by Joseph Wallace
I only visited Senegal once, but even
now, twenty years later, I return there occasionally in my
dreams. I usually dream about the color of the light and
the sound of the wind. In Dakar, the capital, you will
sometimes be awakened at night by a strange gusty breeze
rattling the shutters. The glass in the windows will be
pitted and opaque the next morning, and the city will be
newly bathed in sand. The sky, the placid waves rolling in
from the Atlantic Ocean, the light are all tinged with gold
from fine particles carried down from the Sahara Desert so
close by. For days the sun will be no more than a huge,
hazy circle in a brown sky.
You'd go out for a walk and return with your hair streaked blond,
your skin the color of dry earth. Your lungs would feel gritty
with every breath, and every bite of food would taste of sand.
We were driving away from Dakar, heading south along a road that
passed through miles of empty grassland. A road so featureless
and straight that every gentle curve was dutifully reproduced on
our roadmap. There was nothing to be seen--not a town, not a
tree. Nothing but the grass, brown and crackling in the fierce
midday heat. An occasional skinny cow. The taunting mirage of
water on the road, when there was no real water for miles. And
the endless haze of the desert sands suspended in the air.
My friend Kara was driving, and I sat beside her, half-dazed by
the light and heat. Suddenly I saw her squint, frown.
"What the hell is that?" she said.
I looked ahead. There, on the road perhaps a hundred yards away,
was a strange shape, unresolvable in the shimmery heat. A cow? A
large bush blown into the road?
We drew closer. Kara slowed the car. Fifteen feet away, and we
still couldn't tell what was blocking our way.
Then it stood up and turned around, and we saw that it was a man.
An enormous man, dressed in bright-orange thatch that covered his
body, his arms and legs, making him look at least ten feet tall
and six feet wide. He looked like a living orange haystack,
except for his face. His face was covered with a mask, a garish,
glaring wooden mask painted in spatters of reds and blacks. And
in each hand he held a panga--a knife with a foot-long blade.
Kara braked to a halt. As we watched, he strode toward us,
screaming unintelligibly in a voice like a gull's cry. Soon he
stood right in front of the car, no more than five feet away from
where we sat, frozen. He peered at us through the slits in his
mask, and then began to drum on the car with the flats of the
blades. Bang bang bang along the hood, then the roof above our
heads. All the while talking, singing, or cursing in that eerie
voice. As he moved toward the back of the car, still drumming, I
looked at Kara. "Um, do you think you could drive now?" I asked.
She looked at me for a moment, as if she had forgotten where we
were, and then threw the car in gear and revved the engine. As we
pulled away, I turned in my seat, and watched the man gazing
after us, his arms raised to the sky, blades winking in the sun.
Soon he was just a brown spot in the distance, and then he
vanished in the haze.
When I got back to New York, I called an anthropologist I knew.
"Sounds like you and Kara met a village devil," he explained.
A what? I asked.
"Remember, the tribes in southern Senegal are animist," he said,
"despite generations of missionaries trying to convert them.
Every village has a devil, or several of them. They play tricks,
cast spells, function as oracles in the community. It sounds like
you just got involved in an incantation. There was nothing to
worry about."
He laughed at my silence. "Isn't it wonderful," he said, "that
even now the world is filled with such wonders? Consider yourself
lucky that you had the chance to witness one!"
On the nights that Senegal's golden haze suffuses my dreams, I
know that he was right. 