Cherifa was the principal twentieth-century interpreter of unaccompanied Kabyle women's song and one of the foundational voices of Kabyle traditional music. She was born in 1926 in Tashlijet near Ighil Ali in Lesser Kabylia and was raised in the Berber-rural household tradition, learning the women's repertoire principally from her grandmother before broader transmission within the village.
The death of her parents in early adolescence and a forced early marriage led her to leave Kabylia for Algiers in the late 1940s. She began performing professionally on Algerian radio in the early 1950s under the production of the Kabyle programmer Cheikh Nourredine, recording the principal repertoire of Greater and Lesser Kabylia in the form for which she became internationally identified — solo voice, unaccompanied or with minimal frame-drum support, drawing on the poetic forms of the asefru and the women's-song izli.
Her recorded output across six decades constitutes the principal commercial archive of unaccompanied Kabyle women's song. The repertoire she preserved — work songs, lullabies, harvest songs, marriage songs, lament — would in many cases not have been documented otherwise, given the comparatively limited fieldwork attention to Kabyle women's-musical practice in the mid-twentieth century. Her voice was central to the Kabyle musical sphere of the 1950s through the 1980s and a continuing reference for the subsequent generations.
She lived the latter part of her life in Algiers and died there on 27 September 2014. Her funeral at her home village of Tashlijet was attended by the principal figures of contemporary Kabyle culture; a national-radio commemorative concert by the next generation of Kabyle women performers — Massilia, Malika Domrane, Amel Zen — followed the year of her death.