It seems that no man will have had real power over his body or his mind. If the story of Lalla Fatma N’Soumer could be romanticized, even mythologized, by those who saw in her the extension of Kahina, Berber warrior queen who fought the Arab invasion in the Maghreb in the 7the century, Fatma N’Soumer is above all the figure of the Kabyle woman who defied the French colonial army in Algeria, leading entire villages into battle and breaking the socio-political codes of her time.
Fatma N’Soumer, born Fatma sid Ahmad Ou Méziane, grew up in the highest mountains of Kabylie, a historic region populated by warrior tribes in the north of the country, east of Algiers, in the heart of the Djurdjura massif, in the village of Ouerdja. Coincidence, curse or irony of fate, France had launched, on the orders of King Charles X, its vast conquest of Algeria the exact year when was born the one who will challenge its occupation in 1830. Algeria will remain a French colony until to the declaration of its independence in July 1962, which ended eight years of civil war.
Feminist before its time
The few stories telling his story are unanimous: Fatma N’Soumer, warlord and spiritual guide, marked the minds of all those who crossed his path, enemies and supporters alike. [Elle était] small but robust, and its beauty and elegance were sung in popular Berber poetry. In Stories from Kabylia. Campaign of 1857, explorer and politician Émile Carrey describes her draped in colorful scarves, adorned with jewels and covered in henna as she led the Imseblen, volunteers of death, into battle.
A feminist before her time, she refused the consummation of a marriage imposed on her by one of her brothers at death
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For a long time the French-language daily in Beirut, born in 1971 from a merger between the east et The day, was the perfect illustration of the French-speaking and Christian “Lebanon of Dad” that the civil war would make fun of. The departure of the elites fleeing the violence of the war and the decline of the French language in the country of the Cedars should have dealt the blow of the club to this newspaper.
Fortunately, these dire predictions did not come true. Not only thanks to the return to the country in the 1990s of thousands of French-speaking families fleeing an Africa torn by wars or a Europe in the grip of the economic crisis, but thanks to a real editorial dynamism and the arrival of a new generation of journalists who use a lively and hard-hitting French without preciosity, trickery, or conspicuous self-censorship… And it is no exaggeration to affirm that The Orient-The Day is today the most interesting Lebanese daily and one of the best in the Arab world.
The daily’s website also bears witness to this dynamism, since it is one of the few in the region to update its information several times a day. Admittedly, the old habits have not disappeared and the articles “of convenience” still occupy a small space, but this remains quite acceptable in the face of the distressing editorial decline of a certain Lebanese press. Even the worldly gossip of The Orient-The Day keep a second degree that can make us smile.
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