The Mauritanian Kadehine movement emerged in the late 1960s as a clandestine movement that confronted the one-party regime of the Mauritanian People’s Party (PPM) and its neocolonial dependence upon France. Together with an umbrella movement known as the National Democratic Movement (MND), the Kadehine included student and women’s branches that challenged social stratification and hierarchies in Saharan society, while also redefining Mauritanian nationalism beyond Arab/non-Arab Black divisions. Incorporating Maoist, Marxist-Leninist and Third World liberation concepts into their movement, the Kadehine enjoyed such widespread support and mobilization that several of its demands were met during the early 1970s. By the time the movement announced the formation of the Kadehine Party (PKM) in 1973, the state responded by offering to incorporate members of the PKM into the government. Those who accepted this offer were known as mithaqiyyin, or “chartists,” for signing an agreement with the PPM. This cooptation split the movement and by 1975 its momentum and influence had significantly diminished; the following year, the war over Western Sahara transformed regional politics. In recent years, a number of former Kadehine have published memoirs, and these accounts, along with interviews, shed light on both the making of a generation of “militant intellectuals,” such as Fadi Bardawil has explored in Lebanon (Bardawil 2020), as well as the “unmaking” of political militant subjectivity. Members seek to make sense of their involvement in this revolutionary movement, and their relationship to its legacies in the present. These sources provide a framework for asking how former members – many of whom subsequently remained involved in politics, sometimes as officials and representatives of the (nonrevolutionary) state – situate and temporalize their involvement in the politics of revolution and, later, of governing. How do the legacies of the Kadehine movement relate to ongoing projects of social change in Mauritania? Moving beyond the periodization of the movement itself, memoirs by and interviews with former Kadehine members foreground the project of cooptation and its role as conduit between revolutionary pasts in the present.