Malidoma Some-The Modern Life of an African Shaman

It was a great honor to meet Malidoma Some as I have been studying his Shaman ways for over four years now. As one of the great Shamans of our times, he like many other great Shamans has been lead by the Spirits to share their knowledge with the culture of the United States.

As a Shaman of the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso where English is not the language of the people it is difficult to translate the experiences. He drives himself very hard to give the best translation that he can but there are things that can not be adequately translated. So, a question arises. “Can I do justice to the spiritual ancestors, our traditions, in English?” He says he needs to be more forgiving of himself, and the elders (of his tribe) don’t speak English, so they don’t know what he is saying anyway.

Shamans look at the world view, cosmology, and world structure. They and their people believe in ancient wisdom and channels of dream worlds. There is a place of choice in a dream state. They believe that one does not have a difference between sacred approach and daily life. The assumption being everything you encounter has life. Everything is interconnected. There is a channel of sharing. We share our culture, our stories, and our traditions. And again like all Shamans, he has not lost touch with the indigenous ways of his people and the love of all things even in modern situations/context.

The indigenous ways of many peoples throughout the world have similar concepts as Malidoma and the Dagara tribe. They are in sync with birth, death, environment, earth, and life. They are into subjective elder intuition. They all have their elements which are not exactly the same but similar. The Chinese, for example, have a few different sets of elements that they go by. The Dagara tribe is no different. They have five elements. They are water, fire, nature, mineral, and earth. The water element is known for peacemaking, and we need the water to regulate our body temperature. The fire in us also has to do with body temperature regulation. The fire person also provides the spark that ignites the rituals. Nature has the capacity for transformation, shape changing. It brings us back face to face living with magic. The mineral person, which I am, holds the gateway of memory. The element is associated with not just rocks and such but with the bones. Knowledge of the ancestors is stored in the bones. Finally the Earth, it is a place of home and community.

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Theresa Dolata is a new webreporter and photographer.

Some key things to remember are the following. Cosmology is very important. We are nature and nature is us. We are magic and magic is us. We are supernatural and supernatural is us. We are all interconnected, everything is sacred, and all things have life.