The history of Gnawa

The Gnawa are descendants of West Africans brought north into Morocco through the trans-Saharan trade between the 11th and 17th centuries, from lands reaching from present-day Senegal to Chad. Linguists trace their heritage to Sahelian peoples including the Soninke, Bambara, Fulani and Hausa.

The name itself is usually read through Berber: agnaw in the singular, ignawenin the plural. In Morocco the displaced communities and their descendants formed brotherhoods that folded their ancestral rites into Islam and Sufi practice. The tradition honours Bilal al-Habashi, the Prophet's Abyssinian muezzin, as its spiritual ancestor: proof that the voice of an African could carry the call to prayer.

The heart of the tradition is the lila, a ceremony that runs from late evening until sunrise. What sounds like one unbroken piece of music is a series of chants, each calling one of the mluk: spiritual entities addressed through seven colours, each with its own incense, rhythm and dance, like a prism splitting a single light.

A clairvoyant, the moqadma, keeps the ritual in order, bringing out the cloths and objects each colour requires, while dancers pass into the trance state called jedba. The maâlem, the master musician, leads it all from behind the guembri, calling the entities to present themselves one by one.

The guembri, a three-stringed skin-faced lute, is close kin to West African lutes like the Hausa halam, an ancestor of the banjo; the qraqeb, heavy iron castanets, and the tbel drum complete the sound. That sound has pulled the world in for decades: jazz musicians such as Randy Weston and Pharoah Sanders worked with the maâlems; Jimi Hendrix spent time in Essaouira around maâlem Mahmoud Guinia; Brahim Belkane played with Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page; Hassan Hakmoun carried the tradition to New York and worked with Peter Gabriel.

Out of those meetings grew the Gnawa fusions: the repertoire folded into jazz, blues, reggae, flamenco and hip-hop, without letting go of the guembri's pulse underneath. That current runs through our own stages too. Maâlem Simou Lagnaoui, who carries the tradition from the UK across Europe, plays with Gnawa Berlin in exactly that spirit, sharing stages and streets with musicians from far beyond the tradition. The photograph below is one such moment: the Global Echoes of Gnawa parade at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where we walked and played alongside Hicham Bilali's band and musicians and dancers from Berlin's flamenco and Afro-diasporic communities. The tradition keeps moving, which is how it survived seven centuries. Read more about the band or come and hear it live.