From at least the nineteenth century, the word gnawa has been used in Morocco to refer to the descendants of enslaved people from the Western Sudan. The term is now associated with black Moroccans who entertain in public squares and on concert stages. The guinbri is the most prestigious of all Gnawa musical instruments. This drawing of a guinbri is from the account of Danish businessman and diplomat Georg Høst of his travels in Morocco. Published in 1779, it is the first known mention of a guinbri in European literature. The instrument may derive from one that the fourteenth-century Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta described as being played at the court of the Mali Empire and that he called the gunburi.
