Oral Knowledge in Berber Women's Expressions
of the Sacred

Fatima Sadiki

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Historically, Berber women have been associated with freedom, boldness, and political leadership. Although it is hard for many people today to conceive of such broad female attributes, Kahina, whose name means “priestess“ or “prophetess,“ was an outstanding Berber queen, notorious army leader and warrior who was born 600s CE in the Aures Mountains in Algeria. Kahina succeeded in temporally holding conquering Arab armies who sought to introduce Islam to the local Berber peoples. According to Marçais (2003), the Berbers of the seventh century were not religiously homogeneous. Christian, Jewish and pagan, Berbers co-existed in what is now Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya, and Kahina emerged as a war-leader who could rally everybody during this tense period, and proved amazingly successful at leading the tribes to join together against their invaders. Her reputation as a strategist and sorceress had spread, and she managed to briefly unite the tribes of Ifrikya, the Berber name for North Africa, ruling them and leading them in battle for five years before her final defeat. Kahina took her own life, and sent her sons to the Arab camp with instructions that they adopt Islam and make common cause with the Arabs. Ultimately, Kahina’s sons participated in invading Europe and the subjugation of Spain and Portugal.

Berber women’s boldness constituted a natural mix in their orality (Marçais 2003). Kahina’s speeches and poems were all destroyed after her death, only a short poem titled “My Berber Horse“ has survived:

Run, Run my Berber Horse! Never defeated by Arabs Will you forever be!

Berber female leadership relies more on recognized personal power and self- determination than on institutionalized authority – hence the lack of continuity in this respect. Berber women’s orality has also served as an instrument of language loyalty. Berber women have shown loyalty to their mother tongues and the cultures they carry since time immemorial. A case in point is Tunisia which, being the closest of the Maghribian countries to the Middle East, had its indigenous populations quickly Arabized to the extent that today, only 1% of them speaks Berber. Yet, the Tunisian pop singer, Saliha, achieved tremendous fame in the 1950s with her song “With the Shepherds“ in which Djebel Wislat, a region where Berbers lived in mountains and fiercely resisted the Turkish Beylical army in the middle of the eighteenth century is invoked. The song retraces the pains of exile by the Wislatis in diaspora. The women especially suffered humiliation and marginalization. Selma, a woman’s name, symbolizes the Waslati women who were forced into exile, poverty, and marginalization as the following excerpt indicates (Sadiqi et al, 2009):

With the Sherpherds

My child, my beloved At daybreak fell lost O, Selma, my dear! Fate has decided

That people can become black

After being white
Patience, Djebel Wislat Patience, mount of death Misfortune will assail you Exile is our fate
Destiny, malediction
Or desire for escape
Shall I have peace one day? Or of suffering shall I die!

Language loyalty developed into militancy for language and cultural rights in Algeria and Tunisia. A strong means to pursue vision and engage in public militancy for the revival of Berber, orality started to gain center stage in public life since the mid-1980s in Morocco and Algeria. Fatima Tabamraant (Sadiqi et al 2009) is one of the icons of this revival. A staunch supporter of the writing and teaching of Berber, she never misses an occasion to exhort women to seek literacy in Berber.

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Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred

by Fatima Sadiki