Jacques Willemont's documentary Gnawa: Music and Beyond explores the history, symbolism and ritual practice of Morocco's Gnawa traditions. The Gnawa are a population brought to Morocco from West Africa through a history of trans-Saharan slavery. In some ways mirroring syncretic traditions that grew out of trans-Atlantic slavery, like santaría in Cuba or condomblé in Brazil, the Gnawa fused West African religious and musical practices with Islam to create a musically-driven sacred healing ceremony called a derdba. Following an animal sacrifice, this all-night event moves through a series of spirits who possess adepts through trance. Willemont and his team draw upon years of interview footage to explore both how this ritual works and what its various components mean. To this end, the film relies heavily on interviews and analysis by Viviana Pâques, a French scholar of Gnawa music who provided scientific direction for the production. The film aims to demonstrate what can be a clandestine practice in Morocco by sharing a wealth of footage from these interviews with Pâques (who passed away in 2007) and from a recorded ceremony.
Structurally, Gnawa: Music and Beyond is built around the Gnawa ceremony as it has existed in Morocco for generations. To do so, the film layers three central types of content. Interview material with Al Ayachi, a ritual leader called a moqqadem, sits between documentary footage and interviews with Viviana Pâques, who presents an interpretive analysis based on her three decades of work with Al Ayachi and the Gnawa. Partly because of this structural choice, the film presents dual focal points: it aims to preserve and share the secret knowledge held within Gnawa ritual practice while it presents the importance of deep interpretive symbolism as studied by anthropologists like Pâques. She has been a central figure within the study of Gnawa music and ritual, most notably through her two books on the topic, L'arbre cosmique dans la pensée populaire et dans la vie quotidienne du nord-ouest africain (The cosmic tree in Northwest African popular thought and daily life [1964]), and La religion des esclaves: Recherches sur la confrérie marocaine des Gnawa (The religion of slaves: research on the Moroccan brotherhood of the Gnawa [1991]).
In the immense conglomerate of African fusions which we can explore today we find a wholly unique case: the Gnawa. The approach to the Gnawa’s musical expression, of profound social and religious implications, reveals to us not only an extremely rich cultural heritage but also one of the chapters that would have greatest effect on the development of North African societies during the last 500 years: slavery.
The term Gnawa refers to the brotherhood groupings (and, by extension, to their manifestations) of a minority ethnic-religious group of sub-Saharan origin but with an important presence especially in Morocco and, to a lesser extent, in Algeria and Tunisia, where they are known as Diwan and Stambali respectively. There is no unanimity on seeing the Gnawiya as a Tariqa or Sufi religious path in the way that some of those more rooted in the Maghreb can be, such as the Qadiriya, Issawiya or Hamdushiya, among others, with which, however, it shares an organisational structure and ecstatic and possession rites, in what are considered the limits of Islamic orthodoxy. The establishing of these syncretic expressions took place over several centuries, during which the animist ritual substrate gradually adapted to Islam, with variations which depended both on the geographic area and the social environment to which the different black communities had to adapt themselves.
The Origins The origin of the Gnawa, a word that seems to come from the Berber term agnaw/ignawen (dumb) in reference to their ignorance of Arabic and Berber must first be found in the diverse contingents of black slaves who between the 11th and 13th centuries were taken to the Maghreb strip from the Kingdom of Abyssinia, which occupied a strategic position in the caravanserai routes, and from the old Kingdom of Ghana (which today is part of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal). The traditional slave trade from the great Sudan intensified because of the conquest at the end of the 16th century of part of the Songhai Empire carried out by the Sultan of Morocco Ahmed Al-Mansur, a trafficking that continued until the early 20th century.
The descendants of these slaves, together with other free emigrant black peoples who arrived through the caravanserai routes, mixed with the local population and formed a group that despite its diverse origin acquired its own identity thanks to the figure of Sidi Bilal, the first slave of Ethiopian origin freed by Mohammed and who was the first Muezzin of Islam. These communities would also be known by other names in reference to their geographical origin (Sudani, Bambara), their social status (Ousfan, slaves), their religious affiliations (Bilali) or some of their practices of origin (Bori, in reference to the dance of possession practised by the Hausa taken to Tripoli). The large concentration of the black community in cities such as Marrakech and Essaouira (formerly called the port of Timbuktu) was because both cities had been important slave markets connected to the trans-Saharan route.
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