Habiba Msika
Habiba Msika · Arts & Literature
Singer and actress from the Jewish quarter of Tunis who became North Africa's first superstar, murdered at twenty-seven by a jealous lover
vers 1903 (ou 1899), Tunis, Tunisie — 21 février 1930, Tunis, Tunisie
Tunis, Paris
Habiba Msika is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Singer and actress from the Jewish quarter of Tunis who became North Africa's first superstar, murdered at twenty-seven by a jealous lover
Origins and early life
Habiba Msika was born Marguerite Msika in the Hafsia, the Jewish quarter of Tunis, around 1903 — some sources say 1899 — into a poor Jewish family, and was raised by her aunt Leïla Sfez, herself a singer, who put her on the stage as a child.
Work and career
By the early 1920s she was the most celebrated performer in Tunisia and, the historian Chris Silver has argued, the first superstar of North Africa: she sang in Arabic, in French and in Hebrew, recorded for the great labels in Paris and Berlin, played in the Arabic theatre the roles that no woman had played — Romeo, Napoleon, the heroines of Egyptian melodrama — and filled the theatres of Tunis, Algiers and Cairo with audiences of Muslims and Jews together, which the colonial police watched with unease, for she also sang the songs of Tunisian nationalism.
Her admirers called themselves the 'soldiers of the night' and followed her from show to show; her private life was as free as her art, and this fiche says so, as the newspapers of Tunis did.
Later years
On the night of 20 February 1930 a former lover, Eliahou Mimouni, an old man ruined by his passion for her, broke into her house, doused her with petrol and set her alight; she died the next day, and her funeral drew a crowd such as Tunis had never seen, Jews and Muslims following her coffin to the Borgel cemetery. Her recordings survive, and the film La Danse du feu by Selma Baccar, in 1995, gave her life back to Tunisia.
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Source: https://jwa.org/thisweek/feb/21/1930/habiba-msika
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Singer and actress from the Jewish quarter of Tunis who became North Africa's first superstar, murdered at twenty-seven by a jealous lover
Source: https://jwa.org/thisweek/feb/21/1930/habiba-msika
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