Somé's memoir tells of being taken at age four from his Dagara village in Burkina Faso by French Jesuit missionaries, raised for fifteen years in a seminary where his language and culture were suppressed, and his escape and return home at twenty. To be accepted back, he underwent the grueling month-long Dagara initiation in the bush, an experience he recounts in detail. The book bridges indigenous African spirituality and Western readers, and it became a widely read introduction to Dagara ritual and cosmology.
Author: Malidoma Patrice Somé · Original publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher / G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1994 (full title: *Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman*)
