When was the last time something really impressed you?
It doesn’t happen very often anymore, but it recently happened to us in a small village in the Kédougou region, in Senegal.
The area is officially muslim, but there are still small villages that have kept their ancestral animist traditions; and one of them is Tomboronkoto.
What we thought was a welcoming ceremony with adults and children greeting us on our way, soon turned into a spiral of emotions.
The drums set the tone, and the music gradually grew louder. The children sang along creating a circle, followed by the entire village. Then the fire was lit, and the magic started.
The darkness, the drumming and the bare feet tapping on the sand raised a cloud of dust and created a dreamlike atmosphere.
And suddenly, the whole village went silent. The master drummer led us out in the open, as two giant haystacks danced out of the darkness.
The tension in the air was easy to feel, an excitement that we had not felt in a long time.
The moment they reached the centre of the circle, the drummers resumed their performance. The music grew louder once again and the dancing more frantic, the two figures swaying, spinning and twisting, taking us all back in time..
