Bab Agnaou ( gate for black people)

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]This is Bab Agnaou.

[00:00:03]It's located in Marrakech, Morocco.

[00:00:06]Of course, the word Marrakech is what gives breath to the word of Morocco.

[00:00:11]The word Marrakech is thought to mean the place of Kush or the people of Kush.

[00:00:18]Kush meaning God.

[00:00:20]But why does Bab Agnaou matter?

[00:00:24]Well, let's find out.

[00:00:32]I'm here at Bab Agnaou. This is one of the 19 gates in Marrakech. It was [music] built in the 12th century, and the reason why this one is famous is because of its writings on the wall.

[00:00:44]Now, let's get closer.

[00:00:45]>> The word Bab [music] Agnaou is a very interesting one.

[00:00:49]The word Bab Agnaou [music] is gate of the black >> [music] >> One of the words used for black people in Morocco is Naoua.

[00:01:01]And this word Bab Agnaou is clearly a reference to this, especially since the gate is situated in Marrakech in the direction that points towards the areas which they associated with black people.

[00:01:18]Because of the international approach that Marrakech had, one that was a little bit brand new compared to a lot of the other kingdoms that existed in this Berber area.

[00:01:32]When we look at its direction and where it is, as we zoom in, we can see that it is located in Marrakech next to a palace.

[00:01:44]This gate is purposely put so you can see there Bab Agnaou. And if you keep moving closer, you keep moving closer to a palace that's there that we will talk about, which is a very important part of the Almohad and Almoravid history.

[00:02:04]But, looking at where it's pointing, the direction, you can see that moving southwest in that direction, you're going to get closer and closer to where, first of all, the black Moroccans live, and then ultimately, what they used to call the Bilad al-Sudan, which is starting all the way from Agadir, moving all the way down to the Western Sahara, to Mauritania, and furthermore.

[00:02:41]There are a lot of things that are debated about this specific place, but it's known that the direction to the Western Sahara is the typical direction used by traders.

[00:02:55]Now, you must remember that the Almoravids themselves had colonized most of these lands, so moving from north to south was child's play, even though very early texts, even from 800 AD, like Ibn Hawqal, speaks about how there are certain places where you can't go any further because they belong to the people of the Western Sahara, where you stop in Morocco.

[00:03:23]Although the Almohad were definitely deep conquerors, they were more interested in the Maghreb and conquering that general North African region.

[00:03:34]But the Almoravids, who came before them, were more an African-concentrated colony. As you can see with the orange, they started from the Western Sahara and went north to colonize.

[00:03:53]Before we go further south, what's most important is these three places: Bab Agnaou, or the gate of the black people, Koutoubia Mosque, which looks amazing, but there's something that's a little bit deceiving about it, and then El Badi Palace, where they dictated from, and you can see why they cared. Now, of course, all of these places are technological genius, but again, this is deceiving because the people who developed these came from a completely different world.

[00:04:36]One of the important cities of back in the day is Sijilmasa.

[00:04:44]This is before Marrakech became an important city and a built-up city.

[00:04:49]Everything you see before you did not exist. In fact, the Almoravids destroyed a lot of the mosques and rebuilt them because they didn't face Mecca.

[00:05:01]This over there is Sijilmasa.

[00:05:06]And these are the ruins of Sijilmasa.

[00:05:10]Immediately, you will realize something.

[00:05:13]The ruins are made of mud brick.

[00:05:17]The greatest city that existed at that time was a mud brick city.

[00:05:25]A lot of people like to talk about how the Africans lower than Morocco were taught by the people of Sijilmasa, or the people of Morocco, how to build cities and stuff like that. But if you look at them, they were at the same stage up until around 1000 AD, where some cities had already existed in Africa by then.

[00:05:50]This here is Fez.

[00:05:53]Fez again is one of these built-up cities, capital at one point, and it was an important region.

[00:06:03]The interesting part is how close it is to Europe.

[00:06:07]These directions, this map, tells us and gives us an indicator of the places that a lot of the Moroccans were speaking about in ancient times, like this one from 800 plus AD.

[00:06:22]The capital of the country is Fez, in which resides Eha the Fatimid, for Abdallah the Fatimid has not yet conquered that place.

[00:06:34]Buker and Jezera Beni Rabea, which we have been before mentioned, and about 10 other towns in the vicinity of Tahuth, are considerable.

[00:06:48]Tahuth is the chief.

[00:06:52]It is a large town, well inhabited and supplied.

[00:06:57]The inhabitants practice agriculture.

[00:07:00]They have been conquered by a people called Bosna.

[00:07:05]Sijilmasa is a town of middling size, belonging to the territories of Tahuth.

[00:07:13]One cannot enter Sijilmasa but by the way of the desert, which the sand renders difficult.

[00:07:21]This town is situated near the gold mines, between them and the land of the blacks, and the land of Zila.

[00:07:32]These mines are said to be the most pure and excellent, but it is difficult to work them.

[00:07:38]And the way to them is dangerous and troublesome.

[00:07:43]They say that the district of Te Huth is reckoned as belonging to Africa.

[00:07:50]We don't need to go through every text to know that the majority of the people located further south are somewhat Berber types, your Tuaregs, which by the way there's Tuaregs in Morocco as well in the north.

[00:08:07]Um your going to now your Ghana You have so many people located in those regions that encompass all of this.

[00:08:19]But the interesting part is of the Berbers that are around, the other people who are non-Berbers are also a very interesting thing.

[00:08:31]It's interesting how even on the islands, even on the bottom these Berbers could be living amongst communities that did not accept anything about their culture at all or even their language.

[00:08:47]In Morocco there's a culture of tanning or dying clothing.

[00:08:54]And this is a huge tradition that exists. This trans-Saharan tradition, obviously there's a transfer between Morocco and the rest of Africa. As you can see the same tradition sort of in the southern parts of Africa. Now, perhaps this is not transferring, it's just mere coincidence, but I don't really think so. Now, the thing that makes me think that it's not necessarily the same thing or the only thing that was mimicked is the way it's done is the fact that it's not ubiquitous. Dye dyeing your clothes is ubiquitous in Africa, but the pits themselves are not.

[00:09:41]A lot of the time they dye their clothes inside of pottery.

[00:09:47]This is an interesting image that shows the difference where here you can see the pottery where they're using dyes and sophisticated techniques in order to get the dye to do what it does.

[00:10:01]As you can see, most of these people look like they're wearing tie-dye.

[00:10:07]This is a Dogon woman cooking up the blue dye.

[00:10:13]And again, it's a very interesting reality for Africans because it's been done in so many parts of Africa that it's actually kind of unbelievable. It's actually something that got forgotten in other parts of Africa, but we don't need to talk about that for now.

[00:10:31]So, let's think about a couple things.

[00:10:33]So, in the early years of Islam and the early years of the spread of Berber people, the people in Morocco were still using mud brick for houses as late as 800 AD, 900 AD, >> [snorts] >> which gives a different accent to the video that already played.

[00:10:58]With its distinct stone architecture the same color as the Sahara, [music] it almost feels like Chinguetti is the town that grew from the desert.

[00:11:07]And today it's like the town that time forgot.

[00:11:11]>> [music] >> But in fact, Chinguetti has had a number of reincarnations in its time. It was first founded in 777 [music] and was then a trading hub and a center of religious learning.

[00:11:23]Now, we don't need to sit here and read about the Ghana Empire, but we all know that Chinguetti was part of the Ghana Empire and the people from it were basically the Soninke.

[00:11:36]But what it is interesting is that right here in Chinguetti in multiple books, we know that they were already building with stone while very big cities in North Africa were building with mud brick.

[00:11:52]This is one of those things that's flipped a lot of things on its head.

[00:11:59]Now, obviously it didn't look like this in the beginning, but foundations have been found at Chinguetti that go back to 700 AD and even further back.

[00:12:11]Something that confuses the record is the ever-changing expanding powers between the Almoravids, the Almohads, the Arabs, all of these different groups who each have their turn to take over in the Maghreb and and close regions, they all muddy the area and its history.

[00:12:35]But that's only part of the problem because of course people like to talk about who are the people who went and conquered Spain who are called the Moors.

[00:12:44]Now, this word Moor, even though it's not used a lot of the times by the people living there as well, it is seen over and over again in some of the titles like some of the words like building words, name places and stuff like that.

[00:13:12]Some people like to make it seem like it was obvious that it was the Berbers who are the people who are known as the Moors who went and took over the other side because they had such great technology.

[00:13:24]But some people forget that the word for these people is the Berbers, which means barbarians. And although I think they're not, you know, the lowest of the people, they still were considered Berbers in almost every book that I read. The Berbers are seen as a wilder race, and a lot of that is attributed to the fact that they are parts of the central regions, and they are closer to something, but we're not going to talk about that right now.

[00:13:59]Another thing to point out is the respect that the Tuareg command throughout the area and their reputation for being free men that they There are so many places named after them. And then, of course, there's the words like negro, Kush, all of these all over North Africa.

[00:14:23]And, of course, if you add the fact that you have Baba Gnawa as well in there, it changes the entire conversation because you have a you have a gate that is specifically dedicated to black people, which is the palace gate that only the king could use at one point, which comes from a tribe of people that came from further south, the Almohads, who came from Mauritania in the land of the blacks.

[00:14:54]Everything just seems to line up perfectly, and it's hard to argue in any other direction.

[00:15:06]But, to this day, there's arguments because, of course, the scholars don't know the extreme role of the black inhabitants of the area. They don't act People they don't know actually. If you look it up, they'll say they have no idea.

[00:15:22]Because, of course, half of the story is that the reason why it's called Bab Ignaw is that the black slaves came through that area, but we have read that when the person says the black slaves came through that area, they say they're from the area of Tahoot, a great city in that area of Morocco.

[00:15:42]Meaning that these people are local to that area.

[00:15:45]But [snorts] even if we leave for just a second, immediately we're still bombarded by perfect infrastructure, libraries everywhere, water systems, independent technologies, of course, the way that they dye their clothing, uh cloacas, uh um ships on the ocean.

[00:16:10]They're Forgetting even their independent inventions, then you have to go into the Islamic influence, the North African influence that happened there, which means that the these people were not There's no reason why they should be looked at as like some group that is far away in the corner that has not been you know, that has not had its technological time. And actually, not only did they have the technological time, they influenced the North Africans, even the Arabs.

[00:16:50]And this doesn't just stop when you keep going down, you go to places like Ghana and you stop there. If you go to Nigeria at Kano, you get this civilization.

[00:17:01]Again, everything there is very similar to the stuff that you would see any other part of Africa where you have the mixture of huts, you have the mixture of stone houses, you have the mixture of everything at the same time.

[00:17:17]But at the same time, you also have mosques, giant mosques.

[00:17:24]The feeling that these people have been undermined, especially Nigeria, the reason why Nigeria was undermined as a civilization, is that once it got taken over, its history just got plundered and taken out real quick, and then generalized to a specific thing. But, you know, if you look at Kano, Kano is an Islamic uh completely different type of civilization than you'll see in any other part of Nigeria, which a lot of the parts did not even come close to having Islam at the time.

[00:18:04]But again, that's the strange part, because they're far more sophisticated in some senses than Kano. They have much bigger roads, they have much cleaner roads, they have much better things all over the place, which again, you should not expect that.

[00:18:27]Especially since the thought is that the Africans learned from the northerners.

[00:18:37]Not only does everything line up logically, I think there's also a thing about uh half Berbers, which a lot of people like to pretend does not exist.

[00:18:50]Where like a lot of people, people who mix with anything else, especially black black people, they become close to black people. And so, those Berbers, those very same Berbers, when they mix with black people, they would be considered black people.

[00:19:09]This would take us to Libya with the Garamantes, this some take us to Egypt.

[00:19:13]This will take us to North Africa. This will take us everywhere.

[00:19:17]Uh Spain.

[00:19:20]Spain is one of the most concerning ones, in fact, because I don't know First of all, I don't know how you can have millions of slaves brought to your country, and you only found like 30 people.

[00:19:37]We know more black people by name in the Swahili coast who they're willing to admit were black people than some of the places in Morocco. When I'm talk I'm talking about the mainstream now.

[00:19:50]Obviously, a lot of people we could just, you know, but the mainstream, that's what they do, and it's like how's that possible? Like the Swahili coast was a lot of the papers were destroyed, which another is another one that makes me laugh. Like I was thinking about that video I was talking about, and it's like if these people knew how many Arabs and Persians were living in the Swahili coast, stuff they say would sound so funny when they talk about how there was no wheel, there's no this, no that. It's like okay, but do you know how how quickly Arabs and Persians lived in the Swahili coast? You're saying that they didn't bring the wheel either?

[00:20:31]And then, of course, you go even further than that, that the Portuguese have been living there for, what, since the 1500s?

[00:20:38]Are you saying that they didn't have the wheel either in Africa? It's like, oh, we've never discovered the wheel in Africa, the Swahili coast, none of that.

[00:20:47]It's like, yeah, but there's been so many groups living there.

[00:20:51]It's discovery is not due to the people not having it.

[00:20:57]But I guess you got to have to think a little bit deeper in order to go down that direction.

[00:21:02]Thanks for watching.