Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I hesitated. “Well, yes. Depression. Yes, I suffer from depression. It was very acute. It’s a little better now, but I still do actually suffer from depression.”

“Well, I’ve certainly never done this for a toubab before, but I could actually do an n’deup for you.”

“Oh!” I said. “What an interesting idea. Well, um, yes, sure. Yeah, absolutely, yes, let’s do that. I’ll have an n’deup.”

“Good. I think it will help you.”

She gave me some fairly basic instructions, and then I left.

My translator, Hélène, the aforementioned then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife of my friend David, turned to me and said, “Are you completely crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into? You’re crazy. You’re totally crazy. But I’ll help you if you want.”

First, I had a shopping list. I had to buy seven yards of African fabric. I had to get a calabash, which was a large bowl fashioned from a gourd. I had to get three kilos of millet. I had to get sugar and kola beans. And then I had to get two live cockerels and a ram. So Hélène and I went to the market with David and we got most of the things, and I said, “But what about the ram?”

Hélène said, “We can’t buy the ram today. What are we going to do with it overnight?” I saw the sense of that.

The next day, when we got into a taxi for the two-hour drive to the n’deup, I said, “What about the ram?”

Hélène said, “Oh, we’ll see a ram along the way.” So we were going along and going along, and there, indeed, was a Senegalese shepherd by the side of the road with his flock. We stopped the cab, got out, negotiated a bit, and bought a ram for seven dollars. Then we had a little bit of a struggle getting the live ram into the trunk of the taxicab. But the cabdriver seemed not at all worried, even when the ram kept relieving himself in the trunk.

When we got there, I said to Madame Diouf, “Well, here I am. I’m ready for my n’deup.”

Now, the n’deup varies enormously depending on a whole truckload of signals and symbols that come from above. So we had to go through this whole shamanistic process to figure out my n’deup. I still didn’t know much about what was going to happen. First I had to change out of my jeans and my T-shirt and put on a loincloth. Then I sat down, and I had my chest and my arms rubbed with millet. Someone said, “Oh, we really should have music for this.”

I said, “Oh, great.” And I thought, yes, drumming, some atmospheric, wonderfully West African sort of thing.

Madame Diouf came out with her prized possession, a battery-operated tape player, for which she had one tape: Chariots of Fire. So we listened to Chariots of Fire. I was given various shamanistic objects to hold with my hands and drop. I then had to hold them with my feet and drop them. Madame Diouf’s five assistants had all gathered around. They would say, “Oh, this augurs well.” “This augurs badly.” We spent the morning like this. We’d started at about eight o’clock, and at maybe about eleven, eleven thirty, they said, “Well, now it’s actually time for the central part of the ritual.”

I said, “Oh, okay,” and drumming began—the drumming I had been hoping for. There was all of this drumming, and it was exciting. We went to the central square of the village, and I had to get into a small, makeshift wedding bed with the ram. I had been told it would be very, very bad luck if the ram escaped, and that I had to hold on to him, and that the reason we were in this wedding bed was that all my depression and all my problems were caused by my spirits. In Senegal you have spirits all over you, the way you have microbes in the developed world. Some are good for you. Some are bad for you. Some are neutral. My bad spirits, I was told, were extremely jealous of my real-life sex partners, and we had to mollify the anger of the spirits. So I had to get into this wedding bed with the ram, and I had to hold the ram tightly. He, of course, immediately relieved himself on my leg.