Daily Times

In a riot of colour, acrobatics and drum beats, Morocco’s gnawa artists joyously celebrated the inclusion of their ancient art-form in UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Troupes of the artists in traditional costumes paraded through the white-and-blue citadel town of Essaouira in southern Morocco Saturday, the sound of their lute strings and steel castanets filling the streets.

“Our goal is to bring this music to the world,” said Mokhtar Gania, 56, one of the great Gnawa masters, with a broad grin.

Gnawa culture is a centuries-old Moroccan practice rooted in African rituals, Sufi traditions and music played with the guenbri, a type of lute with three strings, and steel castanets called krakebs.

The tradition, which includes the veneration of Islamic holy men, dates back to at least the 16th century and combines ancestral African practices, Arab-Muslim and Berber influences.

Mokhtar Gania’s father, like his grandfather, was an emblematic figure of Gnawa ritual music, which traces its roots to the descendants of former slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.

Gnawa was once a set of esoteric rituals of rhythm and trance practised by brotherhoods and reserved for initiates, but it has since spread throughout the world.

The genre was popularised by a festival that started in 1997 in Essaouira, a small fortified city clinging to a rocky peninsula on the Atlantic coast that is also known as the “City of the Trade Winds”.