Missing Witches - MW Dihya al Kahina： A Free and Noble Witch

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00:00:26.060 This episode honors a 7th century hero, a black indigenous woman who was a leader, a warrior priestess named Dia, champion of the native North African Amazi people. 0.92

00:00:40.400 Her name means the beautiful gazelle in the Tamazite language of the Amazi.

00:00:45.660 Amazi, plural, Imazian, means free or noble people in the indigenous Tamazite language.

00:00:53.540 Among outsiders, the more common name for Amazian is Berber, which comes directly from

00:00:58.420 the word barbarian or barbary.

00:01:01.540 It is a colonizer's word, a word that's used to diminish, disappear, and destroy.

00:01:09.160 Like her people, Dia is largely known to the world now by the name given to her by those

00:01:13.180 she resisted, conquerors who wrote her history for generations and christened her Al-Kahina

00:01:18.480 or the kahina, meaning prophetess or seer or witch. Arab records describe her as having dark skin,

00:01:27.520 a mass of hair, and huge eyes. She was said to have supernatural powers, that she read the 0.51

00:01:32.760 movements of desert birds and the messages sketched by the wind on the leaves and sand to

00:01:37.060 predict the future. Whether or not she was a sorceress, I want to cast her story into our

00:01:41.840 constellation of witches, and especially of black witches and indigenous witches. Because you

00:01:47.460 deserve a pantheon of queens to stand beside you. Let me acknowledge first that I'm going to wade 0.84

00:01:53.140 way far out beyond histories and cultures and languages I know here, and I'm going to flounder

00:01:59.200 and splash around, and hopefully I won't end up so far afield that you'll feel I fucked it up.

00:02:05.140 And if you do know pieces of this story of Dia and her magic that I miss out on here,

00:02:09.880 we hope you'll write to us at missingwitches at gmail so we can be lit up by your strands of

00:02:14.800 insight and weave them in. Please consider Amy and me just as people willing to try. Settler

00:02:20.560 descendants looking for the gaps and erasures. Looking, as artist and activist Marisa de la 0.99

00:02:25.920 Peña told us in episode 53, to be unsettled. It is our job to unsettle our colonial thinking.

00:02:34.060 We go looking with this feeling that there's history missing and with the knowledge that

00:02:38.120 the power and magic and healing and leadership of marginalized genders and races and cultures

00:02:43.280 are a crucial part of finding new life in a world wrought by plague and violence,

00:02:48.480 fascism and injustice.

00:02:50.120 We have to dig through the slipping shale of many shady burials.

00:02:54.460 Use the world-making power of our collective dreaming

00:02:57.100 to see beyond the concrete and smoke-filled desert

00:02:59.860 to where there used to be trees.

00:03:02.140 Leap toward each other in the dark,

00:03:04.020 with our masks on and two meters apart, of course,

00:03:06.740 to figure out where our roots are and where our wings touch 0.99

00:03:10.000 and what the fuck we're going to do now. 0.93

00:03:11.920 I don't know or have a guess at the great big answer to that question of what to do now, 0.98

00:03:16.580 but my small answer for today is to keep seeking and sharing missing stories.

00:03:21.360 So please, join me.

00:03:24.980 As we reverently call into the circle we make here in the dark between our ears,

00:03:30.520 Dia, the seer, the priestess, the leader, the queen, the witch.

00:03:37.480 Dia was a religious and military leader

00:03:39.740 who led indigenous resistance to the Arab-Muslim conquest of the Maghreb,

00:03:44.460 the region then known as Numidia.

00:03:47.900 The greater indigenous land of the Amazian is called Tamazga,

00:03:52.640 and it stretches across the borders, imaginary lines becoming real,

00:03:56.980 that we now know today as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, the Western Sahara,

00:04:02.720 Mauritiana, the Canary Islands, and parts of Egypt, Mali, and Niger.

00:04:06.600 this is a story about history and how it gets written on the land and on the people the way

00:04:12.480 stories spells in their own right claim and create what happens truth that becomes like a weapon

00:04:18.680 as beautiful oracle friend amanda yates garcia reminds us in her book initiated it matters whose

00:04:27.480 stories get told it matters how we tell them imagination matters in the utilitarian histories

00:04:34.940 crafted by colonizers, the witch's real life goes missing. But the witch herself remains,

00:04:40.820 and she still rings with power. Medieval historian Ibn Khaldun recorded many legends about Diyah.

00:04:47.340 They refer to her spectacular hair and great size and strength, all apparently characteristics of 0.98

00:04:53.060 sorcerers as well as descriptors of powerful black women in those texts. One legend claimed that in 1.00

00:04:58.760 her youth she freed her people from a tyrant by agreeing to marry him and then murdering him on

00:05:03.940 their wedding night. You gotta say, that's one way to deal with tyrants. Dia succeeded Kusela as the 1.00

00:05:09.900 war leader of the Amazian tribes in the 680s and continued his opposition to the encroaching

00:05:15.840 Arab-Muslim armies of the Umayyad dynasty. The Amazian had lived through multiple waves of

00:05:22.300 migration and colonization already. The Carthaginians, Romans, and the Byzantine empires

00:05:26.840 had stretched their long arms across the land with acts of violence and destruction, also bringing

00:05:31.540 new science and culture and ideas, some of which were inspiring to the Amazian, they adapted freely

00:05:36.900 for their own use. Jews had been deported from Jerusalem for resisting the Roman Empire,

00:05:42.560 and many Amazian converted to Judaism in this period. Many Amazian also converted to Christianity

00:05:48.560 in Numidia of the 4th century, but the overall pattern seems to be that a wave of another

00:05:53.420 civilization would hit, and then in the face of weather, resistance, remoteness, terrain would

00:05:59.000 slip back and lose hold, and the Amazi leaders would remain, bearing new tools and new scars,

00:06:05.320 still tending to their people and their land. In the early 7th century, the Amazi of northwestern

00:06:10.540 Africa were under the control of the Exarchate of Carthage, at that time a division of the

00:06:15.500 Byzantine Empire. After Egypt fell to Islamic conquest, the Exarchate found itself in direct

00:06:21.800 conflict with the Islamic caliphates. Umayyad general Hassan ibn al-Numan led the Arab Islamic

00:06:27.980 armies as they marched from Egypt and captured Carthage and other cities. When Carthage fell,

00:06:34.680 it lifted the Byzantine control of the area, and with their former rulers defeated, Dia rallied the

00:06:40.180 Amazian tribes under her leadership. Searching for another enemy to defeat, General Hassan was told

00:06:45.560 that the most powerful monarch in North Africa was the, quote, Queen of the Berbers, Dia, and so he

00:06:50.720 led his armies into Numidia looking for a fight that would act as a symbol to all those who would

00:06:55.180 resist the coming tide of Islamic civilization. In 698, the armies met near Mesquiana in present-day 0.55

00:07:02.200 Algeria. Dia defeated Hassan so soundly that he fled Afriqiya and holed up in Cyrenaica,

00:07:09.100 licking his wounds for years. Dia's life is mostly known to us through Arab historians writing on

00:07:14.540 the Muslim conquest of Africa, and then later through French historians and novelists who use

00:07:19.340 her story to justify their own colonial violence in Algeria. Some Arab historians claim she was a

00:07:25.020 Jewish sorceress who descended from the Beta Israel community of Ethiopian Jews. She is said 1.00

00:07:30.500 to have been a royal member of the Jarawa tribe within the larger confederacy known as the Zanata

00:07:35.200 tribe, a princess who became queen and ruled over an autonomous state in the area of the Orez Mountains

00:07:41.060 in modern-day northeastern Algeria. Some sources claim that Dia was a Christian and that she

00:07:46.140 derived her power from a Christian icon she carried with her. But it's also been argued that

00:07:51.360 she practiced the ancient indigenous religion of the Amazian, which centered around the veneration

00:07:56.200 of the sun, moon, and ancestors. The stories of her prophetic powers are in keeping with Numidian

00:08:02.440 ancient belief in which the gods or the spirits of the dead could communicate with members of

00:08:06.740 the tribe who had the gift of prophecy. Pomponius Mela reported that they considered the spirits of

00:08:12.300 their ancestors to be gods. After making requests, sending up their questions over to the strongest

00:08:18.880 members of their family who stood along the other shore. They slept in their tombs to await responses

00:08:23.800 and dreams. Herodotus wrote, they divine by visiting the sepulchral mounds of their ancestors

00:08:29.460 and lying down to sleep upon them after having prayed. And whatsoever thing the man sees in his

00:08:35.280 dream, this he accepts. And so a priestess with the ears to hear and sight to see might spend nights

00:08:41.600 resting against the family burial mound, watching the stars, listening to the earth dream.

00:08:48.880 Listening in dreams to the long line of people who brought you here.

00:08:53.760 And listening also to the stones themselves.

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00:11:29.480 witches. Augustine of Hippo claimed that the polytheistic North Africans worshipped the rocks.

00:11:37.980 Indigenous people in North Africa erected huge monolithic stone monuments that tracked the

00:11:42.640 summer solstice and Orion's belt. Archaeologists think that these sites brought people back

00:11:48.300 together each year to a place in the desert where there once was a lake, though there isn't anymore.

00:11:52.680 and a recurring theme of this season and of our lives i guess in this day of late stage capital

00:12:00.000 is the desert that comes to eat the lakes and the trees people would come to these ancient lakes and

00:12:05.400 make offerings and share stories and honor their ancestors family members and trees and water

00:12:11.340 they built pyramid shaped tombs and there is evidence they practiced embalming a thousand

00:12:16.120 years before the earliest examples from their neighbors the ancient egyptians dia's gift of

00:12:21.020 prophecy is said to have given her knowledge of how her opponents would form troops, of how they

00:12:25.900 would be reinforced and what direction they would come from. According to legend, during a battle

00:12:31.740 when she was outnumbered by the Arab forces and fell back in retreat, she recognized the direction

00:12:36.700 of the wind and ordered her army to set fires which the wind carried to the enemy. The Arab 0.93

00:12:42.480 army was forced to retreat and the land was so badly burned that any future campaigns would have

00:12:46.960 across an arid wasteland without resources. According to the Arab historians and legends,

00:12:51.920 her victory by fire gave Kahina the idea to initiate a scorched earth policy on a larger 0.97

00:12:57.000 scale. She is claimed to have believed that the coming army was only interested in the richness

00:13:02.300 of the land, and so the smoking husk of earth left by her military ingenuity made her think that

00:13:07.380 maybe if she destroyed the farms and gardens of what had been the granary of the Roman Empire,

00:13:12.500 then the next wave of hungry colonizers would leave her people alone. 0.93

00:13:16.960 According to this version, she therefore commanded her army to tear down the fortifications, destroy the cities and towns, melt down all gold and silver. 0.99

00:13:25.660 She ordered orchards cut, fields burned, and private gardens destroyed.

00:13:30.520 Some historians claim that this scorched earth policy, which was designed to deprive the invading Muslims, led to a loss of support from her people, so in the end she stood alone.

00:13:40.460 She allegedly engaged in this tactic to save her people, but for all those who lived in the towns and cities and relied on the fields and orchards, Dia's policy would have been disastrous.

00:13:51.060 With their homes and businesses destroyed, the only option left would be a nomadic wandering in a place that had been destroyed by war even before Dia supposedly set it on fire.

00:14:00.560 The Arab armies themselves repeatedly used the scorched earth tactic as they moved across the region. 0.58

00:14:06.180 In Egypt, Libya, and Mesopotamia, the invading Arab army routinely practiced this complete 0.99

00:14:11.120 destruction to subdue the population. 0.81

00:14:13.320 This was a common wartime tactic at the time for colonizing armies, so maybe this destruction 0.56

00:14:18.000 by fire wasn't Diyah burning down her world out of fierce desperation, ready to give up 0.56

00:14:23.220 everything her people had built to at least keep the rocks beneath their fate, a last-ditch

00:14:28.660 effort to be free.

00:14:31.300 Maybe instead it was just another act of colonizers.

00:14:34.220 and Arab writers attributed the destruction of the land to Dia 0.97

00:14:37.660 using history for propaganda to dissolve her radiant power 0.99

00:14:41.660 blaming the widespread destruction on the indigenous sorceress queen 0.92

00:14:45.120 who led the resistance. Either way, after the scorching of the earth

00:14:48.760 many of Dia's former allies left her side

00:14:51.100 going over to Hassan because they were broken hearted and demoralized

00:14:55.200 by the loss of all they had built, their homes and gardens

00:14:57.780 and because they were susceptible to bribery when they had little else left

00:15:02.420 One of her sons either defected or was captured.

00:15:06.240 Under who knows what kind of pressure, he informed on his mother's battle plans.

00:15:12.080 In the early 700s, Kahina again met Hassan in battle.

00:15:16.640 Before the armies engaged, the story goes that she sent her two remaining sons to the enemy camp to be raised by Hassan as Muslim warriors.

00:15:23.280 The story we have is that the battle went against Dia from the beginning.

00:15:28.420 She was badly outnumbered, and her children were gone.

00:15:31.420 accounts vary concerning her death she may have been captured and later executed or she may have

00:15:38.120 poisoned herself but the most commonly accepted story is that she died in battle with her troops

00:15:43.280 still clutching her sword her head was cut off and brought to hassan as a trophy she was according

00:15:49.980 to ibn khaldun 127 years old hassan respected dia as an opponent and her sons who converted to islam

00:15:58.060 were well cared for and would later lead their own armies against others who resisted Arab

00:16:02.420 aggression. Diaz people, on the other hand, did not fare well. 30,000 to 60,000 were sold into 0.96

00:16:09.920 slavery by the conquerors and shipped out of their native land. Many wives of Numidian chiefs

00:16:15.400 killed themselves rather than be taken. Small pockets of resistance held out, but between

00:16:21.340 705 and 750, North Africa was fully conquered and the people converted to Islam. After being 0.91

00:16:27.760 used as a cautionary tale for what might happen to resistors, Diaz's story faded for a while into

00:16:32.760 obscurity. Until that is, she was seized upon by the French in the 19th century to support their

00:16:37.500 own military maneuvering in Algeria. She was cast as a freedom fighter who could inspire resistance 0.79

00:16:43.140 to Arab Muslim rule. Amazian history tellers also reasserted their claim to her. She was and is

00:16:50.180 their heroine, though Arab nationalists in the region somehow also managed to argue she was

00:16:55.220 theirs. Cynthia Becker writes, since the 9th century, accounts of Kahina have been adopted,

00:17:00.240 transformed, and rewritten by various social and political groups in order to advance such

00:17:04.860 diverse causes as Arab nationalism, Berber ethnic rights, Zionism, and feminism. Throughout history,

00:17:10.760 Arabs, Berbers, Muslims, Jews, and French colonial writers, from the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun

00:17:16.060 to the modern Algerian writer Kateb Yassin, rewrote the legend of the Kahina and in the process

00:17:21.320 voiced their own vision of North Africa's history.

00:17:24.200 The French and Amazi, Muslims and Jews,

00:17:26.620 men and women alike, 0.96

00:17:27.660 used her life and resistance to give themselves power. 0.99

00:17:31.500 They used her in fiction and tilted histories

00:17:33.640 to voice their own views,

00:17:35.280 rewriting her history and the history of North Africa

00:17:37.660 in the process.

00:17:39.080 She became a conduit, a symbol, an icon, a tool.

00:17:42.820 As Kahina scholar Majid Hanoum writes,

00:17:45.240 the French colonial experience in Algeria

00:17:47.540 effectively cut off Algeria from its history.

00:17:49.740 So the Kahina, in being politicized by various Algerian inhabitants in both the native and

00:17:55.040 colonial populations, was evidence of an attempt to create a history that was becoming harder and

00:17:59.920 harder to retain. Today, D.L. Kahina's image is used by Amazi activists to symbolize their own

00:18:05.300 strength. Her face glimpses at you from graffiti and sculptures around Algeria, and she stands in

00:18:10.640 for the progressive ideals of the modern resistance. Amazi activists fight against 0.95

00:18:14.260 progressive Arabization and Islamization and call for women's rights and secularism as

00:18:19.140 indigenous values. A story of Dia and Bagai was condemned by the government for blasphemy.

00:18:26.900 Amazi activist Nunya Kahina writes, in parts of Tamazga, like the Canary Islands, which are

00:18:34.360 occupied by Spain, and Kabilia, there are movements for independence or autonomy,

00:18:39.200 attempting to actually reclaim Amazi land and gain self-determination. In both past and present,

00:18:44.620 Amazian have fought for the freedom to practice our culture and speak our language on our own land.

00:18:49.140 From 1921 to 1926, Rifian-Imazian rose up against Spanish colonialism and established a state of their own, the Republic of the Rif.

00:18:58.860 This Imazi state was only destroyed by Spain's use of chemical weapons, targeting civilian populations.

00:19:05.920 The Kel-Temasek indigenous to the Sahara have risen up against the Malian and Nigerian governments in the quest for self-determination,

00:19:13.180 which most recently culminated in the creation of the state of Azawad in early 2012.

00:19:17.960 the secular Azawadian state without outside support fought against Islamist militants and

00:19:23.480 was then invaded by French, Malian, and West African military forces. Other organizations

00:19:28.960 are fighting for greater rights of Amazi people within current political systems.

00:19:33.400 Diasporic Amazi organizations in Europe and North America have various goals, such as to revive

00:19:38.080 Amazi culture and advocate for Amazi political rights in Tamazga. The struggle for Amazi rights

00:19:44.120 and to be recognized on our own land will continue

00:19:46.340 until, as our name implies, we can truly be free people.

00:19:54.040 One contentious and little-known fragment I love about Dia 0.69

00:19:57.160 holds that she studied desert birds.

00:20:00.400 A possible burial site of the Seer Queen shows evidence of the birds.

00:20:04.860 There is claim that her work in this area

00:20:06.400 advanced the early study of winged and wild desert animals.

00:20:10.360 Creatures who migrated through the same lands

00:20:12.240 her people had known and navigated for generations, and who, like her, had to rely on messages

00:20:17.200 in the wind to make decisions about when to attempt dangerous crossings.

00:20:21.420 We're learning more about how little we actually know about birds, and what they know all the

00:20:25.660 time.

00:20:26.640 Veery birds' small threshes are better at predicting hurricane season than contemporary

00:20:30.780 meteorologists.

00:20:33.160 Desert birds have to be wise and far-seeing and adaptive to the wild edges of a hostile

00:20:37.740 habitat, and they are at the front lines of system collapse as the surface water burns

00:20:42.640 away and the stretches of sand get too wide to cross.

00:20:47.840 Everywhere the fabric is thinning, we are stretching too far.

00:20:52.820 The center cannot hold.

00:20:55.500 But buried in the sand and the stacks of conflicting colonizer histories, there are icons for our

00:21:00.580 healing and resistance.

00:21:02.860 There are women who led by listening to birds.

00:21:06.580 There are witches who stand like ancient monoliths in the desert, symbolizing lakes that could return.

00:21:13.200 Like so many of the people whose stories we've told on this podcast,

00:21:16.400 what we can see of Dia's real life is like looking through a glass darkly,

00:21:20.720 or through a scrapbook pasted together to serve other people's desires.

00:21:25.360 But the magic for me is that we know her at all.

00:21:28.860 She still scares colonizers and gives her people hope.

00:21:31.780 murdered and used for centuries we still say her name our lives are seeds and even when we go back

00:21:40.840 into the electric pulsing howling earth we cannot and will not be erased i want you to whisper her

00:21:48.600 name to yourself and carry it with you dia al kahina dia the witch dia the gazelle

00:21:57.020 she is an icon for all those who would resist encroaching darkness to stand with the desert 0.93

00:22:03.120 birds for freedom and she ties our work and what is needful in our labor to the labor of the imazi 0.89

00:22:09.800 people and to the lives and loves and heroisms and traumas of black women and she offers the

00:22:16.860 wings of this truth the stories others may have about you do not touch your fundamental power

00:22:23.260 you are a wave of light and sound. You are unbound. Since we don't have her own words to end with

00:22:31.100 here, here's Algerian icon of post-colonial theory and word witch himself, Franz Fanon,

00:22:37.700 offering you a spell from the love of his own self and his own skin. I am black. I am in total

00:22:45.160 fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the

00:22:51.180 cosmos. And the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis 0.93

00:22:57.560 Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has 0.96

00:23:05.660 been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

00:23:13.820 You are truly a drop of sun under the earth.

00:23:17.220 you must be a witch this episode of the missing witches podcast was written and performed by 0.66

00:23:26.460 risa dickens music and editing by amy torok thanks again to our sponsor foxglove farm

00:23:32.380 don't forget to use our listener offer code missing witches for 13 off your order or make

00:23:39.160 a contribution to their wildlife rescue out of the woods find your witchy wellness at foxglove

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00:24:03.620 Missing Witches by Risa Dickens and Amy Torak, published by North Atlantic Books.

Missing Witches - September 27, 2020

MW Dihya al Kahina： A Free and Noble Witch

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