Why Kondén Diara?

“You musn’t be afraid.”

“No.”

I knew whatever my fear might be I must be brave. I wasn’t to show fright or to run off and hide. Still less was I to resist or cry out when my elders carried me off.

“I, too, went through this test,” said my father.

“What happens to you?” I asked.

“Nothing you need really be afraid of, nothing you cannot overcome by your own will power. Remember: you have to control your fear; you have to control yourself. Kondén Diara will not take you away. He will roar. But he won’t do more than roar. You won’t be frightened, now, will you?”

“I’ll try not to be.”

-The Dark Child, by Camara Laye

Konden Diara. After deciding that I was going to keep a blog for my Watson year, I started racking my brain for an appropriate title. I thought about it for a few weeks, but I couldn’t seem to come up with anything that was both meaningful and not incredibly cheesy. Nothing seemed satisfactory. During this time, I was reading a book by Camara Laye called The Dark Child. It details Laye’s experiences growing up in Upper Guinea before leaving to study in Paris. In one chapter, he describes the night that he underwent a ritual to join the society of the uninitiated, a mysterious society run by the elders of the community consisting of all the young, uncircumcised boys aged twelve to fourteen. This was the night of Kondén Diara.

The day the ceremony was to take place, a crowd moved around the town and stopped to pick up all of the boys of the right age who would participate in the ritual. The boys had all heard stories of Kondén Diara, a bogeyman of sorts, a “lion that eats up little boys”. The boys were warned by their fathers to be brave, and then at night were led by the older boys into the forest. They were instructed to kneel in a circle facing a big fire, and when they were all settled in place, they began to hear the roaring of twenty or thirty lions. It was Kondén Diara! They tried to remain brave for their fathers, but they spent the night terrified, facing the fire with their eyes tightly shut. In the early morning, they were finally allowed to get up, and the ordeal was over.

Laye explains that some time later he learned who Kondén Diara really was. It was not real lions they had heard surrounding them that night in the forest, but instead just the older boys using wooden boards to create the sounds of many lions. The description of this ritual got me thinking about fear of the unknown. As Laye says, this ritual was “childishly simple,” nothing to actually be afraid of. But as a young boy spending the night in the forest face to face with Kondén Diara, it seemed terrifying. I was about to leave for my Watson year, traveling into the unknown and coming face to face with my own Kondén Diara. So I decided that this would be the name for my blog, so I can always remember that the unknown is usually not as scary as it sometimes may seem at first. Stay tuned for news from Freetown, Sierra Leone!