The veiled Berber-speaking camel pastoralists who ruled the central Sahara through a set of autonomous drum-groups — Kel Ajjer around Ghat and Ghadames, Kel Ahaggar in the Hoggar, Kel Adagh in the Adrar des Ifoghas, the Iwellemmedan of the Azawagh and Kel Gres to their south. Each was headed by an amenokal over a stratified society of noble (imajeghen), vassal (imghad) and servile classes; together they taxed, escorted and raided the trans-Saharan caravan routes, founded Timbuktu and seized it from Mali in 1433. Modelled here as ONE umbrella confederation because no single drum-group ever ruled the others and none is separately drawn; the atlas already carries the one Tuareg state, the Sultanate of Agadez.
Not an ending: French columns broke Kel Ahaggar power at Tit in 1902 and the last Sahara-wide rising, Kaocen's revolt around Agadez, collapsed when the garrison was relieved in March 1917 — after which the confederations continued as chieftaincies under French administration. The Kel Tamasheq remain several million strong across Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, and Tuareg political movements have contested the same desert ever since.
The standard English ethnography of the Kel Ahaggar specifically — the confederation whose amenokal system and 1902–04 submission anchor this record's end date.
Covers both the northern (Ahaggar) and southern (Aïr) drum-groups, i.e. exactly the north–south span this umbrella record has to represent.