Gnawa Erotic

The Gnawa are less an ethnic group in the tidy sense than a people the Sahara assembled. Their ancestors came north out of the Sahel, most of them in chains, sold along the desert routes into Morocco across several centuries, and what they built after arriving was not a homeland but a practice. A Gnawi is someone who belongs to a house, a lineage of musicians, and a ceremony. The core of that world descends from Bambara, Hausa, Songhay and Fulani captives, but membership opened long ago to Moroccans with no West African ancestry at all. They speak Moroccan Arabic, and Tamazight in the south. The old languages are gone from conversation but not from the songs: much of the ritual repertoire is sung in words the singers themselves can no longer translate, held in place by melody alone. Two events shaped the community more than any others: the Saadian conquest of the Songhai Empire in 1591, which pushed captives north in numbers, and the reign of Moulay Ismail, who assembled the Abid al-Bukhari, a standing army of Black soldiers drawn from enslaved and free men alike. For most of the time since, Gnawa music sat at the bottom of the country's social order, tolerated for its cures and dismissed as the noise of slaves.

The ceremony is the lila, which runs from dusk until the light returns. A maalem leads it on the guembri, a three-stringed bass lute strung over a camel-skin body, with qraqeb, heavy iron castanets, hammering underneath. It opens outdoors with a procession, passes through a loose and comic stretch, then turns serious: a sequence of suites, each keyed to a color and to the spirits that answer to it, white for Sidi Musa and for water, yellow for Lalla Mira. A moqaddema, always a woman, runs the room. She handles the incense, drapes the right cloth over anyone who has gone under, and brings them back. Islam is not incidental to any of this. The patron is Sidi Bilal, the Abyssinian companion of the Prophet and the first to call the prayer, which is the community's own answer to anyone who says the practice stands outside the faith. Since the 1990s the music has traveled: Randy Weston and Pharoah Sanders recorded with Gnawa masters, Essaouira has run a festival since 1998, UNESCO listed the tradition in 2019, and maalems who once played for the sick now play for ticketed crowds. Whether an hour on a stage is the same thing as a night in a room is an argument the Gnawa are still having among themselves.