Gnawa Diffusion are an important group. Important because they were able to invent a new kind of Africa, an Africa for all Africans, including Europeans. And the band’s singer, Amazigh Kateb, knows a thing or two about the multiple layers that make up our identities. Gnawa Diffusion, are indeed more than a musical fusion group: they’re their own world in circulation. These “Fucking Cowboys” couldn’t care less about the powers that be, and although they began in Grenoble, France back in 1992, they are the half-caste children of the black, Berber and Arab speaking Maghreb, of insurgent Jamaica and of western working class neighbourhoods. Onstage, they’re a formidable octet, with Amazigh Kateb on vocals and guinbri (picked lute), Pierre Feugier on guitar, Salah Meguiba on flute and percussion, Mohamed Adenour on mandol and banjo, Philippe Bonnet on drums, Pierre Bonnet on bass, Abdel Aziz Maysour on backing vocals and guinbri, and Amar Chaoui on percussion, all armed with kerbab (“rattlesnakes,” a kind of metallic castanet) that sound like they were calibrated in hell.

The group play like they’re in a reformatory: Amazigh and Co. are frenzied, fiery, human… The young prisoners enter into a trancelike state, the guembri lutes and the bells give their all, calls to rebellion, to freedom, ring loud, the security guards play along… it’s a total celebration of the possibilities of art, something the powers that be in Algeria have trouble comprehending.But what is trance doing in this blend of rock, ragga, reggae and rai? There’s something of Essaouria, southern Morocco’s port city and the cradle of Gnaoui culture, in Gnawa Diffusion’s live music. Like Jimi Hendrix, Orson Welles, and the Rolling Stones, Gnawa Diffusion fell under the Atlantic charm of this city of musicians, soothsayers, and masters of rituals passed down from a time when the Moors vanquished the black population. From this state of slavery a religion bringing together the Islamic saints and the animist gods of the Gulf of Guinea was born. It would go on to be tinged with Catholicism, before reaching as far as North and South America and the Caribbean.
In Essaouira, with the Stambali people of Tunisia, or on Marrakech’s mythical Place Jemaa el Fnaa, the master instrument of this mind-boggling trance is the unstoppable three-cord guembri. Its minions are the iron “rattlesnakes,” karkabs, an irrestible, cyclic, repetitive kind of bells, all coiled up, as a (whirling) dervish might say -- they come from the same Sufi tradition.“What people from the Maghreb are missing,” says Amazigh Kateb, “is the African dimension. And in order to reconcile ourselves with it, we have to first of all reconcile ourselves with the Africans, I mean the Gnawas, the black people of the Maghreb. Their culture was strong enough to put up with our traditions, our language, and our religion.” Amazigh is a man at home in the Berber language. He was given a Berber name by his Arabic-speaking father, who believed that plural democracy was the most important thing in life. Amazigh was sent to a Muslim school, “and so was at the heart of the Algerian conflict.”

As Amazigh Kateb was both born in Algiers and is Algerian, he included samples of Chaabi Algerois, the popular music of the white part of town, and Berber melodies in his music. And as he was born at a time when Bob Marley was king, he included bass lines, cymbals, and melodies in the guise of slogans and lyrics as scathing as those of Babylon System. As the son of a world famous political author, the novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine (1929-1988), Amazigh Kateb is very critical of leaders stuck in the same patterns as those who hindered his father’s existence (take, for example, the song Ouvrez les stores on the album Bab El Oued Kingston, the lyrics of which suggest that “the AIG is bad/but they’re not only ones with dirty hands”).

Amazigh Kateb may look like a street kid, but he worked hard at school, out of respect for his father’s heritage, and has already written much about discrimination, about “Islamophobia, the crime of facial features,” about Algeria, out of work youth such as “hittistes” (who hang around with nothing to do but lean up against walls), the general mafia (“the gas general, the meat general…”)
The eight kids known under the name of Gnawa Diffusion are ruffians, but they’re sensitive too; they know how to sing love songs (such as Ombre-elle, to which audiences enthusiastically sing along). The radical Gnawas lost four of their members in 2002, but four new ones joined, and together they founded an independent company, D’jamaz Production/Edition. They released Souk System, sung in French, English, and Arabic, four years after the release of Bal el Oued Kingston, in 2003. It was a spellbinding mix of bells, electric guitars, flutes and guembri, all thrown in the face of “the world order it’s our duty to disobey!!!”

Amazigh arrived in Grenoble in 1987, and his father died a devastating death from leukaemia a year later. He was a 17-year old kid from Algiers, a rebel, a fighter, and a joker, who was used to touring with his father’s theatre group, Action culturelle des travailleurs (ACT). In the 1970s, ACT entranced tens of thousands of Algerian spectators with their political writing, in plays such as Mohammed, prends ta valise, (Mohammed, get your coat) an uncompromising working-class look at emigration and the Algerian War.

DVD : STEF BLOCH

DISCOGRAPHIE
Algeria (1997)
Bab El Oued Kingston (1999)
DZ Live (2001)
Souk System (2003)