The Amazigh word for music is “muziget”. Traditionally a matriarchal society the Imazighen (plural of Amazigh) live in North Africa with their communities spread across the countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Western Sahara, northern Mali, northern Niger, Egypt, and Burkina Faso. It has been documented that Amazigh women, from as early as 1200B.C. up until the 7th century A.D. have occupied central places of power within their communities. The presence of religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism from the 7th century onward, however, did inform an increasingly patriarchal Imazighen society. Nonetheless, women maintained significant influence over all aspects of their communities and also held within them the important role of being artistic and cultural custodians.
It is a curious thing to note while perusing and investigating various musical archives on the African continent, there often-times looms a paucity, a silence in understanding and in seeing the immense contributions that women have made in shaping their communities and their countries. With the historical understanding that North African women occupied an assertive and not passive place within their society, what does it mean to confront archives that convey a sense of distinct erasure? In what ways does one engage with the contradictions that arise within these archives? How can we understand, celebrate, and tell the stories of these women that came before us in a language rich and encompassing, devoid of lumbering platitudes?
With these questions in mind and with the contemplations which they evoke and within which I dwell, I share with you the stories of four North African women who sang truth to power and whose muziget transcends time.
What it Means to Be a Dark Skinned Model in the Nigerian Music Industry
EGYPT
Umm Kulthum (1898 or 1904 - 1975)
Umm Kulthum was born around the turn of the 20th century in a Nile Delta Village. Her mother raised her two siblings and took care of their homestead while her father was an imam. Her musical foundation came from her father who performed at weddings and other religious gatherings. By the age of six, Kulthum would accompany her father at these performances and she quickly built a reputation for her powerful and captivating voice. However due to the conservative Islamic rule that girls could not publicly recite or sing Quaranic verses, Kulthum’s father would often dress her up as a boy. Under this guise, her popularity grew and she soon was touring throughout the Nile Delta performing at naming ceremonies, birthdays, and other festive occasions.
At the start of 1920, Kuthlum moved to Cairo to professionally pursue her musical career. She began changing the societal and cultural dictates of musical performance, from being an elitist practice saved for select audiences to one that reflected her working-class background. She opened up her performances to the general public and her attire and musical repertoire mirrored the traditions and colours of her rural background. A traditional Umm Kulthum performance would be composed of three songs that would in total last about five hours. Her deliberate intention was to induce her listeners into tarab - a state of rapturous enchantment, where time and self dissolved into the music.
By the 1940s, Kulthum was a household name due to her visible presence as an actress in various cinematic films and her ability to disintegrate strict class restrictions. She combined her music with intricate Arabic poetry - a form of literature that was then inaccessible to most - she, thus, made it available for many to enjoy and understand. Commonly and lovingly referred to as “Egypt’s fourth pyramid”, Umm Kulthum recorded about 300 songs over a 60-year career. Her lyrics of celebration, wisdom, love, loss and joy drift reliably from taxis, radios and cafes, not just in Egypt but across the Arab world today.
Umm Kulthum subverted the gender norms of mid-century Egypt with her hard-nosed business deals, active and vocal engagement in public life and resistance to giving up her career for family life; she remained absolutely true to who she was.
She passed away on 3 February 1975 but her spirit, legacy, and muziget live on.
WESTERN SAHARA
Mariem Hassan (1958 - 2015)
Mariem Hassan was born to Mohamed and Erguia in May 1958 at a time when Western Sahara was a Spanish colony. She was one of ten children, three of whom would be killed in various Sahrawi confrontations with Morocco. At the age of 13 was forced into an arranged marriage by her parents but she managed to escape during the wedding ceremony and the wedding was subsequently cancelled.
Mariem first started singing and playing the traditional tebel drum at religious gatherings where she would accompany her mother and other women from the community. These meetings provided a safe space where the women used music and poetry as channels that fostered the continuation of Sahrawi traditional and cultural practices. Often, such gatherings were banned by the Spanish colonial authorities but since women were not viewed to have any real importance in the eyes of these powers, these communal occasions were allowed since they did not pose a political threat.
Unbeknownst to the colonial government, these spaces were sites of rebellion and resistance which greatly fueled the basis and foundation of Mariem’s musical work. She used her powerful voice to articulate and publicise the domination and plight of the colonial occupation and the subsequent occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco in 1975. Having spent much of her life in the camps, Mariem started her musical career in a group that provided support for the resistance and liberation movement - the Polisario front. She developed a genre of music that directly spoke to the daily experiences and history of the indigenous locals.
A dynamic individual, Mariem worked as a nurse, was an organising leader in her camp, was married twice and gave birth to five children, all the while representing the Sahrawi voice at various cultural arts festivals. She brought to light the struggle of the Sahrawi people to an international stage and made herself part of the history of a nation without land.
Mareim passed away at the age of 57, still exiled in a refugee camp but well beloved by her people. Her spirit, legacy, and muziget live on.
SUDAN
Aisha Musa Ahmad (1905 - 1974)
Aisha Al Falatiya, popularly known as Aisha Musa Ahmad, was Sudanese musician born in 1905. Born to Nigerian parents in Kassala, a town in the eastern part of Sudan, Aisha spent her childhood at a Khalwa (religious school), where she learnt to memorise and recite the Quran. At 14 years old, she began to sing professionally at weddings. Her family disapproved, as women who sang and performed publicly were stigmatised in Sudanese society. In order to end her career, her father arranged for her to be married, but the marriage later ended in divorce, and Aisha continued to work as a singer. By the late 1930s, Aisha had recorded several songs for Egyptian record companies in Cairo, and she began to gain popularity in Sudan.
Her stage name, Aisha Al Falatiya, is a reference to her Nigerian-Fulani ancestry. During the Second World War, she worked as a troop trainer. As part of this, she would sing for Sudanese soldiers active in the East African and North African Campaigns. In 1942, Aisha became the first Sudanese woman to perform on radio, for Omdurman Radio. She performed alongside her sister, who played the oud. The performance was liked by the station's listeners, however, conservative commentators and male singers boycotted the channel in protest. The hostility she faced due to both her gender and ethnicity led her to contemplate leaving Sudan and moving to Nigeria. She eventually decided to stay on, and by the 1960s, her popularity eventually legitimised the presence of women on public radio.
Aisha was and is best known for her songs covering love and politics. A prominent advocate of women’s rights, workers rights and anti-colonialism, she died on 24 February 1974. Her spirit, legacy, and muziget live on.
ALGERIA
Zohra Aïssaoui Dihya (1950 - present)
Zohra Aïssaoui was born in 1950 to Amar Aïssaoui Taghit and Ourida Meghamri of T’kout. For the first eight years of her life, she lived in Taghit, a town located in the western part of Algeria. In 1958 she left for France, with her family, where they lived in Marseille and subsequently in Saint Dizier. Music was an inherent part of her daily existence, and in the early 1970s she moved to Paris to study the subject at the Paul-Beuscher Conservatory. After completing her degree, she pursued an active career as a performing musician while lecturing at the University of Nanterre as a music teacher.
After the release of her first single, “Badala Zamana”, she changed her name to Dihya. She also began to sing in Shawiya / Chaoui, which is one of the four major Algerian Amazigh languages. Dihya returned to Algeria in 1975, where she met her husband, and they both became politically active, advocating for the rights of the Amazigh people. Her activism was embalmed in her strong, articulate lyrics that provided a way for her to express solidarity with her community. Owing to the heated nature of Algeria’s political climate in the early 1980s, both Dihya and her husband received menacing threats, which eventually led to the couple fleeing from Algeria to France in 1981.
After being exiled from Algeria for 33 years, Dihya returned and received the award of an honorary seat at the municipality of Batna. Her spirit, legacy, and muziget live on.