Plant of hot lands, green powder turned into colour, adornment, ritual and language, henna has accompanied some of life’s great moments in Morocco for generations. In South-East Morocco, it is also a local crop, particularly present around Tazarine and in the Maïder Basin. In 2012, sudestmaroc.com met Tlagmasse and Amina, two young women who had turned this art into a profession. In their own way, their portraits tell the story of the still-living transmission of a female savoir-faire now inscribed on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list.

A plant of hot lands

Before becoming a design on a hand, henna is a plant.

Lawsonia inermis is a shrub that thrives in hot, dry climates. Its leaves are harvested, dried and then ground until they become the green powder so familiar in Morocco’s souks. Mixed with water and, depending on the practice, various other ingredients, it becomes a paste whose colouring power comes mainly from a natural pigment, lawsone.

When the paste is applied to the skin, the colour gradually appears, at first orange and then darker, tending towards reddish-brown. It is commonly referred to as a ‘henna tattoo’, although it is not a tattoo in the strict sense: no ink is introduced beneath the skin and the design gradually disappears as the superficial layers of the skin are renewed.

But to reduce henna to a natural dye would be to miss what matters most. In the societies where its use has been passed down, the plant accompanies bodies, celebrations, the passages of life and relationships between generations. It belongs as much to the world of gesture as to that of symbol.

Henna: henna (Lawsonia inermis) is a thorny shrub of the Lythraceae family that can grow up to six metres high. It is known as mehndi, mendhi, mehendi (or mehandi) in India, ḥenna in Arabic, and lḥenni or anella in Berber.

In South-East Morocco, henna has its terroir

The henna found in Ouarzazate was not necessarily born in Ouarzazate.

A significant proportion of the henna circulating in the region comes from the more southerly and easterly territories of South-East Morocco, where the heat and aridity provide particularly favourable conditions for its cultivation.

The Ouarzazate Regional Office for Agricultural Development identifies its main production areas as Tazarine, Aït Boudaoud, Aït Ouallal, Nkob and Taghbalte, in Zagora Province, as well as Alnif, in Tinghir Province. It estimates that just over 1,000 hectares within its area are devoted to the crop, with an average annual production of around 2,800 tonnes.

Tazarine is therefore much more than a name associated, in the shops, with a reputed henna: the plant genuinely belongs to the agricultural landscape of this part of Morocco.

Since 2021, this relationship between a product and its territory has also been recognised through the ‘Henna of the Maïder Basin’ Geographical Indication. Its area covers seventeen communes across the provinces of Errachidia, Zagora and Tinghir.

The specifications accompanying this recognition reveal what is easily forgotten when henna is known only in its powdered form: behind it lie nurseries, irrigation, harvesting by hand with a sickle or scissors, followed by the drying of the leaves in the shade for several days before they are cleaned, ground and sieved. Up to four harvests can take place between May and November.

Before the decorated hand, there is therefore a land, a plant, and the men and women who cultivate it.

From powder to design

Between the dried leaf and the adorned hand lies another savoir-faire: that of preparation and application.

The paste must have the right texture, supple enough to allow the line to be drawn but firm enough to remain in place. Then comes the design. Lines, arabesques, flowers, foliage, interlacing or geometric compositions follow one another according to styles, regions, fashions and, above all, the imagination of the woman holding the instrument.

For there is no single Moroccan henna ‘pattern’.

As with carpets, embroidery or the decorative arts, repertoires circulate, change and mingle. Some practitioners favour compositions inherited from their region; others draw inspiration from pattern books, magazines, the creations of other hennayas or, today, the images circulating on social media.

Yet the gesture remains deeply personal. The same form, traced by two different hands, will never produce exactly the same design.

The hennaya — also known as a nekkacha depending on the region and usage — works quickly, but her speed is that of a gesture learned over many years: a succession of lines that must remain assured even as the design takes shape directly on the skin.

Henna accompanies the great passages of life

In Morocco, as in many societies of North Africa and the Middle East, henna is not merely a form of embellishment.

It appears at weddings, births and various family or religious celebrations. It is associated with festivity, joy and beauty, but also with protective beliefs and an entire imaginary world passed down within families.

Marriage is undoubtedly the moment when its presence is most visible.

The henna ceremony then becomes a particular moment: the bride is surrounded by women, the gestures take their time, and the decoration of the hands and feet is accompanied by objects, songs, words and practices whose forms differ from one family and one region to another. Henna no longer merely decorates a body: it symbolically marks a passage.

It is precisely this social dimension that explains why the plant cannot be separated from those who use it. UNESCO itself describes henna as a ‘symbol of joy’ and stresses that the rituals surrounding it help to strengthen social bonds.

Knowledge is not passed down through written rules alone. For a long time, and still very often today, one learns by watching: a mother, a neighbour, a relative, a more experienced professional. One watches the preparation of the paste, the pressure of the hand, the way in which a pattern is constructed; then comes the moment of trying it oneself.

This is exactly how the two women met by sudestmaroc.com in 2012 described their apprenticeship.

Tlagmasse, ‘I love henna’

This portrait was produced in 2012 by Hafsa Bouheddou. References to age and personal circumstances correspond to that date.

Tlagmasse was born in 1991. Alongside her studies, which she abandoned during lower secondary school, she had a passion for henna and tattooing. She enjoyed sketching shapes in pencil which she would then turn into beautiful henna designs. She turned this inclination into a profession. Yet Tlagmasse admits that she does not think she will go much further in this field, for various reasons including the lack of guidance and the growing number of women practising this activity, each with a style of her own.

Festivals and summer are the periods when there is greatest demand for henna, both from the local population and from tourists. Tlagmasse distinguishes herself through an oriental style known as lkhetfa. For her, the challenge is to draw inspiration from the history of the region so that her tattoos are not simply drawings but meaningful images.

Read also: The history of the women of Taznakhte embroidered on the loom

For Tlagmasse, henna is also a demanding activity that causes pain in her back and legs. She sometimes spends an entire day sitting down, particularly during periods of high demand. Some clients, meanwhile, delay their payment or bargain too much over the original price. Yet Tlagmasse takes care to satisfy her clients and loves her profession, an activity specific to women within Moroccan culture.

Amina, a needle, henna and happiness

This portrait was produced in 2012 by Meryem Ouidder. References to her professional experience and practice correspond to the situation described at the time of the interview.

Even as a very young girl, Amina adored drawing, and so it was quite naturally that, at barely thirteen years old, she began practising tattooing using henna. It did not take her long to excel in the field.

Today, this woman from Casablanca can pride herself on twelve years of experience not only as a henna tattooist (Nakacha) but also as a bridal dresser (Nagafa). Armed with her kindness and seriousness, Amina has managed, not without difficulty, to make her way behind the scenes of this profession. Those who have known her are struck by the cheerfulness and enthusiasm she has always been able to spread around her.

Although she had no prior knowledge, Amina constantly seeks to update her knowledge and skills as a professional henna tattooist. She is grateful to all those who trained her in the profession, particularly her neighbour.

Amina succeeded in sharpening her skills by continually keeping herself informed about new developments in the art of henna tattooing and by collecting patterns sold as photographs or cut out from magazines. Added to this was the fact that she regularly accompanied the most highly regarded tattooists, who passed on their know-how to her. To combine her studies with her passion, our tattooist needed the unconditional support of her mother, to whom she remains deeply grateful today: her mother supplied her with all the equipment she needed to progress in her work.

After completing her studies, Amina devoted herself entirely to her passion; today, this talented professional tattooist says she is impatient to see her work known to a wider public. Offering something new to all her clients is her motto, which is why she constantly makes a point of including traditional Moroccan motifs in her work.

Like all hennayas, Amina has her expert secrets, particularly for making the green colour of henna last longer on the hands of unmarried girls wishing to marry, thus leaving them time for success. These practices take place in a truly sacred atmosphere, in the presence of the famous tray (sinia) specially used for the application of henna, itself decorated and holding the necessary utensils: a bowl of henna, eggs, dates, Fassi lipstick, rose water, khol beldi, miswak, milk, perfume cones and a sugar loaf, symbolising the sweetness of life. According to hennaya Amina, henna mingles myth with religion and carries the hope of increasing the chances of marriage for unmarried girls who colour their thumb and middle finger with henna. Thus the day of henna corresponds to the weekly day of Muslims, Friday. Hadiths praising the virtues of the sacred plant are recited.

Read also: The Taznakhte carpet, tradition, art and beauty

Like an artist, Amina executes her designs with an excellence whose secret belongs to her alone. She uses her dexterity and, above all, her imagination to turn her client’s hand into a genuine work of art and, as a result, to win a smile of satisfaction from her clients at the end of each tattooing session.

Working as a henna tattooist is today an honourable and widely sought-after profession. The price of a tattooing session, besides not requiring a great deal of time, is affordable for every budget.

The city of Ouarzazate is renowned for the quality of its henna, particularly that of Tazarine. It is also home to many experienced and talented tattooists, and Amina says she is very proud to be one of them. Today she lives with her husband, a caterer by profession, in this city of a thousand and one kasbahs and an inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration.

A savoir-faire passed from woman to woman

The stories of Tlagmasse and Amina are not identical, and that is precisely what makes them interesting.

One draws and is still searching for her place in a profession she loves but whose difficulties she can already see. The other describes an apprenticeship begun in adolescence and patiently built alongside a neighbour, her mother and other professionals.

Yet both show the same thing: henna is also a chain of transmission between women.

The gesture observed becomes the gesture reproduced; the pattern received becomes the pattern transformed; knowledge that once belonged to a mother, a neighbour or an older hennaya becomes, in turn, a way of earning a living.

This transmission does not in any way prevent invention. Quite the opposite. Patterns change, tools evolve, influences circulate. New forms appear alongside older compositions. What is passed down, therefore, is not simply a catalogue of designs: it is the mastery of a gesture sufficiently alive to continue transforming itself.

Henna, Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

Twelve years after these two portraits were published on sudestmaroc.com, this cultural dimension received international recognition.

In 2024, ‘Henna: rituals, aesthetic and social practices’ was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as part of a nomination bringing together sixteen countries, from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, including Morocco.

It is not the plant alone that has been recognised in this way.

The inscription encompasses knowledge relating to its cultivation, the harvesting of the leaves, their processing, the preparation of the paste and its application, but also the rituals, social practices, songs, words and forms of transmission that accompany its use.

In other words, everything that connects the field to the hand.

When Tlagmasse and Amina spoke about their passion in 2012, they were of course not yet talking about ‘intangible cultural heritage’. They were talking about a profession, clients, patterns, learning, difficulties, celebrations and weddings.

But they were already talking about exactly that.

Knowledge received. A gesture learned. And a colour which, from the hot soil of southern Morocco to women’s hands, continues to circulate.

Crédit Photographie : Abdellah Azizi
www.azifoto.com

Eric Anglade

For more than twenty years, Éric Anglade has lived in a village of South-Eastern Morocco, where he explores and documents the region’s history, heritage, and living traditions. He founded sudestmaroc.com as a space for sharing fieldwork and cultural insight, bridging local knowledge with global perspectives. He also works alongside women carpet-weavers to help sustain their craft and welcomes travellers at Le Jardin de Yuda, his guesthouse envisioned as a meeting place for exchange and transmission.

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The Berber world is like a world unto itself, full and vast with a history that reaches back into the distant past of our humanity, rich and colourful with an identity mingled, at its roots, with three horizons, solid, almost mineral, yet vibrating with the many resonances of its culture. Today, Amazigh identity is recognised as an integral part of Morocco’s identity, or at the very least of its unity, as clearly stated in the 2011 Constitution.

Sudestmaroc.com takes you on a journey of discovery into this Amazigh world, beginning with an exploration of its culture through the eyes of someone both expert in and passionate about his subject. Dr Mohamed Chtatou answers our questions.

Sudestmaroc.com – From what period in human history can we begin to speak of a specifically Berber culture?

Mohamed Chtatou – The Berber, who calls himself Amazigh — Imazighen in the plural — is one of the descendants of the pre-Arab inhabitants of North Africa. Today, Berbers live in communities scattered across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Niger and Mauritania. They speak several Amazigh languages, all belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family and related, among others, to ancient Egyptian. These Berber populations have been present in this part of the continent since very ancient times.

The Upper Palaeolithic is the period of Prehistory characterised by the development of certain techniques — blades, tools and weapons made from hard animal materials, spear-throwers, etc. — while at the same time witnessing an extraordinary flourishing of art. The Upper Palaeolithic extends from approximately 45,000 to 12,000 years before the present. (Source: Wikipedia)

The indigenous population of North Africa was formed through the arrival of several waves of populations, some coming from Western Europe, others from sub-Saharan Africa, and still others from north-eastern Africa.

The origins of the Berber peoples are not clearly known, but their history is long and ancient, much of it remaining unknown to us because of the scarcity of written sources. Berber populations have nevertheless possessed their own alphabetic writing system since Antiquity, known as Libyco-Berber, attested from at least the sixth century BC and of which Tuareg Tifinagh is one of the surviving legacies.

Among the oldest traces of the history of North African populations are also rock paintings. Rock art several millennia old has notably been discovered at Tadrart Acacus in Libya. Many of these paintings depict animals and scenes from everyday life. Paintings have also been found at Tassili n’Ajjer, in south-eastern Algeria.

From around 2000 BC onwards, Berber languages spread westwards, from the Nile Valley to the Maghreb, across the northern Sahara. By the first millennium BC, their speakers were the native inhabitants of the vast region encountered by the Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans. A succession of Berber peoples — Mauri, Masaesyli, Massyli, Musulami, Gaetuli and Garamantes — subsequently gave rise to Berber kingdoms under Carthaginian and Roman influence.

Among these kingdoms, Numidia gradually came under Roman rule during the first century BC, part of its territory being turned into a province following the defeat of Juba I in 46 BC; Mauretania, meanwhile, was annexed to the Roman Empire in the first century AD. Other kingdoms emerged in Late Antiquity, following the Vandal invasion of AD 429 and the Byzantine reconquest of 533, before disappearing in the context of the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Sudestmaroc.com – Given the vast geographical area occupied by Berber populations, are we dealing with one Berber culture or several Berber cultures?

MC – Broadly speaking, two major groups can be distinguished: the Amazigh populations of the Maghreb and the Tuaregs, the Amazigh populations of the Sahara and the Sahel.

The former are mainly sedentary, with a nomadic minority, while the Tuaregs historically developed largely nomadic ways of life. Amazigh populations extend from the Siwa Valley in Egypt to Morocco and, historically, to the Canary Islands, through Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. The Tuaregs live mainly in Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso.

Sudestmaroc.com – What was the traditional model of organisation within Berber communities?

MC – First of all, the basic unit of the traditional Berber community is the nuclear family, generally patrilineal. From this unit, the tribal group is formed by bringing together several families around the name of a common ancestor. It is indeed from the name of this founding ancestor that tribes derive their public identity. They use the designation Aït, which literally means “the children of” and, by extension, the descendants or people of, followed by the name of the common ancestor.

In principle, all families within a tribe are equal, governed by a code of honour under the authority of a council of elders, the jmāʿah — a democratically elected political body — which maintains harmony within the community and delivers judgements in the event of disputes, notably by determining compensation and punishment.

In reality, the various Berber societies were not quite so egalitarian. A tribe regularly accepted newcomers into its village, but they were then regarded as inferior. More generally, the elders who held power often came from the same ruling families.

The Tuaregs, a people of aristocratic nomads

The Tuaregs of the Ahaggar and southern Sahara, also known as the “Blue Men” because of their indigo-dyed robes and face veils, were aristocratic nomads who ruled over vassals, serfs and slaves who cultivated the oases on their behalf; they in turn recognised supreme chiefs or kings known as amenukals. Under the name Tifinagh, the Tuaregs preserved a form of the ancient Libyco-Berber consonantal script, although historically much scholarly writing was produced in Arabic by a class of Muslim scholars.

Read: Tifinagh, the Berber singularity engraved in time

Sudestmaroc.com – How is Berber identity structured?

MC – Three main themes can be distinguished within Amazigh culture, forming an important and fundamental trinity in its system of values. These themes have transcended Berber culture and have been widely accepted as basic concepts of Moroccan identity.

This trinity revolves around the following notions: first comes the importance of language as a vehicle for culture and the principal marker of identity (tamazight/awal), both as a means of communication and as a means of perpetuating history. Then comes the omnipresence of the strong and indivisible system of kinship and belonging to the extended family (ddam/tamount), expressed through solidarity and coexistence. Finally, there is the powerful connection to the land, identification with its bounty and belief in its sacred nature (akkal/tammourt/tamazirt); this last marker of identity is also very strong among other peoples around the Mediterranean.

The most obvious theme within the Amazigh community in Morocco is the importance of language in society, civilisation and lived experience. When one considers the culture of the Amazigh people, there is a clear correlation between the centrality of language and the preservation of a civilisation and traditions stretching back thousands of years. This is the case, for example, with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in northern Morocco. Their trance music and anthropological theatre have come through four thousand years of history without so much as a scratch.

The history and belief system of the Amazigh people have been preserved orally, from father to son; one generation passed history, wisdom and laws to another, almost automatically, through the mother tongue, a powerful linguistic vehicle. Indeed, despite the existence of three distinct Amazigh dialects in Morocco, the history and laws of the Amazigh people have remained in step with one another and survived countless invasions over a long history spanning eight millennia.

The matriarch as the pivotal figure of the Amazigh family

The idea of kinship, expressed through people linked by blood, shared experience and history, nevertheless highlights an important distinction between Amazigh and Moroccan culture, in the sense that the Amazigh community system places emphasis on the matriarch as the pivotal figure of a family imbued with democratic values, whereas Moroccan culture, with its Arab substratum, favours a very strong and uncompromising patriarchy.

Among the Amazighs, blood ties are sacred in marriage, parenthood and family belonging. Two tribes may, for example, seal their alliance through a marriage. Blood, in the context of sacrifice, is also a sign of reconciliation, a request for forgiveness and respect (tagharst). It is also a symbol of hospitality: a sheep is slaughtered to welcome a guest or stranger because shedding blood establishes a bond of respect with the newcomer and includes him within society, the jma’ath.

The land, a sacred possession

The Amazighs regard the land as a sacred possession which not only sustained life, but also provided protection against Western and Arab imperial campaigns and helped preserve both language and the community system. Indeed, the sale of any inherited plot of land was for a long time strongly stigmatised (hchouma) within Amazigh culture.

Amazigh civilisation has survived the erosion of time and invading cultures thanks to the boundless love that the indigenous peoples of North Africa bear for the land that feeds, protects and strengthens them. It can also be said that Amazigh identity has managed to defy time because the mountains (akkal) protected it against acculturation and invasion.

The Amazigh attachment to the land finds expression in agriculture and in festivals celebrating its bounty for the community. Such celebrations can be found among the ancient Amazigh populations of the Jbala, in particular the Aït Serif clan and their musicians, the Jahjouka, who celebrate the fertility of the land through music and dance during their annual festival known as Boujloud in Arabic and Bou Irmawen/Ilmawen in Tamazight.

The rural territories of South-East Morocco

Sudestmaroc.com – External political and cultural powers have repeatedly occupied Amazigh territories, from the Phoenicians to the French. How did Berber culture develop in the face of these successive pressures? Did it display a capacity for assimilation, cultural intermingling or preservation?

MC – The history of the Berbers living today in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt has been profoundly marked by domination by population groups from elsewhere — first the Romans, then the Arabs, and later the French, Spanish and Italians.

“Adaptation and rebellion” — these were the only options open to Berbers under foreign domination. As “free men” — one of the meanings traditionally attributed to the term Imazighen — they largely chose non-adaptation and withdrew into mountainous regions in order to practise their culture within their families and escape persecution by foreign rulers.

Tattooing was one of the means of rebellion. The signs and ornaments decorating the backs of men’s hands spoke of tribal belonging and religion — and they were forbidden under Muslim rule.

In resisting assimilation by the cultures of conquering peoples, the Berber world was able to ensure its own cultural continuity throughout history through its arts and the symbols of identity carried within them. Music obviously played an important role. Ancient Berber culture is extraordinarily rich and diverse, with a wide variety of musical styles. These range from bagpipes and oboes — in a style that can recall certain Celtic music — to pentatonic music reminiscent of Chinese music, all combined with African rhythms and a very substantial body of authentic oral literature. These traditions have been kept alive by small groups of musicians who travel from village to village, as they have done for centuries, performing at weddings and other social occasions with their songs, stories and poems.

Read: Yaz, the Amazigh symbol of the free man

The mother, a vehicle for Berber cultural continuity

Berber mothers have been largely responsible for the survival of the Berber language and cultural identity. Mothers share traditional stories and beliefs with their children. Women also preserve cultural traditions through crafts such as weaving, jewellery, tattooing and pottery.

Rural women, particularly those who are illiterate, preserve Tamazight as a living language, infusing traditional art forms with an oral dimension through which linguistic traditions are passed from one generation to the next. In music and poetry, Amazigh women use their verses to keep the community informed about the comings and goings of its members, recount important events, uphold moral and social codes, and remind the wider community of the bonds that unite it and of its shared memory.

Sudestmaroc.com – The Amazigh New Year represents a distinctive Amazigh tradition. Could you trace its origins and symbolism?

MC – Anthropologists emphasise that it is difficult to establish precisely the possible historical roots of the Berber New Year, known as Yennayer. The contemporary Amazigh calendar conventionally dates its starting point to the accession of Chachnak — Sheshonq I — a pharaoh of the Twenty-Second Dynasty of Libyan origin, around 950 BC.

The Amazigh New Year marks the first day of the agricultural year for Berber communities. It belongs to a traditional calendar linked to the Julian calendar. By convention, the Amazigh year is now calculated by adding 950 to the Gregorian year: 2026 therefore corresponds to the year 2976. Depending on region and tradition, Yennayer is celebrated around 12, 13 or 14 January; in Morocco, the official date of the Amazigh New Year is now fixed at 14 January. Berbers sometimes call this festival “Id Suggas”, while some Arabic-speaking communities refer to it as “Hagouza”, in reference to the agricultural year.

The Julian calendar is a solar calendar used in ancient Rome, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC to replace the Roman Republican calendar. It remained in use in Europe until it was gradually replaced by the Gregorian calendar from the late sixteenth century onwards. Today, the Julian and Gregorian calendars are thirteen days apart.

Amazigh people celebrate Yennayer in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and parts of Egypt. In Algeria, Yennayer has been recognised as a national holiday since 2018. In Morocco, the situation has changed since this interview was originally conducted: following a royal decision announced on 3 May 2023, 14 January became an official paid national holiday dedicated to the Amazigh New Year.

As an agricultural festival, Yennayer is a celebration of life. Like the celebration of 1 January, it is a time when people make wishes for longevity, prosperity and the future. It is considered an auspicious day for marriages and other important events in life. Children undergo important rites of passage during Yennayer. Boys may receive their first haircut, while parents send their children out to collect fruit and vegetables.

Food occupies an important place in the celebration, and several dishes are traditionally served on this special day. Orkimen is a thick soup made from dried broad beans and wheat. Couscous is another traditional dish and, at Yennayer, is specially prepared with seven vegetables. Tagoula is a cereal-based preparation served, depending on region and tradition, with butter, ghee, argan oil or honey.

A date stone or a piece of almond may be hidden inside the tagoula or couscous. Whoever finds the stone or nut is believed to be blessed throughout the coming year. In the past, that person would be entrusted with the keys to the storeroom for the rest of the year.

Read: Yennayer, the Berber new year

There are also many remarkable traditions and practices surrounding the food Amazigh families prepare for this festive night. Alongside special dances and songs of love, fertility and prosperity welcoming a new agricultural year, Amazigh people, particularly those living in rural areas, find in the occasion an opportunity to come together, exchange food and reconcile with those with whom they may have had disagreements.

Sudestmaroc.com – What is the role of women in Berber culture?

MC – Women’s oral tradition — among earlier generations, many of whom were illiterate — has been a major factor in the survival of Tamazight, because women use the language in domestic communication, in raising children, and in repeating folk tales, poems, proverbs, songs, and family and cultural histories.

Amazigh has been part of Morocco’s primary education system since September 2003, and its gradual expansion continues. This relatively recent presence within the education system in no way diminishes the essential historical role played by Amazigh women in transmitting the language to subsequent generations. As the people traditionally most closely involved in caring for children, they long provided children’s first link with Tamazight, giving it its full status as a mother tongue and helping ensure its longevity despite its historically limited representation in the public sphere.

Read: The story of the women of Taznakhte embroidered on the loom

Another reason why women may be regarded as the principal actors in the preservation of Tamazight lies in their related role as guardians of culture. Alongside managing their households and raising their children, women play an essential role in preserving Amazigh artistic and cultural heritage through their work in areas such as textiles, music, poetry and dance.

Here again, women are particularly important because they infuse these arts with traditions transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Women, for example, give Tamazight names to the motifs in their textiles and pass them on to their daughters. The names vary according to the resemblance the weaver sees between a motif and surrounding objects or the natural world, meaning that the same motif may carry a multitude of descriptive Tamazight names among different artists and families.

Moroccan Amazigh rugs are unique and have a fascinating history. They represent one of the best-known forms of folk-art rug making. These rugs have been made for centuries. The weaving of Moroccan rugs has traditionally been the responsibility of Amazigh women, in terms of their conception, weaving and artistic expression alike.

Women were responsible for preserving and passing on the knowledge required to make these rugs, including the secrets of family motifs, knotting techniques and the colours to be used. All this knowledge concerning the history of Amazigh rug weaving was transmitted matrilineally, each generation of women being responsible for passing it on to the next. Rugs were used within tribal groups as household coverings, horse blankets, standards, flags and other utilitarian objects.

Sudestmaroc.com – What are the distinctive features of Tuareg culture within the wider Berber cultural community?

MC – Although they have retained their language and many of the customs of their Berber ancestors, the Tuaregs have developed a unique culture of their own, a genuine synthesis of numerous traditions, including not only Berber and Arab traditions but also elements drawn from the peoples of the Sahel.

An aura of mystery and romanticism surrounds the desert nomads known as the Tuaregs. Long known as warriors, traders and highly skilled guides through the harsh and arid Sahara, the Tuaregs have seen their independence seriously threatened by repeated droughts that kill their herds and by international borders that severely restrict their movements. Many have been forced to abandon their nomadic way of life and settle permanently, forming small villages or moving to towns and cities in search of work.

Berbers once sought refuge in the oases of the Sahara

The Tuareg people represent a Saharan branch of the Berber world, which has been present in North Africa for several millennia. Although today’s Tuaregs are Muslims, their ancestors gradually moved into and established themselves across the Sahara as North Africa underwent major historical transformations, notably following the Arab conquests of the seventh century and the Bedouin migrations of later centuries. Many Berber groups thus found refuge in the oases and Saharan territories, where they developed or continued nomadic ways of life.

These nomadic pastoralists inhabit a vast region stretching from central Algeria and Libya in the north to northern Nigeria in the south, and from Libya in the east to the regions around Timbuktu in Mali in the west. The largest Tuareg populations today live in Mali and Niger, but also in Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso.

Tuareg society is traditionally highly stratified, with several social categories including nobles, vassals, religious specialists, artisans and formerly servile groups. Tuaregs are traditionally monogamous, and their social organisation gives an important place to descent and transmission through women. In this respect, they differ markedly from many other societies in the region.

Sudestmaroc.com – Is it ultimately possible to distinguish the Berber component within Moroccan identity?

The cultures that make up Morocco are inextricably intertwined. Amazigh culture is nevertheless one of the central elements in the country’s way of life and dominant system of popular beliefs. One example is Twiza, a community support network which is originally an Amazigh concept but has become one of the foundations of contemporary Moroccan social structure.

In Morocco, Amazigh customs and systems of belief lie at the heart of many expressions of popular Islam, including Sufism as it developed within the Moroccan Sunni Maliki context.

Read: The Naciria Zaouia of Tamegroute, anatomy of a birth

The relationship between Islam and the Amazighs in Morocco is mutually reinforcing. Islam constitutes the religious tradition of the Amazighs. The Amazighs, in turn, colour that tradition with their languages, customs and local beliefs, some of which predate Islam. Thus, the ancient Amazigh animistic belief in the religious significance of the seasons acquired an additional layer of Islamic meaning when the Moroccan disciples — sing. mourid, pl. muridoun — of the Amazigh Sufi Sidi Harazem associated the miracle (karamah) of the spring with this Friend of God. Popular Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, in Morocco reconfigures pre-Islamic religious phenomena through an Islamic theological medium. Amazigh awliya’ Allah, or Friends of God, perform the crucial work of locating the Islamic tradition within its Amazigh linguistic and religious context. Popular Sufi Islam in Morocco is therefore a tradition that values both the local Amazigh cultural context and the Islamic tradition.

It should not be forgotten that the Amazighs constitute Morocco’s indigenous population. They have lived continuously in this country for millennia. The relationship between Amazigh culture and Moroccan society is therefore a natural one. The beliefs and ways of life of Morocco’s earliest inhabitants are thus deeply embedded at the heart of contemporary Moroccan culture.

Mohamed Chtatou

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Rites and legends of Yennayer, the Berber New Year

The earth cracks beneath the March sun. In the douars of the Middle Atlas, people scan an empty sky, questioning the absent clouds. Since 1920, a book has preserved, phrase by phrase, what the Amazighs then did to summon the rain: precise gestures, songs, wooden dolls dressed as brides. That book is Mots et choses berbères.

A source from 1920, a perspective to be placed in context

Émile Laoust (1876–1952), a linguist and one of the founders of modern Berber studies, published Mots et choses berbères in 1920, under the French Protectorate. In it, he recorded field notes gathered tribe by tribe, transcribed in Berber and then translated into French.

A century later, his chapter on the sky and the seasons remains one of the most precise sources on Amazigh rain rites — many of which have since disappeared or merged into other festivals. Laoust’s perspective inevitably bears the marks of his time. But the material he collected retains a value that nothing has replaced.

All quotations in this article are taken from his chapter ‘Le Temps, l’Atmosphère, le Ciel’.

Anzar: the founding myth

Before the spoon dressed as a bride, before the songs and the processions, there is a name: Anzar. Among the Amazighs, rain is not a meteorological phenomenon — it is a bridegroom who is awaited.

Laoust is categorical on this point:

This grammatical detail is no scholar’s triviality: it supports the entire symbolic structure of the rite. For if Anzar is masculine, then the ritual spoon — Taghonja — can only be a female figure. A bride who is dressed, carried in procession, led towards her celestial husband.

The union of Earth and Sky, in this reading, is no gratuitous poetic image: it obeys a universal logic of fertility, according to which nothing can grow without the meeting of the two principles. The same expectation can be found in the songs that women address directly to the deified spoon:

This founding myth — Anzar the bridegroom, Taghonja the bride — provides the key to everything that follows: the diversity of the tribes, the variety of ritual objects, even the more troubling figure of Ali the Hooded One among the Berabers.

A tribal map of the rite

The rain rite has no single form. Each tribe, each valley, shaped it in its own way.

In Marrakech and the Haouz, pious widows dress the doll with the greatest care. In the Anti-Atlas, among the Ithamed of the Oued Noun, a lamb is led alongside the spoon. Among the Infedouaq, they go further still: Taghonja is given a miniature husband, fashioned from a pestle.

In the Tafilalt, the ceremony ends in a fight: the women battle until the doll is destroyed, and a fragment of it is kept in the family chest for its baraka. Further south, at Amsmiz and Imi n’Tanout, it is drowned instead — and the way it sinks into the water becomes an omen for the agricultural year ahead.

In Kabylia, even the name of the rite changes: Taghonja is no longer invoked, but Anzar himself, called upon in person:

This variety is not disorder. It is evidence of a system alive enough to adapt to each landscape, without ever losing its symbolic core.

Taghonja: the bride that is fashioned

The name comes from a simple object: agenja, the large wooden spoon used for drawing water. From this domestic utensil, the Amazighs made a divinity.

The ceremony consists of dressing this spoon as a bride — a taslit — and carrying it through the douars, accompanied by songs and the collection of alms. Laoust sees in this an almost mechanical logic: through both its function and its form, the object that draws water calls down the water of the sky.

In Marrakech, making the doll is a genuine craft. A group of mature women, widowed or divorced and renowned for their piety, gather at the home of the most devout among them. They fasten two large ladles crosswise to the end of a reed, draw a face in black dye, apply red to the cheeks, and wrap the head in silk scarves. The procession sings:

The procession stops outside the homes of notables, collects offerings, and drenches both the doll and those accompanying it with water. If necessary, it is repeated for three nights in succession.

What happens to Taghonja afterwards varies from one region to another. In Marrakech, she is simply dismantled. In the Tafilalt, the women fight until she is destroyed — it is said that without this battle, the rain would never fall. Elsewhere, she is buried, or drowned, while people carefully observe the way she disappears beneath the water.

One thing is striking in Laoust’s text: whatever the variant, Taghonja is never merely an accessory to be discarded without regard. Even when destroyed, she remains charged with baraka — hence the custom of keeping a fragment of the doll in the family chest.

The variety of ritual objects

The spoon is not the only object capable of calling down the rain. Laoust distinguishes several ritual objects, each carrying its own symbolic logic.

In some women’s ceremonies, the funnel takes the place of the spoon: it is turned upside down at the end of a stick, its widening shape recalling the very act of receiving water. The shovel, meanwhile, retains a direct connection with grain and harvests — Laoust calls it tasrif unnzar, ‘the Bride of the Rain’.

But the reed and the banner form the second great category of the rite, almost as widespread as the spoon itself. Reeds grow in damp places; by sympathy, it was thought, they could attract water. Their leaves, stirred by the wind, were even said to imitate the whistling sound that summons rain from the west.

Attached to the reed, a coloured cloth becomes a banner. It is raised on the rooftops, where it flutters until the rain finally wets it. At Ras el-Oued, the village chief himself plants the banner on his terrace before making the rounds of the houses to collect grain.

These objects are not mutually exclusive: spoon and banner are often combined in the same ceremony, each reinforcing the magical action of the other. Laoust notes that the invocation itself continues to be made in the name of the same divinity — even when the object changes, the name remains.

Ali the Hooded One among the Berabers

Among the Berabers of the Middle Atlas, the rite changes its face — literally. It is no longer a bride who is carried in procession, but a man: Ali the Hooded One.

The name varies from tribe to tribe — Ali son of Ali among the Ichqern, ‘Addji the Hooded One among the Izayan — but the effigy remains the same: the hood of a burnous stuffed with cloth and carried on a boy’s shoulder. Unlike Taghonja, here it is the men who conduct the ceremony.

Yet the ritual reproduces that of the spoon point by point: a procession around the douar, stops before the tents, sprinklings of water, the collection of offerings for a communal meal. Only the character and the songs accompanying him are different.

These songs tell a little scene: Ali, caught by violent rain out in the countryside, pulls up his hood and moves closer to the douar, where the dogs greet him as a stranger. ‘The rain drove him towards the douar!’ sing the Izayan.

Among the Aïth Seghrouchen, the rain becomes almost a domestic deluge:

Ali the Hooded One is therefore not a god who is implored, but a man who is acted out — driven away, soaked, dispossessed. The magic works by sympathy: to describe the downpour is already to summon it.

The prayer for rain: tazallit n-unzar

Islam did not erase these ancient practices; it gave them a liturgical form. The salat al-istisqa, the prayer for rain, becomes in Berber tazallit n-unzar.

Among the Aït Mzal, it is recited beside a river: an old man enters the bed of the wadi, wets his clothes, then leads the ceremony from a rock. Among the Mtougga, it takes place ten days after the official opening of the ploughing season, if the rain has still not come — sheep are sacrificed, couscous is shared at the mosque, and the fatha is recited by the fqih.

If this first prayer has no effect, people move on to the ‘great sacrifice’, tigersi moqqorn: the tolba and schoolchildren go to the zaouïa of a saint, where large livestock are slaughtered.

Among the Ida Gounidif, the ceremony is accompanied by an older rite: a black billy goat is sacrificed, small cairns of stones are built, then demolished by each participant after the prayer. The taleb concludes:

The official prayer and the magical gesture thus overlap without contradicting one another — Islam frames, without erasing it, the ancient Amazigh ritual substratum.

The rope and the black cow

Two ritual gestures, one playful, the other processional, share the same logic: to provoke rain through collective movement and reversal.

The rope game, jbad elhabel, resembles an ordinary tug-of-war — except that it is deliberately played during periods of drought. Men on one side, women on the other, they pull until the rope breaks: the sudden fall exposes what is normally concealed, provoking laughter and bawdy jokes. The game is repeated three times, then a fatha is recited. Among the Igliwa, someone even deliberately cuts the rope to take the women by surprise as they fall.

The procession of the black cow follows another, more solemn logic. The animal — tamugait idlan — is led around the village, the mosque or a sanctuary. Among the Aïth Bou Zemmour, an elderly woman leads it by the ear, three times around the school tent. Among the Aïth Ouirra, a basket is placed between its horns and a virgin’s belt around its belly.

The black colour is no accident: it is, Laoust writes, the colour of clouds heavy with rain. And if the animal happens to urinate during the procession, it is read as a certain sign — the rain will not be long in coming.

The magic of knots: the little girl with bound hands

The most intimate gesture in Laoust’s chapter is also the harshest. If the rain does not fall, it is believed, dark forces are holding the elements in chains. Untying bonds must therefore, by sympathy, release the rain.

Among the Ida Gounidif, children go from house to house collecting flour, then make their way to a threshing floor with an elderly devout woman. The women present undo the braids across their foreheads. In the centre of the circle, the old woman places a little girl chosen because she is poor and orphaned: she unbraids all her hair, then ties her hands behind her back.

The other children then run around her, shouting and singing:

Overwhelmed by the din, the little girl begins to cry — and her tears, far from being incidental, are precisely what is sought. Laoust states it without hesitation: the tears, he writes, constitute an equally important element of the rite.

The same motif can be found in the Souss and Anti-Atlas. Among the Aït Isaffen, the tolba take a little girl to the place of prayer, her hands remaining bound until the ceremony is over. Among the Isaggen, a young orphan girl is led in procession, her hands tied behind her back, around the shrine of Sidi Hajj Azza.

This rite troubles our gaze today. Laoust records it without judgement — and, in doing so, preserves it from oblivion.

A system, not folklore

Spoon, reed, banner, rope, black cow, bound hands: taken separately, these gestures resemble an inventory of curiosities. Placed side by side, in the light of the myth of Anzar, they reveal something else — a coherent cosmology, in which sky and earth can unite only through the mediation of a human gesture.

What Laoust documented in 1920 is therefore not folklore in the diminished sense of the word. It is a complete system of thought, in which magic, Islamic prayer and myth coexist without cancelling one another out.

Discover: Ali the Hooded One, the fugitive of the rain

Discover: Taghonja, the bride of the rain

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Eric Anglade

For more than twenty years, Éric Anglade has lived in a village of South-Eastern Morocco, where he explores and documents the region’s history, heritage, and living traditions. He founded sudestmaroc.com as a space for sharing fieldwork and cultural insight, bridging local knowledge with global perspectives. He also works alongside women carpet-weavers to help sustain their craft and welcomes travellers at Le Jardin de Yuda, his guesthouse envisioned as a meeting place for exchange and transmission.

You can read this article while listening to the Raïs chant.

Within the mosaic of Moroccan identity, the Gnawa hold a singular place. Their presence strengthens the country’s uniqueness, but above all gives greater depth to its soul. Known for their music, the Gnawa community carries within Morocco the echoes of sub-Saharan Africa. In this sense, it is the rightful heir to the distant suffering of slavery, which for centuries reached into every corner of the kingdom.

The Gnawa are also the bearers of an ancestral mysticism in which the arts of healing mingle with those of dialogue with the divine. Scattered throughout Morocco, Gnawa communities follow different traditions that distinguish them from one another. One of these traditions is associated with a mythical ancestral figure named Lalla Mimouna, revered as a central figure of their identity.

Near Tinghir, in the Todgha Valley, one such Gnawa community still lives today, regularly making the colours of its heritage resound. M’bark El Haouzi is its Amghar. He agreed to answer the questions of Sudestmaroc.com.

Sudestmaroc.com – You have devoted your academic research to the Gnawa, notably through the publication of the book Les Gnawa de Lalla Mimouna, co-authored with Erwan Delon. What led you to take such an interest in this subject, and why did you focus on this particular community?

M’bark El Haouzi – I am the Amghar of the Gnawa of Todgha, and I have devoted my life to preserving and promoting this culture, which came close to disappearing in the early 1980s.

At the time, there was little interest in this culture and the danger of its disappearance was very real. In 1994, while completing my degree in French Language and Literature, I wrote my dissertation on The Gnawa Festival – Performances and Theatrical Games in the Errachidia Region.

Two years earlier, in 1992, during an annual festival in Igli, I had put a few questions to the late Messaoud Oubelkhir. He was then one of the finest Gnawa performers in southern Morocco and a true custodian of Gnawa memory and traditions.

He was renowned for his performances and his distinctive style. Before answering me, he asked why I was asking these questions. I told him that I wanted to carry out an academic study of Gnawa activities and traditions in South-East Morocco.

He then took my hand and said:

I promised him then that I would devote myself to preserving and promoting Gnawa heritage.

Sudestmaroc.com – Can you outline the history of the Gnawa community of South-East Morocco: its origins, when and why it arrived in this part of the country, particularly in the Drâa Valley, Tafilalet and Todgha?

M’bark El Haouzi – The arrival of the Gnawa in Morocco took place in two main waves.

The first occurred during the reign of Ahmed Al-Mansour Dahbi. Born in Fez in 1549 and dying in Marrakesh in 1603, he was the sixth sultan of the Saadian dynasty. During his reign, from 1578 to 1603, he brought large numbers of Black people from what was then known as the Sudan — today Mali, Senegal, Niger, Mauritania and Guinea.

His aim was to make them work in sugar mills such as those of Essaouira and Marrakesh. At the end of his reign, these slaves revolted, destroyed the sugar works and subsequently dispersed throughout the country.

Some found themselves in the service of religious zawiyas, while others served sheikhs — the chiefs of the many rural tribes — or the Sultan’s representatives, the caïds, who kept them as domestic slaves.

All of them, scattered throughout rural Morocco, are Berber-speaking.

Etymology of the word Gnawa: according to Delafosse (1924), the Berber expression akal-n-iguinaouen, meaning “land of the Blacks”, gave rise to the words Guinea and Ghana and, through phonetic similarity, later to the word Gnaoua. By extension, Gnaoua would therefore mean a Black person, or someone coming from the land of Black people — in other words, sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: Wikipedia.

The urban Gnawa and their culture of trance

A second wave brought what are known as the urban Gnawa. They are called this because they arrived at the time when Morocco’s major cities were being established. They came from Moulay Ismaïl’s royal guard and were known as the Bukhara. They arrived with the caravans of the Saharan trade at the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century.

They brought with them a form of music whose very purpose is therapeutic. It is a culture of trance. These Gnawa are Arabic-speaking.

It should not be forgotten, however, that Black populations had already been living in the Maghreb since antiquity. Many historians attest to their presence, particularly in the various oases of South-East Morocco, where they lived as peaceful cultivators of date palms and the land. They were given the name Haratine.

Haratines — isemghan in Berber, singular asemgh — sometimes referred to historically as Black Moors, are Black inhabitants of the Sahara whose social status has varied according to region.
Source: Wikipedia.

As for our own Gnawa community, which arrived very early in South-East Morocco, we formed close ties with the Berber tribes of the Aït Atta and followed them wherever they went and wherever they settled.

Sudestmaroc.com – How did this community live in South-East Morocco? What position and role did it occupy within local society, and what relationships did it have with other population groups?

M’bark El Haouzi – Our community formed close ties with the Aït Atta very early on. The Saghro massif is their ancestral land, the cradle of their confederation.

We have always had good relations with them, but our ancestors, as Black people, experienced slavery or servitude.

It is important to point out that there are many different names for these Black populations. They do not all share the same origins, but all were, in one way or another, victims of slavery.

Two main terms can be distinguished: Ikabliyen and Ismkhan, also known as Ignaoun. The latter term was used for Black people attached to noble families as domestic slaves. Later, however, it became a local designation. Thus Gnawa, Ignaoun, Ismkhan and Ismgan are terms with equivalent meanings whose use differs from one region to another.

Those designated by the first term remain marginalised and continue to bear the status once assigned to them. This is why, in Todgha, the terms Ikabliyen and Haratine still carry a strongly pejorative connotation: they refer to Black men whose task was to work in the fields — in other words, to be slaves.

These relationships stem from the dual origin of Moroccans. Broadly speaking, Moroccans are made up of white Berbers and Black Haratines, descendants of former slaves uprooted from sub-Saharan Africa. The latter continue to be assigned an inferior status and are, in practice, exploited by the former.

Faced with this situation, we have seen significant emigration of Black people away from the villages, either abroad or towards Moroccan cities, where working conditions are better and wages higher.

But no one has come to replace those who left, and this has represented a loss for the local economy because villages have gradually been deprived of part of their workforce.

It would nevertheless be wrong to believe that Black people are subjected to violence; the exploitation is economic. It should also be said that, until quite recently, these people lived in deeply impoverished communities and, left to themselves, did not receive the assistance they needed to overcome the hardships that weighed upon them.

A Gnawa community proud of its origins

Sudestmaroc.com – The Gnawa are commonly referred to by the term “Laâbid”, literally meaning “slave” in Arabic. Why was this term used, and how was it experienced by members of the Gnawa community?

M’bark El Haouzi – The terms Laâbid, Issamkhan and Issamgan are all associated with the period of slavery. They were given and used by white people to assert their superiority, exercise power and domination over Black people, and marginalise them.

The right term is Ignawen, the plural of the Amazigh word agnaw. It is used to refer to Black populations who came from distant lands and settled in the southern regions of Morocco.

These populations spoke languages that the inhabitants of these regions could not understand.

I would say that these racist names lay behind the erosion of our traditions in the regions of South-East Morocco until relatively recently.

That said, today the Gnawa community no longer attaches importance to these names, because its members are conscious of the value of their heritage and proud of their origins and identity.

Sudestmaroc.com – The Gnawa of South-East Morocco are far less well known than those of Essaouira or Marrakesh. How do you explain this? What differences can be observed between these various Gnawa communities scattered across Morocco?

M’bark El Haouzi – The Gnawa of Sidna Bilal have been extensively studied and are indeed much better known in the media. The fact that they live in large cities has undoubtedly played a role.

Their name also helps explain their prominence, since Sidna Bilal was the Prophet Muhammad’s first muezzin.

Their music belongs to a culture of trance with a therapeutic purpose. They use a three-stringed instrument with a low register. Their calendar is lunar and their ritual, which always takes place at night, is held at the end of the month of Sha‘ban because they believe that, with the arrival of the sacred month of Ramadan, all the djinn are chained.

This practice of trance has attracted considerable interest from anthropologists, and Moroccan society quickly accepted these Gnawa because trance already formed part of the country’s cultural background, among the Aïssawa, the Hmadcha and the Derkaoua.

Gnawa of Lalla Mimouna, from father to son

Among the Gnawa followers of Lalla Mimouna, one is Gnawa from father to son. We are therefore Gnawa families.

By contrast, among the followers of Sidna Bilal, a person can become Gnawa by undergoing initiation into therapeutic practices. This makes these Gnawa communities more accessible to study and easier to enter, since anyone can become Gnawa.

This is why our book provides an exceptional testimony, allowing readers to discover the heritage of the Gnawa of Lalla Mimouna, which until now has remained in the shadow of the Gnawa of Sidna Bilal.

Sudestmaroc.com – What cultural traditions are specific to this Gnawa community of South-East Morocco?

M’bark El Haouzi – The Gnawa of South-East Morocco are known as the followers of Lalla Mimouna, or the Gnawa of the Companion.

They are called this because they venerate Lalla Mimouna, who is known here as the Companion. She is an ancient African deity in whose honour — and in whose company — the Gnawa carry out all their activities.

She is therefore truly the faithful and inseparable companion of the Gnawa: the one who comforts, the one who heals, and the one who accompanies them throughout their lives.

This tradition can be found in several regions of Morocco, including the greater Souss and northern Morocco, and even in Algeria.

The music of the Gnawa of the Companion is called Ganga in Berber. Groups regularly set out on ritual alms-collecting tours, and every year they all make the pilgrimage to Lalla Mimouna.

Our musical instruments are drums and castanets. Two drummers set the rhythm for the dancers.

These dances and this music are our heritage, and we want to preserve them intact.

Sudestmaroc.com – How does the annual pilgrimage to Lalla Mimouna take place?

M’bark El Haouzi – Tradition tells us that Lalla Mimouna once stayed on a mountain near the douar of Tamsermass, in the rural commune of M’cissi, within the caïdat and cercle of Alnif, Tinghir Province, in South-East Morocco.

A sanctuary was later built there to commemorate her presence.

The Gnawa journey to the sanctuary of Lalla Mimouna always takes place at the beginning of spring, more precisely during the first week of March according to the agricultural calendar.

It is a ritual journey, a stage through which all the faithful must pass. For them, it is a customary tradition inherited from their parents, but it is also a time of prayer, of seeking forgiveness for their sins and blessings upon their lives.

Throughout the three days of the journey, the sacred and the divine remain ever present.

The Gnawa seek to return to a mythical time, one that their earliest ancestors, torn from their homeland, may have remembered and longed for.

It should also be noted that the Aït Atta Berber tribes adopted the belief in Lalla Mimouna and take part in her pilgrimage.

Sudestmaroc.com – In the past, Gnawa music and dance were an important part of the cultural landscape of South-East Morocco, alongside Ahidous, Ahwach and other traditions. What values and messages did this music and dance convey?

M’bark El Haouzi – Women attach great importance to visits from the Gnawa. They ask Lalla Mimouna for baraka for their children, or for fertility for themselves.

Women often enter into trance during Gnawa visits. These trances have a therapeutic purpose, allowing an overflow of emotion to be released.

Gnawa tours are also a special moment for villagers, a celebration in which they take part — a time of spectacle. The Gnawa offer them entertainment, but there is also the entire mystical dimension bound up with the veneration of a woman: Lalla Mimouna.

Villagers regard the Gnawa as bearers of baraka, which is why they take part in their rituals in such numbers.

Preserving the mystical dimension

Sudestmaroc.com – Today, Gnawa music is often reduced to something purely folkloric and appears to have lost its mystical symbolism. Is this really the case, or do these traditions still survive? And how, in your view, can this cultural heritage — which belongs to the collective history of South-East Morocco and of Morocco as a whole — be given greater recognition?

M’bark El Haouzi – We are indeed witnessing a folklorisation and commercialisation of the Gnawa phenomenon.

In such a context, it is easy to heed the siren call of money and leave the mystical dimension behind.

Among the Gnawa of the Companion, we remain extremely attentive to this mystical symbolism. It is essential. The Gnawa venerate Lalla Mimouna with all the spirituality this implies, and it is equally important to respect the Tagnaouite values.

These are the values we seek to convey: decency between the sexes and between generations, mutual aid and unity within the douar, and universal peace.

Finally, if this heritage is to be preserved and promoted, support from the authorities is essential. They need to realise how fortunate their region is to have Gnawa communities within it.

The Gnawa must be given greater visibility by involving them in cultural events and by making them one of the cultural emblems of the region.

In these difficult times, it is more necessary than ever for political leaders to support the ancestral heritage that we continue to keep alive from one generation to the next.

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A native of Ouarzazate, Abdeljalil Didi has been actively involved in community life for more than twenty years, with a particular focus on local development. He contributes to the web magazine sudestmaroc.com, sharing stories about the life of South-East Morocco’s territories and their collective memory. He also supports young people in their education through a dedicated space offering guidance, encouragement and opportunities for personal development.

For more than twenty years, Éric Anglade has lived in a village of South-Eastern Morocco, where he explores and documents the region’s history, heritage, and living traditions. He founded sudestmaroc.com as a space for sharing fieldwork and cultural insight, bridging local knowledge with global perspectives. He also works alongside women carpet-weavers to help sustain their craft and welcomes travellers at Le Jardin de Yuda, his guesthouse envisioned as a meeting place for exchange and transmission.

Somewhere between January 12 and 14, an old woman still haunts the memory of Amazigh villages. They call her bayuza, the Old Woman of the cold — and her night carries a different name in nearly every valley of South-East Morocco.

Since January 14, 2024, Yennayer has been a paid public holiday in Morocco, a recognition the Amazigh movement had sought for decades. But the ritual itself never waited for the state. In 1920, ethnographer Émile Laoust was already recording it, straight from the mouths of Chleuh women and elders, in Mots et choses berbères — still one of the most precise sources we have on these threshold rites.

Yennayer or Januarius: the roots of the name

The word Yennayer comes from the Latin Januarius — the same root that gives us January. It points to long contact with the Julian calendar, brought to North Africa by Roman conquest and kept alive in Amazigh villages long after the Gregorian calendar replaced it elsewhere.

The Amazigh New Year opens the agricultural year, not the civil one. It falls on January 14 in Morocco — sometimes the 12th or 13th elsewhere in the Maghreb. In January 2024, it marked the beginning of the year 2974 in the Berber calendar.. The next threshold, in January 2027, opens year 2977.

A tradition popularised in the 20th century ties this count to the coronation of the Amazigh king Chachnak — the Egyptian pharaoh Sheshonq I — around 950 BCE. No archaeological evidence confirms it. The story still carries weight: it gives Yennayer an origin of its own, apart from any calendar imposed from outside.

Laoust’s forgotten chapter

Émile Laoust spent part of his career crossing Chleuh-speaking Morocco, recording what modernity was about to erase, straight from the women and elders who still lived it. Mots et choses berbères, published in 1920, remains one of the most meticulous surveys of that world.

Chapter VI, on time, weather, and sky, devotes six precise pages — 195 to 201 — to the New Year’s Day. It holds a legend translated nowhere else, night-names that shift from valley to valley, household omens that mainstream coverage of Yennayer almost never mentions.

The legend of the borrowed days

Before Yennayer come the liali — some forty dreaded nights when the cold settles into the mountains and herders fear losing their flocks. It’s in that tense climate that Laoust records, in untranslated Chleuh, the legend of the borrowed days.

As his reign nears its end, Ennayer — January, personified — swears he has harmed no one all winter. An old woman scoffs: she and her flock survived him easily, she says. Stung, Ennayer turns to Brayer, February, and borrows a day.

With that stolen day, he unleashes hail and freezing wind on the old woman’s flock, driving it to the mountaintop. Brayer asks for his day back. Ennayer never returns it — which is why, the elders say, February counts one day short of every other month.

The same motif — a month that borrows to punish — turns up elsewhere across the Maghreb in different shapes; “days of the old woman” are documented from the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. The version Laoust fixed on paper belongs to Chleuh country alone: one day, one debt, never settled.

One night, a hundred names

Reading Laoust valley by valley, what stands out most is how many names this one night carries. The Aït Yousi call it asuggwas ujdid, “the new year.” The Aït Seghrouchen, the Izayane, and the Ichqern call it id n-bayuza, “the night of the Old Woman” — a demon wearing an old woman’s face, they believe, who passes through every house and every tent that night. The Aït Ouarain call it biannou, a word that survives in place names too: Tabennaiut, the mountain overlooking present-day Khénifra, still carries its trace.

The bonfire lit for the occasion, called bennaiu or tabennaiut depending on the tribe, isn’t unique to Yennayer alone. The Muslim feast of Achoura, which also marks a new beginning, absorbed part of the same ritual — so thoroughly that in Ouargla, the same word names Achoura itself. The two celebrations blurred together over time, and even the Chleuh who still sing these words no longer always know what they once meant.

At nightfall, Aït Isaffen children go door to door singing:

Further south, in the Dadès valley, children chant Bayanno, kerkano; in Demnat, among the Infedouaq, they ask for the “bones of Baino.” Three valleys, three refrains — the same threshold of the year, crossed each time in song.

The threshold table: tagulla, urkimen, and seven-vegetable couscous

The Yennayer ritual, Laoust notes, comes down in Chleuh country to a hearty meal followed by forecasts for the year ahead. Families eat tagulla, a thick porridge still known today as Tagoula and believed to fortify the body, or coarse-grain couscous, berkuks.

The seven green vegetables served alongside — among them artichoke, wild asparagus, and watercress — give the dish its name, sb’a lehodrat. Urkimen, a mix of grains cooked with the trotters of the animal slaughtered at Eid al-Adha, symbolically closes the ritual cycle of the year just past. Among the Aït Tamemt, custom calls for eating two chickens — ‘as many as one has ears,’ the text notes, not without a smile..

Eating one’s fill that night is no small matter: “whoever isn’t full that day won’t be full all year,” runs a saying Laoust recorded among the Ida Oukensous. The second night belongs to eggs and poultry; everyone keeps the eggshells knotted in a fold of clothing, so as not to run short of money during the year.

Reading the year ahead: omens and divination

After the meal, among the Ntifa, a woman of the house rolls a handful of couscous into a dumpling and offers it to each family member in turn. She then sets it above the doorframe; by morning she reads it for omens in whatever hair, wool, or feather the night wind has left there — the talkimt n-djiuneg, “the dumpling of I’m-not-hungry-anymore.”

Other omens hide in the food itself. Among the Aït Mzal, a small coin, a date pit, and a piece of argan bark go into the cooking pot: finding the coin means wealth, the bark means poverty, the pit means a growing herd. Laoust himself likens the custom to the French Twelfth Night cake — a hidden token, a fortune drawn by chance, two worlds that never met yet answer each other.

Yennayer is also the night the hearth gets renewed. The lady of the house tosses the worn stones onto the dungheap, saying: “I exchange you, O stones… for peace and prosperity.” Afterward, men and women go listening at neighbours’ doors, reading whatever conversation they overhear as an omen for the year — in Timgissin, a girl hoping to marry does the same while licking the spoon that stirred the porridge.

The last Wednesday and the rain forecasts

Among the Ida Gounidif, the month’s last Wednesday calls for a ritual urkimen in which every ingredient — lentils, turnips, carob bark — carries its own meaning, in a ceremony Laoust details over several pages. It deserves a fragment of its own one day.

Among the Ihahan, three tagulla dumplings stand in for January, February, and March, set out on the terrace and sprinkled with salt. Whichever one dissolves overnight marks, by morning, the wettest month to come — a home-grown forecast, kept every year without instrument or almanac.

Yennayer today

Since May 2023, by royal decision, the Amazigh New Year has been a paid public holiday — an institutional recognition long sought by the Amazigh movement, and hailed as acknowledgment of a pillar of Moroccan identity alongside the Hijri and Gregorian calendars. Algeria and Libya had already granted it that status.

Laoust already sensed it in 1920: Yennayer’s practices fade as the countryside empties out. Today the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture runs conferences and concerts to keep the memory alive — an institutional gesture that can’t quite replace a dumpling hung on a Chleuh doorway, read at dawn by a woman who has never heard of Laoust.

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Read also: The Berber world

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A man walks toward the last standing ears of wheat. Since morning he has worn the title of King — but in the wheat fields of central Morocco, to be King is already to be marked for death. Around him, his harvesters hold their breath: in a moment, they will seize him.

It is the early twentieth century, in the countryside of central Morocco and the Sous valley. The ethnographer Émile Laoust travels from tribe to tribe, watching the end of the wheat harvest — and records a gesture that Islam, its surface covering, cannot fully explain. Among the Mtougga of Bouâboud, the Aït Yousi, and in the Rif, the same principle recurs. Farmers do not cut the wheat. They kill the field.

Laoust records these practices before they fade. Some have since vanished; others may have survived in weakened or altered form. What follows is, first, a dated testimony — the record of a researcher who took care to write down, tribe by tribe, formula by formula, what his informants told him.

The King and his son

Among the Mtougga, the harvest opens like a small court ceremony. Before any work begins, the farmer and his servants share a meal of bread and butter in the field. Then, tying on leather aprons, they line up at the edge of the wheat, sickles in hand.

The first in line carries, for the day, the title of agellid — the King. Behind him stands his son, his khalifa, literally his deputy, “successor to the dignity of king.” Then come the ait tozzoml, the “people of the middle,” the bulk of the team.

Last comes tikrut, “the ewe lamb” — the least skilled harvester, the one who struggles to keep pace. This hierarchy is no mere pageant. For one day, it recreates an agrarian kingship, one already marked for a very particular fate.

This team is not always the farmer’s household alone. Many fields are harvested through tiwizi — the collective aid by which a village or clan lends a hand to whoever cannot finish the work alone. At Tanant, the harvest tiwizi closes with a scene still remembered: the farmer’s wife and daughters, dressed for celebration, greet the workers by waving a banner — a scarf tied to a reed — to “dry their sweat.” Laoust reads it differently: originally, he suggests, the gesture served to witness the field’s death and hasten the rain that would bring it back to life.

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The braid of the field

The King has the honour of cutting the first sheaf, carried straight to the farmhouse. He then enters the wheat and marks out the nira, the strip his men will harvest behind him.

One rule holds firm: at the centre of the field, a large tuft of ears must stay standing. Different tribes give it different names — tagottit n-iger or takiwt n-iger, the “braid of the field.” The Aït Yousi call it the tail, tabzzâl n-iger; the Zemmour, the curl, launza n-iger; the Tlit, the mane, izig n-iger.

The name shifts from valley to valley; the function never does. This tuft is no oversight by a hurried harvester. It is a deliberate reserve — a place where the community chooses not to cut, not yet.

The capture of the King

The work presses on. As the end nears, a competitive energy grips the harvesters, who suddenly race each other. Soon only one sheaf remains, at the field’s edge.

The King steps toward it to cut it. But the moment he raises his sickle, his own men seize him, bind him with a turban, and drag him to the mosque, where the village waits. A striking silence greets his arrival.

Laoust reads the scene in three stages. By cutting the last sheaf, the field’s master comes to embody the spirit of the grain it holds. Once, it is believed, this ritual killing had to happen in earnest, for the crop to grow again. The hushed negotiation between the King and the taleb, inside a sacred place, may be its distant echo.

The King wins back his freedom only through ransom — honey, butter, slaughtered sheep, served as a feast for the whole village. The harvest closes with a banquet Laoust describes, plainly, as sacred in character.

Mut, mut, ia-feddan! — The funeral formula

Across much of Berber Morocco, mourning language accompanies the cutting of the last ears. At Tanant, one harvester cries out:

Among the Imeghran, harvesters say as they cut the last sheaf:

The Aït Tatla repeat almost the same words. In the Rif, the formula shifts slightly:

Among the Izenaguen, harvesters cross their arms behind their backs and call out together:

Every tribe has its own words. At heart, they all say the same thing. The field’s death is only ever a stage.

The soul of the field

Earlier in his book, in the chapter on ploughing, Laoust had already dropped a key line:

— a soul he describes as

He added, almost as a warning to the reader, that he would return to the idea in the very chapter on the harvest we have just walked through. The thread, then, is Laoust’s own; we have only followed it.

This link is already at work during sowing. Among the same Mtougga, a goat is slaughtered in the field; its blood, Laoust writes, can “embody the baraka of the field or the spirit of the grain,” given back to the earth so the field’s life continues.

Laoust goes further still, raising a more unsettling question: what if the field’s master, before he was merely bound in jest, was once the real victim of such a sacrifice? The question stays open. But it places the Harvest King within a family well known to mythologists — kings whose ritual death is now staged, and may once have been carried out in earnest.

The Bride of the field

In some regions, the central tuft changes sex. It is no longer the braid but laslit n-iger, the Bride of the field — or ‘arost n-iferddan among the Hiaina.

There, the farmer’s wife herself, dressed for celebration, cuts this final tuft. She throws its ears into the air, over the workers, calling out: “For the love of God!” The women around her answer with ululations and a song in memory of Sidi Ali.

Elsewhere, it is the village’s poor women, the limldrin, who pull the Bride free by hand, ear by ear — never with the sickle. Iron must not touch this sacred body.

The spirit of the grain thus wears two faces, depending on the place: an animal’s — mane, tail — or a young bride’s, promised, like the King, to a death followed by marriage to next year’s harvest.

The harvest sacrifice

Sometimes the spirit of the wheat takes an altogether different body: an animal, led to slaughter. Laoust calls this ceremony tigersi n-lmgra, the Harvest Sacrifice.

At Douzrou, among the Ida Oukensous, the farmer leads a young white heifer into his field, its back draped in pale cloth. He walks it three times around the braid, then cuts its throat in a cleared space among the last standing ears.

The blood flows into a hole, covered first with ashes from the Ashura fire, then with earth — so that no dog, it is said, can defile blood that has become divine. Each participant leaves with a fragment of the white cloth, kept afterward as a remedy against illness.

Elsewhere it is a sheep (Achtouken, Ida Ou Zekri), a cow (Imejjat), or a she-camel chased on horseback to exhaustion before being killed (Ida Ou Brahim). The principle stays the same throughout: give back to the earth, in blood and shared flesh, the strength just taken from it in grain.

The bridge to Anzar

Once the field has died, it must be reborn. Laoust concludes this chapter with the following observation:

The myth of the dying wheat thus meets the myth of the rain. Laoust’s two chapters answer each other: the harvest calls the rain, as winter calls the spring.

Emile Laoust’s own perspective

Laoust does not hide his interpretive sources. In a footnote, he credits “the ideas of Mannhardt and those of Frazer in his Golden Bough,” and also cites Westermarck, praising his “fine study” of Moroccan agrarian ceremonies.

He goes as far as linking these southern Moroccan rites to “a myth dear to the classical Orient: the death and resurrection of a deity presiding over growth.” He is thinking, quite plainly, of Demeter and Proserpine — the Mother and the Daughter, Greek goddesses of wheat.

In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of agriculture, the harvest and fertile earth. She taught humankind how to cultivate wheat. Her daughter Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the Underworld, who makes her his queen. Overcome with grief, Demeter leaves Olympus and allows the earth to become barren, causing a great famine. Eventually, an agreement is reached: Persephone spends part of the year on Earth with her mother and the rest in the Underworld with Hades.

The myth offers an explanation for the seasons: when Persephone is with her mother, spring and summer return and the earth flourishes; when she descends to the Underworld, autumn and winter begin and nature “sleeps”.

He reaches back further still, to ancient Egypt. Diodorus Siculus had already recorded how Egyptian harvesters, on cutting their first sheaf, mourned around it while invoking Isis — convinced that, in doing so, they had killed the field.

On this parallel Laoust closes his own chapter, in a line worth more than any commentary:

He was a researcher of his era, with all the limits of that era. But his comparative instinct, sitting at the very heart of the text, opens a door we have only had to push.

Read also : The Berber world

Read also : Rites and legends of Yennayer, the Berber New Year

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