Iréli

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At the foot of the wall the granaries come first. Squat towers of dried earth, each finished with a pointed cap of thatch, they crowd the tumble of fallen boulders at the base of the cliff so thickly that from a little way off the village reads as a field of cones the color of the rock they lean against. A person standing among them, at eye level with the season’s millet, has only to tip his head back to find the second village. Forty and more stories up, wedged into a sheer face where no ladder now reaches, small blind cells of mud cling to the ledges and the cracks — granaries and sealed tombs, open-mouthed and weathered by six or seven centuries of wind. They hang in the stone above the living where they have clung since before the present village had a name. This is Iréli, and it is really two settlements stacked in one wall: the Dogon at the bottom, tending millet and burying their own; and above them, older by centuries, the dead of a people who were gone before the Dogon came.

Tellem cells and burial-caves lodged high in the Falaise de Bandiagara, above a Dogon settlement built on the slope beneath — the characteristic double occupation of the cliff, photographed around 1970. Collectie Wereldmuseum (Tropenmuseum), part of the National Museum of World Cultures, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Where the plain runs up against the wall

Iréli lies at the very foot of the Bandiagara Escarpment, at the line where the long sandstone cliff of central Mali drops the last five hundred meters to the sandy Séno plain. The great wall runs level along the horizon for some hundred and fifty kilometers, a clean step between the plateau spread out above and the flats reaching south below, and Iréli is built where that step touches the ground. Administratively the village belongs to the Sangha arrondissement of the Bandiagara Region, in the old Mopti country of central Mali; its coordinates, as the French record gives them, fall at about 14°25′44″ north and 3°18′44″ west. The living settlement stretches roughly a kilometer along the base of the cliff and is split down the middle by a steep-walled gorge that can be crossed only on foot, so that the two halves of the village face each other across a cleft in the rock.

Directly above it, on the plateau rim, sits Sanga — the cluster of hamlets, Ogol chief among them, where the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule did most of his celebrated fieldwork, and whose name has become a shorthand for the whole modern picture of the Dogon world. Iréli lies about thirteen kilometers south of the Sangha seat by a winding road that drops off the plateau to the cliff base; a little farther along the same wall, to the south-southwest, stands the neighboring cliff-village of Tireli, so that Iréli is strung between the two. In 2023 the older, sprawling Sangha commune was divided, and a new commune of Iréli was carved out of it, gathering thirty-four localities under the seat at Iréli Dama — itself a modest place of some two hundred and fifty people at the last count, dwarfed by the larger villages of the new commune such as Tireli and Sono. The administrative line is recent; the settlement is not.

What makes Iréli more than one cliff-village among many is the vertical archive above its roofs. The mud cells in the high face are the work of the Tellem, the people the Dogon remember simply as those who came before — the cliff’s builders before the Dogon inherited it. Archaeology places the Tellem on the escarpment by about the eleventh century and through the sixteenth, true cliff-dwellers who set their granaries and small houses high in the rock and buried their dead in the dry caves far above the flash floods that scour the base of the wall after the rains. The desiccating air of the high cliff did what almost no African climate does: it kept cloth. Between 1964 and 1974 a multidisciplinary Dutch team worked those burial caves systematically, and out of them came some five hundred textiles of cotton and wool spanning the eleventh to the sixteenth century — among the earliest surviving fabrics known from the whole West African interior, ordinarily a region where cloth rots to nothing within a season. The great catalog of that find, Rita Bolland’s Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff, assembled with the archaeologist Rogier M. A. Bedaux, turned the vanished cliff-people of Iréli’s overhang into one of the best-documented medieval populations of the region. The Tellem themselves thinned out and were gone — driven off, absorbed, or simply overtaken — leaving their granaries and graves lodged permanently in the rock.

Into the space beneath them came the Dogon. Their own tradition, which the heritage documentation follows, holds that they reached the cliffs in the fourteenth century, arriving from the Mande country to the southwest near the village of Kani-Bonzon and spreading from there across the plateau, the escarpment, and the plain. They did not clear the old cells out. At Iréli, as along the whole wall, the Dogon built their flat-roofed houses and their granaries at the foot of the cliff and left the Tellem lodged overhead — so that the ordinary business of the living village goes on in the literal shadow of tombs older than any name its people carry.

The Mande country the Dogon remember leaving is the same broad West African world that produced their neighbors the Bambara and the medieval empires of the Niger bend, and the move to the cliffs is usually read as a retreat into defensible rock — the escarpment a fortress as much as a homeland, its high ledges and its single gorge at Iréli as good for keeping strangers out as the Tellem had once found them. Whatever drove the migration, the result at Iréli is a settlement pinned between two barriers it did not make: the plain at its back and the wall at its face, with the split gorge running up through the middle of the village and dividing it into two halves that must meet on foot.

The doubly inhabited earth

Inside the Dogon world Iréli is not a picturesque ruin, and the face of the cliff is not scenery. It is a worked and legible geography in which the earth is doubly inhabited: the living below and the ancestral dead of an older people above, with the sheer rock between them carrying its own weight of meaning. The heights are proper to burial and to the spirits. The Tellem caves overhead, whose builders the Dogon regard as the cliff’s first knowledgeable inhabitants, are ancestral ground, not to be casually disturbed; and Dogon memory peoples exactly this kind of terrain with small primordial cliff-beings, the Andumbulu, the little spirits of the bush who, in the tradition, first knew the masks and gave them and their secret language to the Dogon. To stand at the base of the Iréli face is to stand beneath a stack of the dead and the numinous, the human predecessors and the bush-spirits both belonging to the rock above.

The granaries clustered at the foot of the wall are, in the same symbolic language, a good deal more than storehouses. In the Dogon reading a granary is a dense image of the ordered world — its compartments and its conical cap, its male and female forms answering to the divisions of creation, the seed and the harvest and the reckoning of the year all folded into a single built object. A village read closely is a diagram of the cosmos, and the people who live in it read it that way. Behind that ordered world stand the powers of the Dogon religion — Amma the remote creator who folded the germ of the world into the smallest cultivated seed, the ordered water-twins the Nommo who came down in an ark with the word and the grain, the earth-serpent ancestor Lebe beneath the Hogon, and the pale fox Yurugu whose loosed disorder the divination still reads — set out in full where the Dogon and their creator themselves are described. What Iréli makes visible as almost no other village does is a doubly inhabited cliff: the living Dogon at the wall’s foot, and above them the sealed burial-caves of the Tellem dead — the same high rock that some Dogon traditions give to the Andumbulu, the small beings said to have held the escarpment before the people came. To stand at the base and look up is to read the living and the ancestral at a single glance.

Iréli lies within the ritual reach of Sanga, which is a recognized center of this living devotion, and along the stretch of cliff that the great ceremonies pass through. When a person of weight dies, the awa — the society of the masks — dances the funeral, the carved and fibered masks moving through the village and out along the terraces to settle the dead and 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 travels in slow procession from village to village down the whole length of the escarpment, renewing across a full generation the covenant between the living and the dead; its last complete cycle ran through the cliff villages across the years around 1967 to 1973, and the next lies still decades off. A short way inland at 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 outside; they are not set down here as instructions, and the Dogon keep their working detail close. The point is only that Iréli is a working piece of a living sacred landscape — 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 on display but a tradition tended by people who farm the same terraces their forebears cleared.

Dogon dwellings and a granary set hard against the steep rock face of the Bandiagara Escarpment, around 1970. Collectie Wereldmuseum (Tropenmuseum), part of the National Museum of World Cultures, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The famous view and the argument beneath it

To the outside world Iréli is, above all, a photograph. The image of Dogon granaries crowding the base of the wall with Tellem caves suspended in the rock above is one of the signature pictures of Mali, and the village is a keystone of the UNESCO World Heritage property Cliff of Bandiagara (Land of the Dogons), inscribed in 1989 as one of the relatively few sites listed as mixed — cultural and natural at once. The listing honors not a monument but a whole inhabited terrain, and the tiered village at Iréli, where the double occupation of the cliff is at its most vertiginous, is one of the places the terrain is most often seen through.

But a village at the foot of Sanga cannot be only a view, because Sanga is where the modern idea of Dogon religion was made, and Iréli sits directly beneath the workshop. Beginning in 1931 Griaule led a long series of expeditions to the plateau above, and out of them came the two books that fixed the Dogon in 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 reported a Dogon esotericism of astonishing depth — an egg-born cosmos, a numbered creation, a sacrificed and risen water-spirit — and for a generation that account supplied nearly everything the wider world thought it knew about the people whose granaries stand at the bottom of the Iréli wall.

That account is now read with care. The Dutch anthropologist Walter E. A. van Beek, who lived and worked in this same cliff country 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, and that he could not reproduce it. He read the famous cosmology as, in large part, an over-systematized co-construction — built up in the long give-and-take between a determined investigator, a handful of exceptional elders, and a courtesy that inclined informants to agree with a commanding guest. Griaule’s defenders answered that van Beek had simply not been admitted to a guarded, deep initiatory knowledge. The quarrel is genuine and unsettled, and it is argued at length where the Dogon themselves are treated; for Iréli the thing to hold onto is only that the celebrated depth of the cliff’s cosmology is the celebrated, contested reconstruction of the Griaule school, and should be named as such rather than repeated as plain fact. Its most sensational offshoot makes the case. In The Sirius Mystery of 1976 the writer Robert Temple built on an earlier Griaule-Dieterlen paper to claim 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 — the reported astronomy too confused to bear the weight, and most plausibly a feedback from Europeans, Griaule perhaps among them, folded back into the fieldwork — and it belongs in the record as a piece of pop-culture legend and a problem in the history of the discipline, never as a lost science.

Against all of that stands the harder evidence overhead. The Tellem caves and their medieval textiles, the Dutch excavations of 1964 to 1974, the eleventh- to sixteenth-century cloth — this is material, dated, and not in serious dispute, and it sits in the same rock as the contested metaphysics, a few hundred feet higher. The two kinds of knowledge share a wall: the argued-over cosmology below and the excavated, radiocarbon-anchored past above.

The living present of the place is somber. Since about 2012, when the collapse of the Malian state’s authority in the north spread a jihadist insurgency across the center of the country, the Bandiagara region has been gravely afflicted — and with the insurgency came a grinding cycle of intercommunal violence between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders that has cost thousands of lives, the killing of some one hundred and sixty Fulani villagers at Ogossagou in March 2019 among its worst single days. The trekking that had run along the escarpment for a generation, and that had made lodging and guiding one of the mainstays of the cliff economy, ended almost overnight. The fuller account of that violence belongs with the Dogon people as a whole; noted here it is only the recent condition of a still-inhabited place, held soberly and without a verdict. The trekkers are gone from the terraces now, and the guides with them. What is left is the oldest arrangement the site has ever kept: the granaries filling and emptying with each year’s millet at the foot of the wall, and above them, unreachable and undisturbed, the small mud rooms where an older people laid their dead — the two Irélis holding their stations in the rock, the lower one counting the seasons and the upper one long past counting anything at all.

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