Bandiagara Escarpment

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A traveler coming north across the Séno-Gondo plains sees it before anything else: a sandstone wall running level along the horizon for a day’s drive, some 150 kilometers of it, rising about 500 meters sheer above the sandy flats. Up close the smooth stone turns out to be worked. The upper reaches of the cliff are pocked with small chambers of dried mud — squat granaries, sealed cells, open-mouthed tombs — lodged in the rock face high above where any ladder now reaches, set into cracks and ledges like the nests swallows plaster under an eave. The people who built them into the stone are long gone. They were called the Tellem, and the mud pockets are their granaries and their graves. Below them, at the foot of the same cliff and along its shaded terraces, stand the villages of the Dogon, who came after the Tellem and who keep their handiwork still — climbing, in places, to the old high stores when they need them, and otherwise leaving the ancestors lodged above the living where they have hung for half a millennium.

The sandstone face of the Bandiagara Escarpment: the older mud cells of the Tellem set high in the rock, above the flat-roofed houses of the Dogon village built at its foot. Timm, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Reading the cliff from the bottom up

The escarpment is a landscape stacked in time, and archaeology reads it much as a geologist reads a rock cut — from the bottom up, each layer of occupation folded over the one before. The Falaise de Bandiagara stands in the Mopti region of central Mali, a long chain of cliffs that runs from the southwest to the northeast and continues toward the distant Grandamia massif, where the Hombori Tondo, at 1,155 meters, is the highest point in the country. Along the stretch that concerns the Dogon world it draws a clean 500-meter step between two flat lands: the sandstone plateau spreading away above, and the sandy Séno-Gondo plains reaching south below. On the wall between them, and on the terraces at its foot, human beings have lived for a very long time.

The earliest occupants the archaeologists can name are the Toloy. They are known almost entirely from their granaries — cylinders built up of superimposed coils of clay, a technique unlike anything the later peoples of the cliff used — found in a rocky channel near the village of Sangha. The gully lent the vanished people their name. Radiocarbon dating placed the Toloy granaries deep in the past, in roughly the third and second centuries before the common era, which makes the cliff one of the older continuously legible human sites in West Africa. After the Toloy, and separated from them by a long unlit interval, came the Tellem. The name is a Dogon word, and it means, plainly, those who came before us. The Tellem inhabited the escarpment between about the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries of the common era, and they were true cliff-dwellers. They set their granaries and small houses high in the rock face, and they buried their dead in shallow caves far above the reach of the flash floods that scour the foot of the wall after the rains.

What the Tellem left in those dry caves has made them, improbably, one of the best-documented medieval populations of the whole West African interior. Between 1964 and 1974 a multidisciplinary Dutch team — the archaeologist Rogier M. A. Bedaux and the textile scholar Rita Bolland foremost among them — excavated the burial caves systematically. The desiccating air of the high cliff had done what almost no African climate does: it had preserved cloth. The team recovered some 500 textiles, cotton and wool, dated to the eleventh through sixteenth centuries, a survival of medieval weaving from a region whose fabrics ordinarily rot into nothing within a season. Alongside the textiles came wooden figures, iron and copper ornaments, leather, and the bones of the buried themselves. The Tellem disappeared from the cliff for reasons that remain unsettled — driven off, absorbed, or simply thinned out and gone.

Into the space they left came the Dogon. Their own oral tradition, which the UNESCO documentation follows, holds that they reached the cliffs in the fourteenth century, arriving from the southwest near the village of Kani Bonzon and spreading from there across the three zones of the country: the plateau above, the escarpment itself, and the plains below. They inherited the Tellem granaries and tombs along with the rock, and they did not clear them out. In places they still use the old high stores; elsewhere the sealed Tellem cells simply remain, the predecessors lodged permanently above the successors. This much — the coiled-clay Toloy of the last centuries before the common era, the cliff-hung Tellem of the medieval centuries, the Dogon arrival in the fourteenth — rests on excavation, on radiocarbon dates, and on a tradition the Dogon tell of themselves. The far more elaborate esoteric readings of the same landscape, the ones that made the Dogon famous, rest on something more contested, and are a matter for the reception of the place rather than its foundations.

In 1989 the escarpment was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Cliff of Bandiagara (Land of the Dogons), one of the relatively few properties listed as mixed — cultural and natural at once — under criteria (v) and (vii). The inscribed property is vast, covering about 400,000 hectares and taking in some 289 villages spread across the plateau, the cliffs, and the plain. What the listing honors is not a monument but a whole inhabited terrain: the cliffs and sandy plateaux, the architecture set into them, and a body of social and ritual practice still carried on within them.

A landscape read like a text

Inside the Dogon world the cliff is not scenery. It is a worked and legible geography, its three zones stitched together by settlements whose built forms each carry meaning. The house, the granary, the altar, the shrine, and the men’s meeting-place are not merely useful; they are arranged, shaped, and sited according to an order the Dogon take to run through the whole of creation. A village read closely is a diagram of the world, and the people who live in it read it that way.

The most quietly eloquent of its structures is the toguna — the togu na, the men’s meeting-house, sometimes rendered the house of words. It is a low open shelter, its flat roof piled thick with layers of dried millet stalks and its supporting posts often carved. The roof is built deliberately low. A man seated beneath it in council can speak, but a man who leaps up in anger will crack his head on the heavy roof and be forced back down, and so the architecture itself cools the argument and keeps the debate to words. The granaries are read as closely: their compartments, their conical caps of thatch, their male and female forms are understood to echo the ordering and the divisions of the created world. Set among the houses and along the rocks are the family altars, the lineage sanctuaries, and the shrines where offerings are made. And above all of these, physically above them, hang the inherited Tellem caves — so that in the ordinary Dogon village the dead and the predecessors are lodged literally overhead, and a person tending a shrine at the base of the cliff does so in the shadow of tombs older than any name he knows.

The landscape is also the theater of the great ceremonies. When a person of weight dies, the awa — the society of the masks — dances at the funeral, the carved and fibered masks moving through the village and out along the terraces to settle the dead and to close the breach a death tears in the community. Rarer and larger is the Sigui, the rite that comes only about once in sixty years and passes in slow procession from village to village along the whole length of the escarpment, renewing across a full generation the covenant between the living and the dead. The Dogon tie the Sigui to the origin of speech and of death itself; its last full cycle ran through the villages across the years around 1967 to 1973, and the next lies still decades off. Near Bandiagara, at the village of Songo, a painted rock-shelter carries images tied to the cycle of circumcision by which boys are made men, its walls refreshed in red, white, and black at the seasons the rite demands. These things can be named and described from the public record; they are not offered here as instructions, and the Dogon guard their working detail closely.

Behind the whole terrain stand the powers of the Dogon cosmos, honored across the plateau and the cliff and the plain. Amma is the one creator, who folded the germ of the ordered world into the smallest cultivated seed and set it unfolding from an egg. The Nommo are the ordered water-twins who came down in an ark bringing the word, the grain, and the arts of living. Lebe is the first ancestor who became the serpent of the earth and who renews the sacred soil under the priest-chief. Yurugu is the pale fox, torn prematurely from the egg, who loosed disorder into a creation meant to be balanced and who now speaks the coming days in the tracks he leaves across grids drawn in the night sand. And the Andumbulu are the little spirits of the bush, from whom, the Dogon say, the masks and their secret language first came. This is a religion practiced now, in the present, alongside the Islam and the Christianity that have also long been at home on the cliff — not a survival but a living tradition, tended by people who farm the same terraces their fourteenth-century forebears cleared.

The escarpment and a Dogon settlement built into the terraces at its foot, in the cliff country south of Bandiagara. David Sessoms, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Two roads to the wider world

The Bandiagara Escarpment reached the world along two very different roads, and the relation between them is the whole difficulty of its modern fame. The first road is a library. Beginning in 1931, the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule led a long series of expeditions to the cliff, and out of them came two books that made the Dogon a fixture of twentieth-century thought: Dieu d’eau, published in 1948 and known in English as Conversations with Ogotemmêli, the record of long talks with a blind Dogon elder at Sanga; and Le Renard pâle, the vast synthesis Griaule built with Germaine Dieterlen and which appeared in 1965, after his death. Together they presented a Dogon esotericism of astonishing depth — an egg-born cosmos, a numbered creation, a sacrificed and risen water-spirit — and for a generation the Dogon stood in the textbooks as proof that oral Africa could hold metaphysics to rival any written theology.

That account is now read with caution. The Dutch anthropologist Walter E. A. van Beek, who lived among the Dogon in the 1980s, set out to find in the field what Griaule had recorded, and reported in Dogon Restudied, published in Current Anthropology in 1991, that ordinary Dogon did not recognize much of the elaborate system — raising the real possibility that the deep cosmology was, in significant part, co-authored in the long encounter between an ethnographer hungry for structure and a few exceptional elders. Griaule’s defenders answered that van Beek had simply not been let into a guarded initiatory knowledge. The dispute is genuine and unsettled, and it is treated at length where the Dogon themselves are described; the point for the cliff is only this, that the famous depth of the Bandiagara cosmology is the famous, contested reconstruction of the Griaule school and should be named as such, not repeated as plain fact. Its most notorious offshoot is a case in point. In The Sirius Mystery of 1976, Robert Temple built on a 1950 paper of Griaule and Dieterlen to argue that the Dogon preserved ancient knowledge of the invisible companion of the star Sirius, taught them by visitors from the sky. The claim is widely regarded as spurious — most plausibly a product of leading questions and feedback in the fieldwork, since van Beek’s informants who spoke of the companion star agreed they had heard of it from Europeans — and it belongs in the record as a historiographic controversy, not as a lost astronomy.

The second road is made of stone and cloth. It runs through the Tellem burial caves and their medieval textiles, through the Dutch excavations, and through the UNESCO inscription of 1989 — the material heritage of the cliff rather than its contested metaphysics. That road carried a different kind of visitor. For decades the World Heritage listing drew trekkers along the escarpment to villages that became famous in their own right: to the ritual hub of Sanga on the plateau rim, and down the wall to the tiered cliff-village of Ireli and its neighbor Banani, where the Tellem cells hang directly over the Dogon houses. Guiding and lodging those walkers became, for a generation, one of the mainstays of the local economy.

After 2012 that road closed. The collapse of the Malian state’s authority in the north spread a jihadist insurgency across the center of the country, and with it came a grinding cycle of intercommunal violence between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders that has cost thousands of lives — the massacre of some 160 Fulani villagers at Ogossagou in March 2019 among its worst single days. The tourism that had run along the cliff ended almost overnight, and the conflict reached the World Heritage property itself: UNESCO has reported the total or partial destruction of close to thirty villages in the region, roughly half of them inside the inscribed boundary, with heavy loss to the granaries, houses, and ritual objects that gave the site its value. The wider suffering of central Mali is a subject in its own right and is handled where the people themselves are described. What belongs to the cliff is the response it has drawn: working with the ALIPH foundation, UNESCO has undertaken a program of rehabilitation at the Bandiagara World Heritage site, restoring damaged granaries and traditional houses and helping the communities that hold the intangible heritage — the masks, the ceremonies, the crafts — to keep it alive under conditions that make the keeping hard.

Between the two roads, the escarpment holds steady. The archaeology can be dated and the textiles cataloged; the great cosmology can be argued over and the Sirius legend set aside; the insurgency can be reported and the ruined granaries counted and rebuilt. Through all of it the wall itself stands as it has stood, 500 meters of worked sandstone with the Tellem dead in its high pockets and the Dogon at its foot, tending the shrines and roofing the houses of words, on a cliff that has never once, in more than two thousand years, been empty of people.

→ Related: Amma · Nommo · Lebe · Yurugu · Andumbulu · Sanga · Songo · Ireli · The Dogon · The Tellem · The Bambara