At the Ziggy Marley performance on Saturday May 17, night two of Morocco’s 2008 Mawazine festival, I wouldn’t risk having my camera’s flash disturb the scene. In my over ten-years of traveling to Morocco, I’d never seen a diverse cross section of Moroccan society enjoying the same social event.

The Ziggy Marley concert was one of the many free concerts held during the nine day festival that boasts 100 concerts held by bands from 40 different countries. Sound, light, and backline are handled by Touareg Productions, who also handle the Gnaoua festival in Essaouria and the World Sacred Music festival in Fes. The Marley concert was held at Qamara, just off the “juicer,” which is what the locals call the busy traffic circle where Hassan II mixes with the other streets of which I have yet to learn the names. As I drove by the scene earlier in the day, people had already begun reserving seats on the stairs several hours before the concert was scheduled to begin. The night of the concert brought women in jellabas and hijabs, boys on motorbikes wearing baseball hats, young couples holding hands, grandfathers and granddaughters, old married couples sitting in the grass, hippies in plaid pants, dusty boys in worn jeans, girls with straight hair in tiny tank tops, and students in Bob Marley hoodies.

People navigated through the crowd by holding hands, interlocking arms, or forming dance trains. One group of mixed-age females locked arms into a beetle-like formation that impressed me as a potent battle-field tactic. A young girl wearing a white hijab, peach blouse, and blue flowered skirt cowered up to me, evidently hiding from someone. I gently shielded her with my arm until her friend found her and playfully scolded for being a part of their game. Dusty groups of boys kicked their legs to the music and hoisted one another onto their shoulders.

Packs of boys would occasionally get lost in their exuberance, and fights would break out. “Only Moroccans would fight at a reggae concert” my Moroccan-companions would lament, but the fights seemed harmless to me. The crowd moved in waves towards and away from tussles in the crowd. No one ever appeared to want to contribute to a conflict. The crowd would part to form a boxing-ring square and representatives from each side of the dispute would try to calm their champion, with the result that neither fighter was left on their own and both quickly had their egos soothed. After one fight, a nose was bloodied. The void created by the fighting square was quickly filled by a ring of dancing hippies who seemed to purify the space with their hippie love and swaying, tattered dreadlocks. I thought this hippie-love-ring was going to engulf the entire concert, but instead, one male and one female representative from the hippie clan offered the dusty boys a dance lesson in reggae moves. Even after the hippie teachers departed, the boxing ring remained an unofficial dance square for the rest of the evening.

Many of the concert goers knew nothing about reggae, Ziggy Marley or his famous father. They learn about international music from the Mawazine concerts. The dusty boys receiving the dance lesson were not from the crowd that checks out songs on You Tube before deciding which of the 100 concerts to attend. For them, this was just part of the annual party thrown by King Mohammad VI. Members of each neighborhood flock to the spectacle set-up in their local. The festival is brilliantly planned with many well-prepared venues set-up around the city so that everyone has a chance to attend. And for those how won’t attend a specific show, Mariachis roam the city and play in major arteries.

During the Ziggy concert, a police officer walked a young boy through the crowd, roughly holding the youth’s shirt collar and smacking his behind with a baton. “The kid probably deserves it” was the general feeling from my companions. On-lookers patrolled the scene to ensure the youth wasn’t treated too roughly. Despite the ruckus, we were able to lose ourselves in the music. Certainly not everyone in the crowd knew the lyrics or that the pattern of white light on red squares spelled the word “love.” But everyone, literate and illiterate, appeared to enjoy the spectacle of sound and light and song that was brought from around the world to the stage set-up in the neighborhoods shared space.