Gnawa festival has become a point of pride for Essaouira’s inhabitants since its founding in 1998. With music blaring over the streets of the city, the thousands of people who head to the three-day festival give a major boost to the touristic city’s economy.For almost twenty years, the rhythmic sounds of Gnawa music have wafted across Essaouira’s stages each June, bringing thousands of fans of music, the outdoors and spirituality, for what has become one of the biggest music festivals in Morocco.
Since Randy Weston, Jimmy Hendrix, and Cat Stevens made pilgrimages to them in southern Morocco, and since Bob Marley, Peter Gabriel, and Carlos Santana made music with them, music lovers have been familiar with their fascinating bass lines and polyrhythmic drums.
Little known, however, are the rituals and therapeutic practices of the brotherhood of the Gnawa, who originally came from western Sudan.
Although every Moroccan first of all associates the word “Gnawa” with black people, for a long time not all Gnawa have been black. As a result of intermarriage and assimilation, today there are light-skinned as well as black Gnawa. The Gnawa are not an ethnic group but evidence of West Africa’s cultural influence on Morocco. And nowhere in Morocco is “Africanism” as strongly represented as in the southern Moroccan seaport of Essaouira
