repertoire, encompassing their novel aural and poetic expressions, to demonstrate that the autocratic rule of the newly formed nation-states was a mere extension of the colonial paradigm.