Summary
Malidoma Patrice Somé (1956–2021) was a Dagara writer and ritual elder from Dano, Burkina Faso, who at age four was kidnapped by a French Jesuit missionary and raised in a colonial seminary for fifteen years before escaping and returning to his village to undergo the traditional Dagara initiation, the Bayuo. His 1994 memoir Of Water and the Spirit is the most detailed first-person account in English of West African indigenous initiation, and it became a foundational text for cross-cultural medical anthropology, decolonial readings of missionary medicine, and contemporary writing on ancestor work and ritual healing. Somé’s central argument was that the disease of modernity — what he called “restlessness” — has its roots in a broken relationship with the ancestors, and that the West needs the medicine of indigenous ritual as much as Africa once needed the literacy of the colonial school.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Early life and abduction
Somé was born in 1956 in the Dagara village of Dano, in what was then the French colony of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). His autobiography opens with a striking summary of the violence done to him in childhood: “When I was four years old, my childhood and my parents were taken from me when I was literally kidnapped from my home by a French Jesuit missionary who had befriended my father.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) At that time, he writes, the Jesuits “were trying to create a ‘native’ missionary force to convert a people who had wearied of their message along with their colonial oppression.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) He spent the next fifteen years in a boarding school far from his family, “forced to learn about the white man’s reality, which included lessons in history, geography, anatomy, mathematics, and literature.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Bakhye’s sleeping room was a spirit workspace filled with an intricate system of gourds, clay pots, and cans whose arrangement formed a connected magical pattern tied to his bed.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Malidoma came from the water, which in the tradition is the symbol of peace and reconciliation with a direction north, and is designated to follow the white man to serve as the eye, ear, and mouth of his tribe.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) An unspoken closeness exists between a grandfather close to returning and a grandson who has freshly entered from the Otherworld.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Somé reproduces Bakhye’s dying instruction in full: “You will walk with men who live in trees that reach to the sky. You will speak to their hearts and you will learn their secrets. You will be the bridge across the great sea between our people and their people.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) In Dagara practice, the dead are not hidden away; when an important elder dies far from home, the body must be walked back because the dead remain as important to the living as they were before.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Grandfather’s room was transformed into an upside-down kitchen where a clay pot of water boiled on the ceiling above a suspended fireplace while men prepared condiments for a gravity-defying meal.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The mother was unwilling to discuss the experience because the Dagara believe that contact with the otherworld is always deeply transformational and to successfully deal with it, one should be fully mature.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Somé also narrates a ritual debt his father carried that broke the family’s protective field. His father had owed an offering to the Earth Shrine for nearly ten years; the unpaid debt weakened “the protective family shield,” and a witch was eventually able to enter the household and kill Somé’s stepbrother.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Somé presents the episode as ethnography rather than as accusation — it illustrates the Dagara position that an individual’s failure to perform owed ritual cascades through the family and the wider community, weakening the shielding that ritual maintains. The Dagara understanding of witchcraft itself is less morally absolute than Western readings might assume: being a witch is not intrinsically bad in this framework, and those who are not witches do not fear them so much as find the prospect of becoming one daunting because of the sustained energy such a role demands.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Two of Somé’s later academic credentials are relevant for placing the books in their reception context: he completed three master’s degrees and two doctorates from the Sorbonne and Brandeis, which gave him the unusual position of being able to write Dagara material in the academic registers his Western readers had been trained to trust.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Dagara cosmology
Somé presents Dagara metaphysics as a coherent medical and ethical system rather than as folklore. In Dagara cosmology “every person is an incarnation, that is, a spirit who has taken on a body. So our true nature is spiritual. This world is where one comes to carry out specific projects.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) A birth is therefore “the arrival of someone, usually an ancestor that somebody already knows, who has important tasks to do here. The ancestors are the real school of the living.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Before birth, the lineage holds a ritual called a hearing: the pregnant mother, her brothers, the grandfather, and a priest gather, and “the incoming soul takes the voice of the mother … and answers every question the priest asks.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) In Ritual, Somé elaborates the mechanics of this ceremony: the mother enters trance while a shaman poses questions directly to the incoming soul, which speaks through her voice to announce its purpose for incarnation.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) The newborn’s name is derived from these answers, and “a name is the life program of its bearer.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The Dagara are matrilineal: “everybody in the village carries the name of their mother. The family is feminine, the house where the family live is kept by a male… The female is in charge of the continuity of life. She rules the kitchen, the granaries where food is stored, and the space where meals are taken. The male is in charge of the medicine shrine and of the family’s connection with the ancestors.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Wealth in this scheme is relational. “Wealth among the Dagara is determined not by how many things you have, but by how many people you have around you. A person’s happiness is directly linked to the amount of attention and love coming to him or her from other people.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Seminary, rebellion, escape
At the Jesuit mission, Somé was among approximately ten kidnapped boys; no contact with outsiders was allowed, and the mission was five or six miles from home but effectively inaccessible.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) When Somé asked Father Maillot why he was taken, he was locked in a concrete room and then whipped by a catechist who called him by his Catholic name Patrice.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The seminary at Nansi appropriated the name and land of a nearby village, whose inhabitants were politely asked to quit their own land, leaving them astonished and horrified.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The seminary’s history curriculum never taught African history; the continent appeared only in the context of white involvement, and textbooks presented Western thinkers as great inventors.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Somé’s mature judgment is blunt: colonialism cannot be justified on the grounds that some people decided it was their right to disturb the quiet lives of others.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) After years of trying to believe and pray without success against continued brutality, Somé rebelled against God; his last three years at the seminary were devoted to dissidence, ego, and intellectual pursuits.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Eventually, hearing voices behind him, he walked into the jungle to avoid being seen and began his voyage home, knowing only that home was east.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Return and Bayuo initiation
When he reached his village, Somé was twenty years old, “Westernized” in the sense that he had been formed by missionary schooling rather than by ancestor ritual.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) He fit poorly into Dagara village life,(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) could not speak the ritual register fluently,(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) and his father explained that the village council had reached a specific diagnosis: the years of seminary education had displaced Somé’s soul, and the Bayuo initiation was the proposed cure for that displacement.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) He was eventually brought before the council of elders at the earth shrine, who decided that he would have to undergo the Bayuo — the full traditional initiation — if he wanted to be reincorporated as a person.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
The central description of the Bayuo, occupying roughly a hundred pages of his memoir, is one of the most detailed first-person accounts of an indigenous initiation in print. The initiates were divided into five elemental groups corresponding to earth, fire, nature, water, and iron, and each group was taken by an elder to a distinct location for a different ordeal.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Somé’s account of the visionary experience rests on a specific epistemological claim: the mind is a receiver that cannot imagine what does not exist, and the spirit and mind are one with a vision greater than ordinary experience.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The decisive ordeal is the “light hole” or volcanic gate: an apparent ring of fire through which initiates must leap. “It was important for me to remain focused, to continually recite the prayer of the ancestors, and to approach the gateway to the other world as quietly as someone who was coming home.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Inside the light hole he describes a rapid descent through darkness into “an aurora borealis, shot with areas of dark and ones of extreme luminescence — rays of such intensity they made me think of the cosmos in expansion or a cosmogony in progress.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Body sense vanishes — “When I looked down, hoping to see my naked body, it too was invisible. I was not there, yet I was — an invisible presence bathing in the light of my invisibility.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The luminous architecture of the underworld appears to him as bundles of living light wires fed by an infinite volcano below.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Subsequent chapters describe burial-alive ordeals,(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) encounters with a tiny snow-white man in a cave where the animals that had disappeared after colonial hunting were hiding,(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) and a descent into an underworld where Somé crossed a river on the backs of crocodiles that formed a living bridge, connected to his clan’s ancient relationship of mutual cooperation with crocodiles.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Under the roots of an enormous tree he found a bluish-violet stone with a pulsing bright center that glowed fiercely when grasped, turning his hand violet.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) Directed by a village girl to a cave on the other side of dog mountain, he found his way home.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Homecoming and the “song of return”
Somé returned to his village in a state his elders treated as ritual purity. “Every house to which a boy was returning from initiation had an extension or a special quarter painted white, the color of hospitality… It had taken six weeks of perilous adventures to bring me to the point where I could ritually wash away the impurities of my previous state.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) His ceremonial suit carried “images from the underworld, the family earth shrine, the nature shrine, and the ancestral shrine. A bird, the symbolic messenger of nature, sat on top of the nature shrine… A chameleon, symbol of adaptability and compatibility, stood beside the ancestral shrine… The seven cones at the top represented the seven secrets of the medicine of our clan.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
The “song of return” sung at the homecoming dance articulates the Dagara philosophy of initiation as remembering rather than as the acquisition of new knowledge: “I had to go away to learn / How to know. / I had to go away to learn / How to grow. / I had to go away to learn / How to stay here… Oh, little did I know / The doors did not lead outside. // It was all in me. // I was the room and the door. / It was all in me. // I just had to remember.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) In the closing pages he expresses gratitude for the elders who had carried his life across the rupture,(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) and dedicates himself to the cross-cultural mission of bringing Dagara ritual into a Western world he diagnoses as starved for ancestral connection.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Diagnosis of modernity
Somé’s most-cited claim, and the through-line of his work, is a clinical reading of Western restlessness: “It is my belief that the present state of restlessness that traps the modern individual has its roots in a dysfunctional relationship with the ancestors. In many non-Western cultures, the ancestors have an intimate and absolutely vital connection with the world of the living. They are always available to guide, to teach, and to nurture. They represent one of the pathways between the knowledge of this world and the next.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) He interprets initiation, by contrast, as the medicine that “eliminated my confusion, helplessness, and pain and opened the door to a powerful understanding of the link between my own life purpose and the will of my ancestors.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
Ritual as communal technology
The 1993 book frames the diagnosis of modernity from a different angle than the memoir. Where Of Water and the Spirit approaches “restlessness” through Somé’s own biography, Ritual approaches it as a structural problem about speed and reciprocity. Michael Meade’s introduction makes the angle explicit: Somé writes as “an ancient person interpreting modern life,” not as a modern person looking back at village life.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
The contrast Somé draws between the indigenous and industrial worlds turns, in his telling, on speed rather than on the question of whether ritual is needed at all. “I believe that the difference between the indigenous world and the industrial world has mostly to do with speed… the indigenous world looks while the industrial world overlooks. Indigenous people are indigenous because there are no machines between them and their gods.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) The Dagara language has no word for time in the production-and-schedules sense; Somé first encountered it as a French loan that had no equivalent his elders could recognize.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Constant motion, in this reading, is a defense: “those in constant motion (going places, doing things, making noise) are moving away from something that they do not want to look at… the anger of nature within each of us, the anger of the gods, the anger of the ancestors or the spirit world.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
The diagnosis of technology that follows is sharper than the memoir’s. Somé reads Western machine technology as “the spirit of death made to look like life” — life made easier at the cost of dehumanization, because “to sleep in a cozy home, a good bed and eat great, chemically produced food you must rhyme your life with speed, rapid motion and time.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Christianity in Africa, in his account, arrived on the strength of its infrastructure rather than its theology: missionaries “built churches, schools and industries and stirred a vibration, created a disharmony that displaced the indigenous person.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Machines, in this account, are not evil; they crowd out the channel through which human beings address the gods.
In place of speed, Somé puts ritual: a communal technology whose function is to repair reciprocity between the living, the ancestors, and the natural world. Sacredness is not something humans can manufacture; “we can’t make sacredness. The sacred is made by the spirits themselves.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Ritual is the form in which humans make themselves available — they “take the initiative to spark a process, knowing that its success is not in our hands but in the hands of the kind of forces we invoke.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) What looks like religion is, in this reading, closer to what an engineer would call infrastructure: the standing means by which the village and its dead remain in contact.
Somé recounts that because he was, in a sense, already dead, only the death of a chicken and a sheep saved him from actual death, and it took a week to regain strength.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) He also describes a Dagara gatekeeper who began charging foreigners for healing and lost his spiritual power entirely, illustrating how money and spirit can be catastrophic when intertwined in ritual practice.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Ritual theory
Where the previous section presents ritual as a structural alternative to industrial speed, this section presents Somé’s account of how ritual actually works as a practice — its anatomy, its risks, and the principle of hiddenness that organizes it. The book draws on the same Dagara framework as the memoir but shifts from autobiography to cultural diagnosis.
Somé distinguishes ritual from ceremony: ceremony is the visible anatomy of a ritual (what can be seen, observed, corrected), while ritual is the invisible effect produced by the ceremony when spirits are successfully invoked.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) He critiques Western culture as a “show-off culture” and argues that performing ritual for show generates death and loss, and that concealment of ritual is an act of life preservation.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
He identifies four structural elements of indigenous ritual: invocational (calling non-humans for a specific purpose), dialogical (solemn dialogue with spirit and self), repetitive (the structures stay the same even as content varies), and opening and closure (the spirit must be formally thanked and sent away).(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Failure to close a ritual space has consequences — ancestor spirits trigger major accidents, while nature spirits cause prolonged interpersonal conflicts.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Purpose is the driving force of ritual effectiveness. A ritual without a purpose can backfire: “Elders say that ritual is like an arrow shot at something. When the intended target is not there, the arrow invents one.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Conversely, invocation in Dagara ritual must be a plea or humble request, never a command, because ritual is a spirit‑based activity whose success depends on humility and the recognition that humans cannot handle the situation alone.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Somé defines illness as “the sign language of the soul in need of attention” — the soul picks up on situations ahead of conscious awareness, and the body translates these as need, want, or absence.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) From this perspective, the physical world is dealt with “at the last stage” of Dagara therapeutics: “Visible wrongs have their roots in the world of the spirit. To deal only with their visibility is like trimming the leaves of a weed when you mean to uproot it.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Hiddenness is a foundational principle. “For the traditional person, hiddenness is effectiveness. Hiddenness is power.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) A person who displays spiritual power is enslaved by it: “The fundamental principle of ritual is that visibility threatens because visibility enslaves. When power comes out of its hiddenness, it shrinks the person that brought it into the open and turns that person into a servant.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) This principle extends to his critique of Western corporate culture, which he reads as a form of visible power that dehumanizes those who serve it.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) The Dagara enforce hiddenness ritually as well as ethically: elders install in each initiate a protective mechanism that produces physical symptoms — choking, dizziness, suffocation — if the initiate begins to disclose what was learned, a kind of homing device that prevents terminal errors of speech.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Power, in Somé’s account, also has to be earned over time. “As one grows older in the village and demonstrates a character that matches one’s age, more powers become available.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) However, receiving information by error results in being “crushed by it.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) In Dagara drumming, no two people play the same rhythm; each drummer contributes their own response and opinion.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Community as ritual infrastructure
Somé argues that community is not incidental to ritual but its infrastructure. “Without a community you cannot be yourself. The community is where we draw the strength needed to effect changes inside of us.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) He identifies seven characteristics of a functioning community observed in his own village: unity of spirit, trust, openness, love and caring, respect for elders, respect for nature, and cult of the ancestors.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) In Dagara villages, houses have no lockable doors — only entrances — and the community operates without police because “the real police in the village is Spirit that sees everybody.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Ritual has three interdependent dimensions: communal, family, and individual. The three operate as a cascade — community rituals liberate the energy that makes family rituals possible, and family rituals in turn enable individual rituals. When a whole village’s communal ritual is not performed, all lesser rituals suffer: “Individual duty in ritual cannot take the place of communal duty and vice versa.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) When ritual is absent altogether, “the young ones are restless or violent, there are no real elders, and the grown-ups are bewildered.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Dagara grief ritual
The most detailed ethnographic contribution of Ritual is its chapter-length account of Dagara funeral ritual. Grief, Somé writes, is “food for the psyche. Just as the body needs food, the psyche needs grief to maintain its own healthy balance.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Tears serve a cosmological function: they “carry the dead home” — communal grief provides the cathartic energy that transports the dead to the ancestor realm.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Without grief, the dead cannot transition and become dangerous ghosts who intrude on the living.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) The Dagara hold that suppressing grief is not merely unhealthy but a moral failure toward the dead: passionate public mourning is the right of the deceased, who need those tears, and grief that remains contained inside a person is actively dangerous.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994) The ritual musicians are therefore not ornamental. The griot chanter functions as an indispensable engineer of emotion whose skilled orchestration of sound makes it possible for grief to move through people safely; grief released without these musical guides risks overwhelming the living and, in the Dagara understanding, can precipitate another death.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1994)
The ritual involves three interacting groups: the musicians (xylophones, drummer, and improvising cantors who narrate the deceased’s life), the mourners and their containers, and the assembled villagers.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Containers are non-immediate relatives who shadow each mourner, mimicking their grief actions while watching for boundary violations — a mourner who crosses into the shrine space (the threshold to the Otherworld) risks death.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Primary mourners (kotuosob, “center-of-the-heat people”) are tagged with wrist ropes for identification, while laluoro — joking partners — act as emotional thermostats, preventing grief from exceeding human-bearable intensity.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Expression of grief is also gender-specific: a man provides the outlet for another man’s grief and a woman echoes another woman’s, with no cross-gender grief assistance permitted.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Somé treats this less as cultural prescription than as a working observation about which kinds of resonance hold under conditions of extreme emotional load. A people who cannot weep together, in his stronger formulation, “are people who cannot laugh together… like a time bomb, dangerous to themselves and to the world around them.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
A re-enactment ritual (xanu, “dream”) requires the dead adult’s initiation group to act out token activities from the deceased’s life — farming, weaving, hunting — as a means of freeing both living and dead from attachment.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) A ritual transfer of friendship follows, in which friends present offerings to the deceased and a surviving relative accepts each offering, becoming the living embodiment of the friendship.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Burial itself is structured by the deceased’s relation to the village: elders are buried in the middle of the family compound rather than in nature, because as ancestors they are expected to keep counseling the living from the other side, and their graves become the family’s working shrines.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) An uninitiated person, by contrast, is mourned but does not receive the internal funeral rituals; in Somé’s terms, “to evade initiation is to deny yourself a proper death.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Somé describes dividing participants into three groups: containers, mourners, and singers; the singers, led by a master drummer, were in ritual preparation long before the ritual began, and the zeal with which people involved themselves was baffling.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) He concludes that “the other side of real grief is real joy” and “unfinished grief translates into petty joy and silly amusement,” adding that without ritual, humans live in nostalgia.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
The book closes with two prescriptive moves rather than a theoretical one. First, an everyday practice: send a brief invocation to the ancestors at the start and end of each day, on the grounds that doing so sanctifies what falls in between and “places it in the hands of the spirit world.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Second, a public proposal: in place of Memorial Day, the modern world needs “a massive funeral day when everyone is expected to shed tears for the titanic loss wrecked by Progress on people’s souls.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) His summary is direct: “Without real ritual there is only illness. Such illness cannot be healed with pills or drugs or alcohol, or shopping at the mall, or being tranced out many hours a day in front of the TV screen.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993) Without ritual, “humans live in nostalgia.”(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Reception
See also
- Shamanism
- Ancestors —
- African traditional medicine
- Initiation —
- Michael Harner — Western core-shamanism, parallel acquisition path
- Michael Meade — co-organized adapted Dagara grief rituals at Western men’s conferences; introduced Ritual (1993).
Major works
- Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman (1994) — autobiographical account of Somé’s seminary captivity, escape, and Bayuo initiation. Trade publication via Penguin Compass. The most-cited single Anglophone source on Dagara cosmology.
- Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (1993) — theoretical companion volume; lays out the four-element ritual structure, the ceremony/ritual distinction, the principle of hiddenness, and the Dagara funeral as worked example. Introduced by Michael Meade.(Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 1993)
Editorial Notes
Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.
Ritual as communal technology