Egyptian Zār Group Mazaher in Marseille

Some traditions travel easily. They fit neatly inside shipping crates, museum vitrines, or concert programmes. Others resist movement entirely because they were never meant to be separated from the people who make them, the spaces that hold them, or the rituals that gave them life.

The zār, a centuries-old healing ritual rooted in Egypt and the wider Horn of Africa, belongs to the second kind. And yet, beneath the stone arcades of Marseille’s 17th-century Vieille Charité, Cairo’s Mazaher - led by Umm Sameh, with Imam on tamboura, and Sabah and Umm Hassan on vocals and percussion - proved that certain traditions do not lose themselves by crossing borders.

They reveal the routes they have always shared. Joined by Moroccan Gnawa musicians, including Hind Ennaira, the ensemble performed as part of the Mediterranean Season’s ʿUbūr (Arabic for “crossing”), which became less a collaboration than a reunion between musical lineages that have long carried African memory, ritual practice, and movement across deserts, ports, and trade routes.

In Marseille, those histories met again beneath the open sky, where music dissolved the distance between performer and audience, and listening gave way to something closer to collective release.

This was the late tamboura player Imam’s final performance with the ensemble. This video is dedicated to him.