Andumbulu

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At dusk in the bush below the cliffs, a woman gathering wood came on something no one was meant to see. In a clearing a ring of small figures was dancing, none of them taller than a child, their bodies bound in skirts of red fiber and their faces shut behind masks. She had surprised the Andumbulu. At the sight of her they broke and scattered — into the rocks, into the mouths of caves, down the holes of the earth where the little people live — and in their fright they left everything behind: the masks lying on the ground, the red costumes, and, too old and slow to follow the rest, one of their own kind, whom she took hold of and carried back to the village. From that single theft, in the account the Dogon still keep, the whole art of the masked dance descends. The masks the men of the escarpment dance to this day were not made by them and were not given by a god. They were taken from the bush.

These are the Andumbulu — in the French of the ethnographers, the Andoumboulou — a class of small bush- and underworld-spirits of the Dogon of the Bandiagara cliffs in Mali. They are the “little people” of the untilled country: of the caves and the scree, the crevices in the rock, the interior of the earth. They are not the great powers of the Dogon sky-world. They are neither the Nommo, the ordered water-twins who came down in the ark with the grain and the Word, nor the deified human ancestors honored at the shrines. They are older and lower than both — an order of genii already in the land before ordinary humankind, and it is from them, and not from the makers of the cosmos, that the most public and most guarded of Dogon institutions traces its beginning.

The little people and how they reach the record

The Andumbulu come paired, and their pair is the Yeban. In the ordered account of Dogon origins, when Amma the creator peopled the young world he made, among the genii, the Yeban: small immortal beings with oversized heads, discolored bodies, and frail, spindly limbs, who, ashamed of their form, hid themselves away in the holes of the earth and the caverns of the mountains. The Andumbulu are reported as smaller still, and as dwelling deeper — in the earth’s interior. In one telling the two are set in a line of descent, the Yeban begetting the Andumbulu, and the children coming out smaller than the parents because in the first age the sky hung so low that nothing beneath it could grow to full height. Whatever the exact kinship, the pattern holds: the Yeban and the Andumbulu are the diminished, hidden, cave-bound orders of an earlier world, and the Andumbulu sit at the bottom of it, closest to the raw force of the bush and furthest from the daylight of the human town.

Almost everything that can be said in this register reaches print through a single scholarly channel, and the manner of its arrival is now part of what has to be said. The Yeban-and-Andumbulu, the descent of one from the other, the symbolism that binds them to the masks — all of it comes chiefly from the French ethnography of Marcel Griaule and his long collaborator Germaine Dieterlen, above all from Griaule’s Masques dogons of 1938, the reference study of the Dogon mask society, and from the grand cosmological synthesis of Le Renard pâle (The Pale Fox), the first volume of which appeared in 1965. That synthesis is exactly what a later generation of anthropologists learned to hold at arm’s length. When Walter van Beek restudied the Dogon around Sangha and published Dogon Restudied in 1991, he found that a great deal of the numbered, interlocking esoterica in Griaule’s system was unrecognized by ordinary Dogon outside the small circle of Griaule’s own informants; he argued that the tidy architecture was, in part, built in the give-and-take of the interview itself. The dispute is treated at length in the accounts of Amma and the Dogon, and it need not be re-argued here. What it asks for is a distinction. That the Andumbulu are named, feared, addressed, and reckoned with by living ritual specialists belongs plainly to the tradition. The neat genealogy in which the Yeban beget them, and the exact place each occupies in a lettered cosmic scheme, is best read as a classic reconstruction assembled between particular elders and a particular listener — valuable, partial, and not to be mistaken for unmediated Dogon doctrine. The little people are the tradition’s; the diagram around them is the ethnography’s.

The gift of the masks

The founding story is set in motion, always, by a woman, and it turns on a theft she commits without meaning to. In the version gathered by the Griaule school, she surprises the Andumbulu dancing in the bush, and when they flee she is left holding what they drop — the fiber masks and the red costumes — and, more than that, she seizes one of them who could not get away: old Albarga, a spirit-elder of the little people, who is credited with knowing, and teaching, the use of the masks. This is the decisive capture. A mask left on the ground is only a thing; Albarga is the one who knows what it is for. The men of the woman’s village then take both from her — the masks and the old spirit — and hide them away in a cave, the sacred rock shelter of Albarga at Youga Dogorou, high in the cliffs, where the memory of the theft is kept. In certain traditions the woman has a name, Yayeme, and a home village, Yendouma, and for her discovery she is given a lasting office: she becomes the Ya Sigine, the “sister of the masks,” the one woman permitted an active role in the masked rites in a domain otherwise closed to women. Her figure stands atop the tall Satimbe mask, a small carved woman with arms upraised riding the plank above the dancer’s face — the female founder built into the very object the men now carry.

The masks the woman stole were of fiber, and at first no one knew what they were for. Their purpose, in the tradition, became clear only when death came into the world. The reference account puts the sequence plainly: the first ancestor to die did so in the form of a serpent, and death loosed the nyama — the charged, dangerous vital force that a living thing carries and that a death sets violently free. That force had to be given something to settle into, a body to hold it and keep it from doing harm; and so a mask was carved in the shape of the serpent the ancestor had become, to serve as its support. This is the imina na, the “great mask” or “mother of masks” — a towering plank of wood, the largest the Dogon make, cut in serpent form. It is not a thing to be worn on a face and danced. It is carried, or set upright and displayed, a standing vessel for the force of the first death. And it is renewed once in a very long while: at the Sigui, the greatest of the Dogon ceremonies, which comes only about every sixty years. The recorded Sigui celebrations fell in 1787, 1847, and 1907, and the last ran from 1967 to 1973; the next is expected around 2027. The rite is a slow procession that begins and ends at Youga Dogorou — the cave of Albarga — and travels from village to village across the whole of the country over some seven years, and what it re-enacts is precisely the stretch of sacred time the little people opened: from the death of the first ancestor to the moment humankind gained the use of speech. Its cycle is timed to the star the Dogon call Sigi tolo, the “star of the Sigui,” which the wider world knows as Sirius — a link that would later be pulled far out of shape by hands the Dogon never invited.

Bound to the masks is a second, guarded gift: a language. The Sigui carries its own restricted tongue, the sigi so, the “language of the Sigui,” taught only to the male dignitaries of the awa, the society of masks. It is a poor language by design, holding, in the estimate the documentary record preserves, only about a quarter of the vocabulary of everyday Dogo so, the ordinary Dogon speech; women are not to learn it. Speech and its withholding sit at the center of the whole complex. The Sigui commemorates the coming of the word to humankind, and it does so in a word-hoard deliberately kept small and deliberately kept from half the population — an ordinary language and its shadow, twinned the way the Dogon twin everything, the full daylight tongue and the quarter-tongue of the masks. The society that keeps it, the awa, is an initiatory body of circumcised men, and it is the awa who bring the masks out at the dama, the collective funeral rite that closes a period of mourning and escorts the nyama of the dead safely away to the ancestors. The masks that dance on the rooftops and in the plaza of the dead — the antelope Walu, the tall openwork Sirige, the Kanaga with its double-barred cross, and the female Satimbe with the sister of the masks above — are the living inheritance of the fiber costumes a woman once carried out of the bush.

The little people are not only remembered in the masks; they are addressed directly. Among the songs of the Dogon funeral is the “Song of the Andumbulu,” a chant sung to the spirits themselves. In the notes to the recordings that first carried it out of the country, it is whispered by initiates kneeling in a circle in the deserted village at night, with only the wind and the barking of dogs to break the silence, and its words tell of the creation of human beings and the first appearing of life on the earth. It is a strange and exact placement. The song of the little cave-people is sung when a person has died and is being sent on, in the emptied town, in the dark — as if the passage out of life had to be spoken over in the register of the oldest and lowest order of beings, the ones who were here before people, who live in the ground the dead are going into. The Andumbulu stand, in all of this, at a single hinge: between the wild and the human, the bush and the town, the raw force of the untilled country and the ordered life of the masked society that tames and carries it. Their gift is not the calm order the Nommo bring down from the sky. It is power seized out of the bush — the masks, the mask-language, the containment of the force of death — and kept, ever after, at a careful distance, described in the open only as far as the public record goes and no further.

The song carried away

No Dogon spirit has traveled by a stranger road than the Andumbulu, and the vehicle was that funeral song. In the early 1970s the American poet Nathaniel Mackey, then working at a radio station in northern California, found in the station’s library an album of Dogon music, Les Dogon, with funeral songs on one side — and among them the “Song of the Andoumboulou.” Mackey took the title and never let it go. His “Song of the Andoumboulou” has grown, over five decades, into one of the longest serial poems in American letters, its installments numbered past a hundred and forty. In his reading the Andoumboulou are what the Dogon material offered him: not finished people but a rough, earlier, flawed draft of the human, a spirit-order that the song of the dead reaches back toward — and the poem becomes a music of the incomplete, of a humanity always still being made. The little people of the caves, addressed by kneeling initiates in an emptied Malian village, thus keep a second life in the pages of a contemporary poet who never saw the cliffs, carried there by a recording and a name.

They brush, too, against the most famous controversy attached to the Dogon, and here the sober course is to name it and step back. Because the Sigui — whose masks descend from the Andumbulu — is timed to Sirius, and because Griaule’s informants were reported to speak of a companion to that star, Po tolo, the British writer Robert Temple built The Sirius Mystery (1976) on the claim that the Dogon held an ancient, impossible knowledge of Sirius B, the star’s faint invisible companion. The claim is widely judged spurious and is not asserted here: van Beek’s informants told him they had heard of the star from Griaule himself, and the fuller reckoning belongs to the accounts of Amma and the Dogon. What matters at this end of the chain is only that the Andumbulu were caught up in it — the bush-spirits who gave the masks enlisted, against their whole character, as evidence of visitors from the sky.

On the escarpment itself the tradition is not a matter of the past tense. The Dogon today are largely Muslim and in part Christian, and the older devotion lives on beside the world religions rather than beneath them; the awa still initiate, the dama masks still dance, and the ground of the whole system — the cliff of Bandiagara, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1989 — remains a living sacred landscape and not a museum of one. That life has been badly strained. Since the Malian conflict opened in 2012, the center of the country has been torn by jihadist insurgency and by intercommunal violence between Dogon and Fulani communities, the worst single episode being the March 2019 massacre at Ogossagou; the security collapse and its toll on the escarpment’s people and their ceremonies are set out, soberly and at fuller length, under the Dogon. The masks have gone on dancing where they can, for funerals and, increasingly and uneasily, for the few travelers who still come.

For the scholar the Andumbulu remain a test case in how to read Griaule. Every load-bearing thread of their story — the pairing with the Yeban, the myth of Albarga and the stolen masks, the symbolism that ties the imina na to the first death — reaches the record through Masques dogons and Le Renard pâle, and each should be held as van Beek taught, as a classic account that is also a debated reconstruction. But the correction cuts only at the diagram. The dancers on the cliff, the great serpent-mask carried once in a lifetime, the quarter-tongue guarded by the awa, and the whispered song sung over the dead in the dark town all still point back to the same low clearing in the bush, and to the small figures who scattered into the earth and left their masks on the ground for a woman to carry home.

Dogon masked dancers in performance, Mali. Fasokan, 2016 (Wiki Loves Africa), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A Satimbe mask from Sangha, the small upraised female figure representing the Ya Sigine, the ‘sister of the masks.’ BluesyPete, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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