Mano Dayak was a Niger Tuareg political and intellectual leader who became the principal international representative of the 1990–1995 Niger Tuareg rebellion. He was born in 1949 in Tidene, a Kel Aïr Tuareg encampment in the Aïr massif north of Agadez, and educated in part at the lycée at Agadez and subsequently at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, where he completed graduate work in linguistics and anthropology in the 1970s.
He returned to Niger in the late 1970s and worked through the 1980s on Tuareg cultural-tourism enterprises in the Aïr and the Ténéré, principally Temet Voyages, which he founded in 1986. The 1990 outbreak of the Tuareg rebellion in northern Niger — sparked by the May 1990 Tchin-Tabaraden massacre, in which Niger security forces killed several hundred Tuareg civilians — drew him into political leadership of the rebel coalition.
He served as the principal political spokesman of the Coordination of Armed Resistance (CRA) across the rebellion and through the negotiations that produced the April 1995 peace agreement at Ouagadougou. His three published books across the rebellion period — Touareg, la tragédie (1992), Je suis né avec du sable dans les yeux (1996, posthumous), and the autobiographical materials collected in Mémoires de l'Azawad (1996, posthumous) — articulated the Tuareg case for cultural-territorial autonomy in a French-language public register that French- and European-Tuareg readers had not previously been offered.
He died on 15 December 1995 in a small-aircraft crash near Niamey while travelling to negotiations with the Niger government. The crash circumstances remain debated in the Tuareg political literature; he is conventionally treated as the principal late-twentieth-century Tuareg political figure of the western Sahel and a foundational reference for the post-2012 Azawad-region political mobilisations.