Sangoma: My Odyssey into the Spirit World of Africa Book

How could a white American man, born a Roman Catholic and raised in a conservative Chicago suburb, become an Aftrican shaman?

Writer james Hall's long, strange trip begins in 1986, when he goes to Guinea, West Africa, to interview legendary singer Miriam Makeba. During their conversations, Makeba suggests that Hall has a spiritual gift—one that permits him to communicate with the dead and foresee the future. At Makeba's urging, Hall travels to the tiny southern African nation of Swaziland, where he meets a shaman—a sanoma—who advises him to explore his own potential as a healer empowered by ancestral spirits.

Intrigued but skeptical, Hall flies back to America, but then a series of weird, inexplicable occurences convinces him that the spirit world is directing him toward a very special destiny. And so Hall returns to Swaziland to begin kutfwasa—the arduous process of initiation that will prepare him to be a sangoma.

In the small Swazi village that will be his home over many months to come, Hall begins to learn the sangoma's craft—dancing the ritual dances, purifying himself through rites of vomiting and steaming, and studying the divination bones by which a sangoma diagnoses illness. Then, days into his training, Hall suddenly begins to see visions.

As he is possessed by the ancestral spirits the Swazis called lidlotis, Hall leaves behind the reality he has always known and enters another, profoundly uncanny universe. But his newfound acquaintance with the spirit world marks just the beginning of Hall's astounding journey. At turns humorous, terrifying, sad, and joyous, his story is that of a man who, against all odds, is somehow able to bridge the gap between the modern, "rational" West and the age-old spiritual traditions of Africa.