The rite is small, domestic in its materials and unmistakable once seen. A wooden cooking ladle is dressed: cloth wound to make a gown, beads and borrowed jewellery, sometimes a headscarf, so that the utensil becomes a figure of a bride. Women and children carry it from house to house through the village, singing. The songs address Anzar, the rain, and the figure is his bride. At each door water is poured over her and food or small gifts are handed over, and at the end of the round the collected food is cooked and eaten together. In some recorded versions the procession goes to a spring or a field; in others it stays within the village.
Everything in it is ordinary except the address. The ladle comes from a kitchen, the jewellery from the women taking part, the water from the household that has it to spare in a season when it is scarce. What makes the rite a rite is the naming: the figure is Anzar's bride, and the song is a negotiation with the rain in the language of a marriage. Ethnographers recording it in Morocco and Algeria across the twentieth century found local variation in the name of the figure, taghonja and ghonja among others, in who takes part, and in whether the food is shared, given away or offered at a shrine.