Amazigh Triple Wedding

The three brides arrived on top of camels.

Behind them came dozens of 4WD vehicles moving across the desert in procession, carrying relatives, friends and people from the village. Dust rose behind the cars as everyone made their way toward the wedding celebration in Hassilabied.

This was the beginning of a traditional Amazigh wedding involving three couples marrying together during the same celebration.

I was living and working in the southeast Moroccan Sahara at the time. I spent around four years in this region, and through my involvement with the local community I was invited to attend the wedding.

It was not something organised for tourists. I was there because I knew people in the village.

One of the grooms wanted the younger generation to see these traditions being practised. Instead of simply hearing older people talk about how weddings had once been celebrated, they could watch it happening around them.

The camel procession was the first sign of how large the day was going to become.

The brides were above the crowd on their camels, while vehicle after vehicle followed behind them through the desert.

Then everybody arrived.

The village gathers on the sand

Soon there were people everywhere.

Women and children sat together directly on the sand. Groups formed and changed as people arrived. Children moved between adults. Behind the gathering was an irregular line of 4WDs and vans, with the dunes and palms of the Sahara farther away.

That photograph captures something I remember very clearly about living in this part of Morocco.

Traditional life and modern life were not separated.

The brides could arrive on camels while dozens of Toyota 4WDs followed behind them. Men could wear traditional robes while somebody parked a Land Rover a few metres away. Children came on bicycles. Phones, cars and modern clothes existed alongside things that had been part of wedding celebrations for generations.

Nobody appeared interested in making the scene look old.

They were simply celebrating a wedding.

Many of the women wore black outer garments decorated with small flashes of bright colour. Red, yellow, blue and green embroidery appeared against the black fabric, sometimes in tiny geometric shapes and sometimes running along the edges of the clothing.

Those decorations were one of the visual details I kept photographing.

In Amazigh communities of southern Morocco, textiles, embroidery and jewellery can carry information about local identity and family tradition. People who grow up around these clothes can notice distinctions that an outsider may completely miss.

I certainly could not read all of them.

I could only see that what initially looked like a large group dressed in black became much more individual once I looked carefully.

The three brides together

Inside the large wedding tent, the three brides sat side by side.

They wore white clothing, but their faces were covered by extraordinary red ceremonial headdresses decorated with horizontal bands of colour and metal ornaments. Striped textiles fell around their shoulders, and large amber-coloured beads hung around their necks.

Their hands were covered with henna.

Seeing the three women seated together made the triple wedding suddenly very clear.

These were not three separate weddings taking place around the same time.

All three couples' ceremonies took place together.

Around the brides, men sat on carpets and talked. Women and children watched from behind. Large drums rested directly in front of them.

The bridal clothing separated the three women visually from everyone else inside the tent.

The red face coverings, jewellery, henna and layered textiles transformed them into the unmistakable centre of the ceremony. These elements of ceremonial dress were not simply decoration. They marked a specific stage of the wedding and made the brides immediately identifiable within the gathering.

The details deserve local verification because every piece had a meaning that I did not fully understand at the time.

What I remember most clearly is the colour.

Outside there was sand, white clothing and black fabric.

Inside the tent, the three red bridal headdresses dominated everything.

The drums

Music was continuous through much of the celebration.

A group of men stood together wearing long white and cream robes and wrapped headcloths. Some covered most of their faces against the desert environment. Several carried enormous round frame drums against their bodies.

Other men wore broad red-and-green striped textiles across their shoulders.

The frame drums appear in several of my photographs because they were physically at the centre of the celebration.

These drums are commonly associated with the bendir family of North African frame drums. They are held against the body and played with the hands, making it possible for several musicians to produce a strong collective rhythm together.

At this wedding the musicians were not separated from everybody else on a stage.

They stood among the guests.

The rhythm, singing and movement belonged to the same space as the wedding itself.

That made the music feel less like entertainment being provided for an audience and more like something the community was producing together.

Cooking for everyone

A celebration involving this many people also meant a huge amount of food.

Several lambs were slaughtered for the wedding. The meat was grilled and prepared for the guests.

There was also couscous, homemade bread, tea and cookies.

This was not a small meal brought out at one particular moment. Food was part of the whole social structure of the gathering. People sat together, ate together, drank tea and continued talking while everything else happened around them.

The homemade bread is one of those details that sounds ordinary until you consider how many people were there.

Someone had to prepare all of it.

The same was true of the couscous, meat, tea and cookies.

A large village wedding does not happen only because three couples decide to marry. Behind what the visitor sees are hours of preparation and many people working: cooking, serving, arranging the tent, receiving guests and making sure everybody is fed.

I saw the celebration.

Behind it was an enormous amount of work.

The wedding tent

The main tent had been erected directly on the sand.

Tall wooden poles supported dark woven material that created shade from the desert sun. Carpets covered parts of the ground inside and around the entrance.

People were constantly moving between the tent and the open desert.

Again, the ordinary details make this photograph interesting to me.

There is a 4WD parked beside the tent.

Children are standing around watching.

Two bicycles are nearby.

Men talk at the entrance.

People sit wherever there is space.

Nothing looks staged.

The wedding occupied the same landscape where everybody normally lived.

As the sun went down

By late afternoon the desert light changed.

The hard brightness softened and the entire gathering became orange.

I photographed a line of women from behind as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Their black garments filled most of the frame, but colourful embroidery appeared across the fabric in small geometric shapes.

Against the sunset they became almost silhouettes.

By then the procession of camels and vehicles that had begun the celebration felt far away.

The brides had arrived.

The three couples had gone through their ceremonies together.

The musicians had played.

People had eaten grilled meat, couscous, homemade bread, cookies and endless tea.

Children had spent the day moving through the crowd while adults talked, sang, cooked and celebrated.

I had originally been invited because one of the grooms wanted younger people to witness these traditions.

Looking around at the end of the day, they were impossible to miss.

The children had been inside the celebration from beginning to end.

And as the sun disappeared behind Hassilabied, the drums were still part of the sound of the village.

Continue through my best travel experiences for more stories from Hassilabied and the Sahara Desert.