The greatest dancer I ever saw was the kankurang. But in the moment I didn’t know who or what it was: a wildly swaying orange shape, of a man’s height but without a man’s face, covered in many swishing, overlapping leaves. Like a tree in the blaze of a New York fall that uproots itself and now dances down the street. A large gang of boys trailed behind it in the red dust, and a phalanx of women, with palm leaves in their hands—their mothers, I assumed. The women sang and stepped heavily, beating the air with the palms, walking and dancing both. I was squeezed into a taxi, a beat-up yellow Mercedes with a green stripe running down its middle. Lamin was next to me, in the backseat, alongside somebody’s grandfather, a woman feeding a squalling baby, two teenage girls in their uniforms, and one of the Koranic teachers from the school. It was a scene of chaos that Lamin met calmly, ever conscious of his status, as a trainee teacher, his hands folded priest-like on his lap, looking as always—with his long, flat nose and broad nostrils, and sad, slightly yellowed eyes—like a big cat in repose. The car stereo played reggae from my mother’s island, turned up to a crazy volume. But whatever was coming toward us was dancing to rhythms reggae never approaches. Beats so fast, so complex, that you had to think about them—or see them expressed through the body of a dancer—to understand what you were hearing. Otherwise you might mistake it for one rumbling bass note. You might think it was the sound of thunder overhead.
Who was drumming? I looked out of my window and spotted three men, their instruments gripped between their knees, walking like crabs, and when they scuttled in front of our car the whole traveling dance party paused in its forward momentum, took root in the middle of the road, forcing us to stop. It made a change from the checkpoints, the sullen, baby-faced soldiers, their machine guns held loosely at the hip. When we stopped for soldiers—often a dozen times in a single day—we would fall silent. But now the cab exploded in talk and whistles and laughter and the schoolgirls reached out of the window and jimmied the broken handle until the passenger door opened and everyone except the breastfeeding woman tumbled out.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
I was asking Lamin, he was supposed to be my guide, but he seemed barely to remember I existed, much less that we were meant to be heading for the ferry, to cross the river into the city, and on to the airport, to greet Aimee. None of that mattered now. There was only the present moment, only the dance. And Lamin, as it turned out, was a dancer. I spotted it in him that day, before Aimee had even met him, long before she saw the dancer in him. I saw it in every hip swivel, each nod of his head. But I couldn’t see the orange apparition any more, there was such a crowd between me and it that I could only hear it: what must have been its feet pounding the ground, and the raw clang of metal on metal, and a piercing shriek, otherworldly, to which the women replied in song, as they, too, danced. I was dancing involuntarily myself, pressed up close to so many moving bodies. I kept asking my questions—“What is it? What’s happening?”—but English, the “official language,” that heavy formal coat people only put on in my presence, and even then with obvious boredom and difficulty, had been thrown to the ground, everyone was dancing on it, and I thought, not for the first time in that first week, of the adjustment Aimee would have to make when she finally arrived and discovered, as I already had, the chasm between a “viability study” and life as it appears before you on the road and the ferry, in the village and the city, within the people and in a half-dozen languages, in the food and the faces and the sea and the moon and the stars.
People were clambering on to the car for a better view. I looked for Lamin and found him, too, scrambling up, on to the front bonnet. The crowd was dispersing—laughing, screaming, running—and I thought at first that a firecracker must have gone off. A group of the women fled leftwards, and now I saw why: the kankurang wielded two machetes, long as arms. “Come!” cried Lamin, reaching a hand down for me, and I pulled myself up to him, clinging to his white shirt as he danced, trying to keep my balance. I looked down at the frenzy below. I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life.
Directly above me an old woman sat decorously on the roof of our car, eating a bag of peanuts, looking like a Jamaican lady at Lord’s, following a day’s cricket. She spotted me and waved: “Good morning, how is your morning?” The same courteous, automatic greeting that followed me round the village—no matter what I wore, no matter who I was with—and which by now I understood as a nod to my foreignness, which was obvious to everyone everywhere. She smiled mildly at the machetes as they spun, at the boys who kept daring each other to approach the dancing tree and match its frenetic moves—while steering clear of its circling knives—imitating in their own narrow bodies the convulsive stamps and twists and crouches and high kicks and general rhythmic euphoria that radiated from the figure to all points on the horizon, through the women, through Lamin, through me, through everyone I could see, as beneath us the car shook and rolled. She pointed at the kankurang. “It is a dancer,” she explained.
A dancer who comes for the boys. Taking them to the bush, where they are circumcised, initiated into their culture, told the rules and the limits, the sacred traditions of the world in which they will live, the names of the plants to help with this or that illness and how to use them. Who acts as threshold, between youth and maturity, wards off evil spirits and is the guarantor of order and justice and continuity between and within his people. He is a guide who leads the young through their difficult middle passage, from childhood to adolescence, and he is also, simply, a young man himself, anonymous, chosen in great secrecy by the elders, covered in the leaves of the fara tree and stained with vegetable dyes. But I learned all this on my phone, back in New York. I did try to ask my guide about it, at the time, what it all meant, how it fitted into or diverged from local Islamic practice, but he couldn’t hear me over the music. Or did not want to hear me. I tried again, a little later, after the kankurang had moved on elsewhere, and we were all squeezed back into the cab, along with two of the young dancing boys, they lay across our laps, sticky with the sweat of their efforts. But I could see my questions were annoying to everybody and by then the euphoria was over. Lamin’s depressing formality, which he brought to all his dealings with me, had returned. “A Mandinka tradition,” he said and then turned back to the driver and the rest of the passengers to laugh and argue and discuss things I couldn’t guess in a language I didn’t know. We drove on. I wondered about the girls. Who comes for the girls? If not the kankurang, who? Their mothers? Their grandmothers? A friend?
Two