Gnawa

For the article about music, refer to Gnawa music

The Gnawa or Gnaoua ( Arabic: چنّاوة) are a group of Moroccan musicians. The Gnawa may have descended from former slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa, migrated in caravans with the Trans-Saharan trade, or a combination of both. Their name could indicate that they came from the old Ghana Empire, which has no connection with modern day Ghana.

Gnawa and music

The same word also refers to Gnawa musicians of the same people who also practice healing rituals and thus bringing the rite of African animism with them. Gnawas, through their ceremonies, are considered to be experts in the treatment of scorpion stings and psychic disorders. They heal diseases by the use of colors, condensed cultural imagery, perfumes and fright.

Gnawas play deeply hypnotic trance music, marked by low-toned, rhythmic sintir melodies, call-and-response singing, hand clapping and cymbals called krakebs. Gnawa ceremonies use music and dance to evoke ancestral saints who can drive out evil, cure psychological ills, or remedy scorpion stings.

The sounds of the Gnawa have international appeal and have had colloborators outside the Maghreb, such as musicians Bill Laswell, Adam Rudolph and filmmaker Jamal Morelli. A mixed blessing, the modernization of the Gnawa has created a way for the musicians to leave or modify the sacred traditions and become international recording artists such as Hassan Hakmoun or performing expensive spectacles for tourists who want their own experience of the jnoon.

History

Gnawas are generally believed to originate geographically and culturally from the sahelian region of West and Central Africa or as their name might indicate from the old Ghana empire.

In 1591, with the fall of the Songhai Empire of Timbuktu, the Moroccan Sultan Ahmed Al Mansour Ad-Dahbi brought with him slaves into Morocco. Among the slaves who were taken were many speakers of Bambara (a language still heard among Moroccan gnawas), Songhai, and Hausa. It is believed that gnawas arrived in Morocco at this time.

While adopting Islam, they continued to celebrate the dramatized African spirits during rituals where they are devoted to the practice of the dances of possession and fright. This rite of possession is called Derdba (Arabic: دردبة), and proceeds the night (lila, Arabic: ليلة) that is animated jointly by a Master musician (maâlem, Arabic: معلم) accompanied by his troop. Gnawa music is already a mix between Moroccan Sufism and the spiritual power of African celebration music.

Gnawa assimilation in their new environment is represented by their songs in which they sing and dance to ease the pain just as Black Americans did when they sang as a way to deal with their plight. In this regard, Gnawa is very similar to the blues that is rooted in Black American slave songs. There are also similarities with many spiritual black groups in Africa such as the Bori in Nigeria, the Stambouli in Tunisia, the Sambani in Libya, the Bilali in Algeria, and those outside Africa, such the Voodoo religion. These similarities in the artistic and scriptural representations seem to reflect a shared experience of many African diasporic groups.