Bukut, Baila, Senegal 2007

Another unexpected event of my time in the casamance was the bukut, or circumcision ceremony which takes places once every 30 years in Baila, a village about 30 km from Ziguinchor. As it is a only a once or twice in a lifetime event for locals, it is a BIG deal! Jola people come from all over the world to participate. You can find infants to old men among the initiates. For any number of reasons, a person may miss the opportunity to participate and have to put it off for another 30 years. Those who do not go through the experience will always find them selves at the bottom of the social strata, having to speak last in gatherings or not regarded as "true" men amongst their peers.

The proceedings were remarkably open - everyone was welcome to participate AND take photos, film and record. The initiates filled their days by traversing around the village fulfilling certain tasks - visiting relatives, getting the hair on the back of their head cut into a particular design (we never did figure out what the significance of each different design was), then later having their head shaved except for a small patch which was then shaved on their way to the woods......Each day before going to the woods, the groups gathered in a large field around and enormous tree. The general flow of the participants was counter clockwise. Every one sort of trucking along with the music. A kind of slow/fast groove at 70/140 bpm. The men stomping and singing, the women banging bits of metal together and singing. You can hear a bit of that here. There was one small group which had men playing drums.

The crowd was composed of interested peoples from all over the place, a few toubab thrown in as well. The photos here show some of the dancers. These are men who are already circumsized or are initiates. This was a bit confusing for us, me being a toubab and the others being mostly from Dakar and not familiar with local customs. Anyway, these guys danced and danced and sang and showed their manhood and courage and protected state (they used gris-gris) by cutting their tongues, arms, necks, heads, stomaches with knives, swords, machetes. For the most part, they didn't get hurt. I did see one guy who cut the back of his head, but just continued on as though he didn't even notice that he was bleeding all over. One of the "caretakers" came over and applied a salve to the wound. The mood was very festive and carnavalesque, with people dressing up in funny hats, wigs and strange clothing. There were a lot of people flming, photographing and recording audio. At the presence of a camera, people jumped up and posed.There is an enormous tree where the special dance step was passed on to them earlier in the year at the center of the village. On the day of moving into the woods where the circumcision ceremony was to take place at night time, all of the different groups converged on the main roads forming bigger groups and then converged on the big tree forming an even bigger group. From here, women and foreigners (including non-Jola Senegalese) were forbidden to pass. Beyond there and into the woods was sacred territory. Upon reaching there, there was a general call to everyone to stop filming, but they still didn't ask people to stop accompanying the initiates toward the woods. The singing and dancing continued and the women followed as well, and so did I. This continued for another hour or so, slowly making their way toward the actual forest, with men cutting their tongues and one guy every once in a while going a little crazy and running over to a coconut tree to try and climb up, but then being dissuaded by one of the caretakers that followed and looked out for them.Eventually, we reached a point where I was asked (very politely) not to continue. The Jola men were allowed to accompany them a bit farther, but at the forest (where the sacred space began), only initiates and mentors were allowed.One of my favorite parts about the whole thing were these different bomb squad crews. Each was from a different part of the village. They moved around in groups of 8 or so, with somebody to carry around a 5 gallon paint can filled with gun powder to re-fill their bombs. They would run ahead of the procession and set themselves up along the route and surprise everybody with their huge explosions. They were like super comandos or something....dressed up in matching outfits, with canibalized headphones as ear protectors, wigs as well as gris-gris for protection. They moved about with incredible purpose, as though in a trance.