Music and ritual · Morocco
Gnawa (Gnaoua)
Gnawa (or Gnaoua) is a Moroccan musical, spiritual and healing tradition created by the descendants of enslaved people brought from sub-Saharan Africa. Led by a maâlem on the three-stringed guembri, with iron qraqeb castanets and call-and-response singing, it accompanies all-night lila ceremonies of trance. UNESCO inscribed it as intangible cultural heritage of humanity in December 2019.
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Roots
Gnawa culture was created by people taken from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco through the trans-Saharan slave trade, and by their descendants. Over centuries it combined ancestral African practices with Arab-Muslim and Amazigh (Berber) culture into a brotherhood with its own music, saints, spirits and rituals.
The sound
Three elements define gnawa music:
- The guembri (also called sintir or hajhouj): a three-stringed bass lute with a camel-skin face, played by the master musician, the maâlem. Its deep, looping lines carry the music, and the player also strikes the skin for percussion.
- The qraqeb: pairs of heavy iron castanets played by the other musicians, producing a relentless, metallic, galloping rhythm.
- Voices: the maâlem sings and a chorus answers, in songs addressed to saints and spirits.
The repetition is purposeful. Gnawa music is built to carry participants towards trance.
The lila
The central ritual is the lila, an all-night ceremony of healing and devotion. It moves through a sequence of songs, each associated with a family of spirits and a colour; incense is burned and participants may enter trance as their spirit's music is played. The ceremony is led by the maâlem with a mqadma, a woman who organises the rite.
From ritual to world stage
From the 1960s and 1970s, gnawa musicians played with jazz and rock musicians visiting Morocco, and fusion has continued ever since. Maâlem Mahmoud Guinia (1951–2015), from a celebrated Essaouira family of musicians, played with international artists including Carlos Santana.
Since 1998 the coastal city of Essaouira has hosted the Gnaoua and World Music Festival, which brings gnawa masters together with jazz, blues and world musicians and draws large crowds every year. In December 2019 UNESCO inscribed Gnawa on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Related
The visual equivalent of gnawa's blend of African and Moroccan sources is the work of Farid Belkahia and the Casablanca School. For Algeria's neighbouring tradition, see raï; for West African trance-adjacent dance rhythms, see mbalax.