Songo

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Eight kilometers or so northwest of Bandiagara, where the road climbing up from Sévaré and Mopti first reaches the sandstone, the cliff bends into an overhang, and the overhang is covered in figures. They are small — many no larger than a spread hand — and they crowd the rock in red and white: masks with tall crests, antelopes, lizards, standing human shapes, and rows of signs whose grammar is not obvious to a stranger. A good number of them were put there by boys. In the season after a circumcision, the newly cut youths of Songo climb to the shelter and lay their own marks beside the ones already there, mixing pigment from the earth and setting it on next to the work of the generation before them. Nothing on the wall is meant to stay untouched. The images are refreshed when the rite requires it, and the whole painted vault is gone over, once in a very long while, for the ceremony the Dogon call the Sigui — the great rite of the masks that comes round about once in sixty years.

Red-and-white figures in the painted circumcision shelter above Songo, on the Bandiagara plateau. BluesyPete, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The village at the first cliff

Songo — the name is also written Songho — is a Dogon village on the sandstone plateau of the Bandiagara cercle, in the Mopti region of central Mali. It sits about eight to eleven kilometers northwest of the town of Bandiagara, on the road that climbs from Sévaré and Mopti onto the highlands, and for most travelers coming that way it is the first substantial Dogon settlement they reach. That has made it, for a long time, a threshold village: the place where the plateau and its people begin. The surrounding country is the same great sandstone escarpment that UNESCO inscribed in 1989 as the Cliff of Bandiagara (Land of the Dogons), a mixed cultural-and-natural property of some 400,000 hectares taking in around 289 villages, of which Songo is one. The heart of that heritage landscape is the great cliff itself — the escarpment proper, a chain of cliffs running roughly 150 kilometers and rising as much as 500 meters above the sandy Séno-Gondo plains. Songo lies up on the plateau at its western approaches, among outlying rocks rather than beneath the sheer face, but it belongs wholly to the world of that wall and its people.

Like its neighbors, Songo is a village of the Dogon, who in the account they tell of themselves and that the scholarship broadly follows came to this country from the Mande lands to the southwest, near the upper Niger, and spread north and east along the plateau and the cliff. The migration is conventionally placed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — the Dogon are said to have reached the Sanga region by about the fifteenth — and they settled a landscape that older peoples had already worked: the Tellem, the medieval cliff-dwellers who lodged their granaries and their dead high in the rock face, and before them the Toloy, whose coiled-clay granaries near Sangha have been dated to roughly the third and second centuries before the common era. That deep stratigraphy belongs properly to the escarpment as a whole. What sets Songo apart within it is a single feature: the painted rock-shelter above the houses, a cliff overhang and vaulted recess whose surface is worked over with red-and-white figures of masks, animals, plants, human forms, and abstract signs. The village is known for one other craft besides — its cotton weaving, a trade of loom and thread that the Dogon do not hold to be separate from the matter of the wall, since in their thinking the woven cloth and the spoken word are versions of one another, both of them speech laid down in order.

The rock-shelter reaches the record from two directions at once, and they should be kept apart. On one side stands the living practice: Songo is, in the plain present tense, a regional site of male circumcision and initiation, and the shelter is the ground where that rite is carried out and the surface on which its meanings are written. On the other side stands the interpretation — the dense reading of what the masks and the signs and the two great paintings on the vault are held to mean, most of which comes into the wider world through French ethnography rather than from the wall itself. The first is the ground the entry stands on. The second is a famous, and contested, reconstruction, and it is treated below where the shelter’s reception is.

The wall as a ledger

Inside the Dogon frame the escarpment world is not raw scenery but a made thing, the work of Amma the one creator, and it is held together against disorder by the Nommo — the ordered water-spirits, the primordial twins who came down bringing the word and the grain and the arts of living — and threatened by Yurugu, the pale fox torn too early from the creation, who loosed imbalance into a world that was meant to be paired and whole. The Songo shelter is one of the places where that cosmos is carried onto stone. Its images are not ornament. They are a record, read by the initiated at successive depths, and the same figure that a child sees as an antelope or a mask an elder may read as a clause in a much longer sentence about how the world was ordered.

Two paintings on the overhanging vault are singled out in the documentary record above all the rest. The Smithsonian’s Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, whose photographs of the great vault at Songo were made in 1972, name them in the reported Dogon phrasing. The first is a red-and-white figure called the trace of the sacrificed Nommo’s blood — given as nommo semi illi bummo — and the second, nearby, is named the drawing of the stopping place of the resurrected Nommo, nommo bulo inu toy. The pairing is not incidental. It ties the local wall to the widest reach of the cosmology: the story in which one of the Nommo is put to death and rises again, and the world is set in order through blood, water, and speech. On the Songo vault that story is not narrated but marked — a stain of red and white where the blood is said to have fallen, and a sign for the place where the risen spirit came to rest.

Ranged around and beneath those two figures are the masks. The Dogon mask tradition is carried by the society of the masks — the awa — and its forms are famous: the tall vertical sirige, a mask so long it can only be worn by, or danced for, men who were alive at a Sigui; the kanaga, with its double-barred cross of arms raised and lowered; the animal and antelope crests. The Dogon hold that the masks and their secret language came first from the Andumbulu, the little spirits of the bush. On the shelter wall the masks appear as painted signs rather than carved and fibered objects, part of the same ledger as the animals and the abstract marks. The record notes, too, that one of the paintings among the circumcision figures is understood to stand for the entire cycle of the Sigui — the whole sixty-year turn compressed into a single image on the rock.

Circumcision is the hinge on which the wall turns. Among the Dogon the boys are cut in age-sets, in groups formed across a span of about three years, and Songo is one of the places to which the surrounding country brings them. After the operation the newly circumcised are secluded to heal, kept apart for a period the record gives as about a month, during which they are marked out from ordinary life; and it is in that interval that they take up pigment and add their own figures to the shelter. Each set writes itself into the cliff. The old paintings are the work of the men who came before; the fresh ones are the work of those just made men; and because the surface is refreshed rather than preserved, the wall is always both very old and very new. Comparison of photographs of the Songo paintings taken across more than a century shows exactly this — new images appearing, and older ones gone over again — a surface that is continuously rewritten rather than a fixed monument.

Figures of masks, animals, and geometric signs in the circumcision shelter above Songo; the newly circumcised add their own images to the wall, and the whole vault is refreshed for the Sigui. BluesyPete, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The largest renewal is reserved for the Sigui. This is the central ceremony of the Dogon mask-cult, held only about once in sixty years and celebrated not on a single day but as a slow wave that passes from village to village along the whole length of the country, taking some seven years to run its course. The Dogon tie it to the origin of death and of speech, and to the great serpent-ancestor whose carved image, the sigi so, is renewed at each cycle; its own restricted language, learned by the men of the mask-society, carries the same name. The most recent full cycle ran through the villages across the years around 1967 to 1973, and by the reckoning that follows it the next is expected to begin near 2027. For Songo the Sigui is the occasion on which the painted vault is gone over completely, the figures of the masks and the two Nommo paintings alike brought back to strength in red and white. All of this — the rite, the seclusion, the masks, the repainting — can be named and set down from the public record, and it is set down here at that distance. It is described, not instructed; the Dogon hold the working detail of their initiations closely, and the shelter’s meanings open only to those the tradition admits to them.

How the painted wall reached the world

Songo entered the wider record as one of the emblematic sights of Dogon country, and it did so first as an image. In January 1972 the American photographer Eliot Elisofon, on assignment across Africa, climbed to the shelter and made a series of color photographs of the great vault; those images passed into the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, and it is from their catalog that the names of the two Nommo paintings are most readily read today. Elisofon was one photographer among many. The Songo shelter is among the most-photographed of all Dogon rock-art sites, reproduced in museum archives and travel accounts alike, and after the 1989 World Heritage inscription it became a fixed early stop on the trekking circuit that ran up onto the plateau and down the escarpment — the first cliff, the first paintings, the first village most visitors saw.

That visual fame is inseparable from a body of interpretation, and here the ground shifts from what can be photographed to what has been claimed. Beginning with the Dakar-Djibouti mission of 1931 to 1933, the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule made the Dogon the most intensively described people of West Africa, and out of decades of return-work based near Sanga came the readings that gave images like those at Songo their reputation for hidden depth — Griaule’s record of long conversations with the blind elder Ogotemmeli, published in 1948, and the vast synthesis he built with Germaine Dieterlen, Le Renard pâle, which appeared in 1965. It is from that school, far more than from the wall itself, that the wider world learned to read the masks and signs as a coded cosmology to be construed at levels of ever-deeper meaning. But the synthesis is not the tradition, and it is now read with caution. When the anthropologist Walter van Beek set out among the Dogon in the 1980s to find the elaborate system Griaule had recorded, he reported in his 1991 restudy, Dogon Restudied (Current Anthropology 32:2, pp. 139–167), that ordinary Dogon did not recognize much of it, even as faded memory — raising the real possibility that the famous architecture was in significant part co-authored — the coded reading of signs like Songo’s own owing as much to a scholar bent on system as to the few elders who answered him. Griaule’s defenders answer that van Beek was simply never admitted to a guarded initiatory knowledge. The dispute is genuine, and it is argued at length where the Dogon themselves and their creator Amma are described; the point for Songo is narrower. The deep esoteric readings of the shelter’s figures should be marked as the contested reconstruction of the Griaule school, not passed off as the plain speech of the wall — while the rite, the names, and the living devotion belong to the Dogon and are theirs.

The most notorious offshoot of that school touches a star. From a 1950 paper of Griaule and Dieterlen, Robert Temple built the argument of his 1976 book The Sirius Mystery, that the Dogon preserved an ancient and otherwise impossible knowledge of Sirius B, the invisible companion of the Dog Star. The claim is widely doubted, and van Beek’s fieldwork gives the plainest reason to doubt it: the Dogon he asked who spoke of the companion star agreed that they had heard of it from Europeans. It belongs in the record as a problem in the history of ethnography, not as a lost astronomy, and it is dealt with fully elsewhere in this account of the people; it need only be named at Songo, and set aside.

Through all of this the Dogon remain a living people and their religion a living tradition, practiced now alongside the Islam and the Christianity that have also long been at home on the plateau. The last decade has been hard on the country that surrounds the shelter. Since 2012 the collapse of state authority across central Mali has spread a jihadist insurgency through the region and, with it, a grinding cycle of intercommunal violence between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders — the massacre at Ogossagou, near Bandiagara, in March 2019 among its worst single days. The trekking economy that had once brought visitors to Songo’s cliff ended almost overnight, and the wider suffering of the region is a subject in its own right, handled soberly where the people are described and not to be sensationalized here. What can be said of the shelter is only this. It is not a ruin and not a relic. It is a working surface in a living village, gone over in red and white by each set of boys the country still sends up to be made men, and kept for the ceremony that, by the tradition’s own long clock, is due again within a generation.

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