When you’re in Morocco, it’s often easy to tell if a man is a Berber, one of the nomadic tribes that along with the Arabs became the first members of the Kingdom of Morocco. The distinctive blue djellaba with the gold embroidery that he wears makes it clear that he’s one of the “Blue People”, the name Moroccans call these descendants of the desert.
But there are other people in the desert as well. I had the chance to visit the village of Khamlia, near the Algerian border, and you notice something different about the place as soon as you drive up to the front gates.
Instead of olive-skinned Berbers, or the lighter faces of Arabs, you mostly see tall, thin and very dark men. Because Khamlia is first and foremost a Gnaouan settlement, and the Gnaoua have come from a very long way away.
Back in the late 1600s, the Sultan of Morocco decided to design a seige-proof city at Meknes. He was afraid of attacks from marauding Berber tribesmen, and possibly European armies with colonial ambitions.
He had his workers build a granary, storehouse and water cisterns with enough supplies to keep the townspeople for a full year. And he also collected together over 10,000 horses, which he kept in a royal stable right next door.
But to go along with his citadel he needed soldiers, and so he brought in slaves who had originally come from what is now Mali and Senegal on the other (southern) side of the Sahara.
These were people from the very same tribes who found themselves chained and transported (if they didn’t die on the horrific voyage) to colonies like Jamaica and the American South.
And just as in those New World areas, descendants of the slaves (the Gnaouans) stayed on for generation after generation, and are now an intriguing feature of Moroccan life.
They play a style of music that is much admired throughout the country, a style with the same African roots that (if you listen closely) you’ll also hear in that great foundation of Western popular music, the blues.
I was fortunate to visit with Groupe des Bambaras, a band resident in Khamlia that keeps the tradition of Gnaouan music alive. The musical style, and also the words, have always been known in Morocco, especially in towns and cities where in the past travelling performers would put on impromptu shows in the souks.
More recently, with the development of World Music as a musical genre, and along with it the many well-known and popular festivals around the world, Gnaouan music has found a much wider audience. In fact, the wonderful town of Essaouira on the Atlantic coast now holds an annual Gnaoua festival.
The festival is a showcase for Moroccan performers, as well as musicians from areas of the sub-Sahara such as Mali and Senegal that were the original sources of Gnaouan music. Some years (because the links are so obvious to people in this part of the world) you’re even likely to hear Jamaican reggae, Cuban samba or American blues.
I had a wonderful morning listening to Groupe des Bambaras perform in what was really their rehearsal “house”, or dar, and talking with Hamad Mahjoubi, the band’s leader. I was even able to swap a few names based on performers I had seen at WOMAD in New Zealand over the years.
Hamad also offered me a closer look at the instrument he plays, the hajhuj, a precursor of the modern banjo. He gave my friend Alan an impromptu lesson, and as I’m sure Al can attest, Hamad produces some amazing sounds on what appears at first “grasp” to be a very rudimentary instrument indeed.
ooOOoo
Back in 1999, when it came time to choose the colour for the buildings that would become our family’s garden centre, my wife suggested cobalt blue. I have to say I was more than a bit sceptical.
I’d never seen a garden centre that used a chromatic like that as its background colour. In fact, the only business I could find that even came close was a tire sales franchise.
The way she finally convinced me was quite simple, however. She showed me a book with stunning photographs of a famous garden in Marrakesh, Morocco. The garden was Majorelle. And the most striking (and yes, beautiful) thing about it were the walls of cobalt blue in the background of many of the shots.
The colour could best be described as dramatic, since it set off in beautifully stark relief the leaf shapes of all the tropical plants, as well as the shadows created by the bright desert light.
Needless to say, the blue did pretty much the same thing for us, and many people in the area still refer to it as “that blue garden centre on Tara Road.” It also became a signature that we used in all our advertising. It was part of the “brand”.
Ever since I first looked through that little book, I’ve dreamed of one day visiting Majorelle. And so it was that on a wet and windy afternoon in November we made our way along a broad, car-choked avenue outside of the Marrakesh medina, and into the peace of one of the most famous gardens in the world.
Majorelle was created by Jacques Majorelle, the artist son of a French furniture designer who was responsible for one of the most famous Moroccan tourist posters of the 1920’s (the one with a smiling woman wearing a burkha that somehow manages to look both mysteriously Arab and art deco at the same time).
The garden was really just a personal project, but it also became a repository for a major collection of cactus and succulents from around the world, and in 1947 Jacques opened it to the public for the first time.
Jacques Majorelle died in 1962, and the garden became a bit neglected, before being purchased by Yves St. Laurent and Pierre Bergé. They financed the restoration of the property, and also set up a trust to ensure its survival into the future.
With the wind and rain, we didn’t really see Majorelle at its best. It’s a dry garden, with an under-story of tiny pebbles, and plants well-spaced out around a series of tiled paths.
It also, however, has several bamboo forests that provide shelter from the wind (and unfortunately lots of debris for the gardeners to sweep up after the very occasional storm).
But no matter. The specimen plants are nothing short of fantastic, and include easily the biggest pony tail palms your likely to see anywhere. There are also a number of well-maintained pergolas, with massive examples of bougainvillea in all the assorted colours.
And then, of course, there’s the cobalt blue. You really don’t notice it much when you first enter the garden, although there is at least a hint in the trim on the curbs that line the paths.
It’s only when you walk through the first of the bamboo groves and come upon a classic Arabic rill (a long water-filled channel that harkens back to the irrigation runs found in wadis) that you see it, way back at the far end.
The blue covers the plaster on a two storey Moroccan-style house (Jacques’s original studio), and even without much sun to set it off, the contrast with the plants just captures you, and makes you stand and stare.
The blue is also used to great effect in a series of ponds and water features, which again have always been part of Arabic gardens. And Jacques used other bright, primary colours that contrast remarkably well with both the plants and the background blue.
The other thing that’s obvious when you actually see Majorelle in person is just how influential it has been in modern landscape design. When it was first constructed, it’s highly unlikely that anyone in the West was making gravel gardens, and concentrating on plants that created texture and form.
Now you see this sort of thing almost everywhere, although very seldom with the sort of daring (and large, mature plants) that still makes Majorelle look so unique.
As for the colour, in both France and Morocco these days it’s known to everyone as “Majorelle Blue”.
~originally composed in November, 2011~