The Dogon

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The wall runs for some hundred and fifty kilometers, ochre sandstone lifting about five hundred meters sheer above the sand, and the villages are built into it. Not on the open plain, and not on the flat plateau above, but wedged into the broken talus at the foot of the cliff: houses of mud brick with terraced roofs, and among them the granaries, each capped in a cone of thatch, packed so tightly that the lanes between them climb like stairs. Higher up the rock face, past where a person can easily go, small mud cells cling to the ledges — older than the houses below, the work of other hands. Behind the village, on the sandy shelf of the plateau, millet ripens in the short rains. And near the middle of the settlement, where the men sit in the heat of the day, there is a shelter with a roof so low that no one beneath it can rise to his feet.

This is the country of the Dogon, along the Bandiagara escarpment in central Mali, south of the great bend of the Niger. They are farmers of the cliff and the plateau, and they number on the order of several hundred thousand — estimates run from about four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand — with the greater part on and around the escarpment and some communities across the border in Burkina Faso. Their religion is one of the most closely studied in Africa and one of the most argued over, and both of those facts turn on a single stretch of rock and the people who chose to live against it.

A toguna, the men’s shelter at the heart of a Dogon village, at Kani-Kombole. Its roof of stacked millet stalks is deliberately built too low to stand under, so that a heated dispute cannot rise into a fight. upyernoz from Haverford, USA, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Out of the Mande country

By their own account the Dogon are newcomers to the cliff, and they came from the southwest. Their oral tradition traces the migration back to the Mande country near the upper Niger — the heartland of the old Mali empire — and tells of a movement in waves, over generations, that brought them across the plateau to the Bandiagara escarpment and the Sanga region by about the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The reason the tradition gives is a plain one: they came to keep their own religion rather than take Islam, and the sheer wall of the escarpment, with its ledges and its narrow approaches, was ground a small people could defend. The place was a refuge before it was a homeland.

They were not the first to find it so. The ledges above the villages belong to the Tellem, the people the Dogon found already there — the name is glossed in the Dogon tongue as we found them, or more broadly as those who came before. The Tellem inhabited the escarpment from roughly the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, and they left the small cells high in the rock: granaries, dwellings, and above all burial caves, set where the cliff is hardest to reach and where the dry air has kept bone and cloth and wood for centuries. When the Dogon arrived the Tellem withdrew, southward toward the plains of Mali and Burkina Faso, and the newcomers took over what they left — the high granaries reused, the burial caves kept as places of the dead. The archaeologist Rogier Bedaux, who excavated the caves, was able to separate the two peoples by their things: certain objects, carved wooden headrests among them, turn up in Tellem burials but not in later Dogon ones, so that the layers of the cliff can be read as a sequence and not a single culture. The fuller archaeology of that stacked rock belongs to the escarpment itself and to the Tellem; what matters here is that the Dogon came late to an inhabited cliff, and knew it, and built their own history on top of an older one they never claimed as their own.

The languages carry the same message of depth and layering. Dogon speech forms an independent branch of the great Niger-Congo family — not a dialect of anything nearby but a stock of its own, splintered into at least a dozen dialects and many more sub-forms, some of them barely mutual. And in seven villages toward the south some fifteen hundred people speak Bangime, a tongue that the linguists cannot fit into Dogon or into any other family: an apparent isolate, an island of speech older, it seems, than the Dogon arrival, and a hint that the peopling of this plateau was longer and more tangled than any one migration. Whatever the Dogon found on the cliff, they found people already speaking there.

The wider world, though, met the Dogon less through their own migration story than through a French ethnographer’s notebooks. Beginning in 1931 the anthropologist Marcel Griaule led a long series of expeditions into the Bandiagara country, returning across a quarter century; and in October 1946, at Sanga, the elders assigned a blind old man named Ogotemmêli to open the deeper teaching to him. Over thirty-three days of conversation Ogotemmêli laid out a creation and a cosmos of extraordinary reach, which Griaule published in 1948 as Dieu d’eau, Englished as Conversations with Ogotemmêli. With his collaborator Germaine Dieterlen he went on to a vaster synthesis, Le Renard pâle, the pale fox. Those books made the Dogon famous. They also make everything said below about the deep cosmology a matter of record and of dispute at once, and the two cannot be untangled — a point the reception returns to.

The palaver-house and the powers

Enter the village and the first thing to understand is the shelter with the low roof. The toguna — togu na, the great shelter — is the men’s palaver-house, and it sits near the center of every settlement. Its roof is a thick deck of stacked millet stalks, laid heavy and set low on purpose, so low that a seated man cannot stand up under it. The point is not comfort but restraint: when the elders meet there to weigh a quarrel or settle a matter of custom, a man whose temper rises cannot spring to his feet, and a dispute that cannot become a brawl stays a debate. The building is a machine for keeping the peace, and it is the readiest emblem of how the Dogon bind their social life into the things they build. Around it stand the granaries with their carved shutters, and on the houses and shrines the sculpted wooden doors and locks for which Dogon carving is prized in the museums of the world.

The living of it is farming, hard-won. The Dogon grow millet and sorghum and rice, and they are known above all for onions, raised in tiny walled plots watered by hand and traded down off the plateau — a cultivation that expanded greatly around Sanga in the twentieth century — along with tobacco and peanuts. Authority over a village rests with the Hogon, the elder who is at once spiritual head and arbiter, drawn from the oldest men of a leading lineage and hedged about with restrictions on what he may touch and where he may go. He is the human anchor of an order that the tradition understands as reaching far past the human.

That order is the work of Amma, the one creator, who in the account transmitted by Griaule and Dieterlen folded the whole of the world into the smallest seed and set it unfolding from a cosmic egg. From Amma’s making came the Nommo, the primordial water-spirits, twin and ordered, who descended in an ark bringing to humankind the rain, the granary, the crafts, and the word — the model and the source of right order in the world. Against them stands the figure of incompletion: Yurugu, the pale fox, who in the tradition tore prematurely from the egg and loosed disorder into a creation not yet finished, and who now, alone of the powers, is made to speak the future. And bound to the earth itself is Lebe, the first ancestor who became a serpent and passed into the soil, the source of its fertility and the renewer of the Hogon. Around these stand the lesser presences of the bush and the founding time — among them the Andumbulu, the small spirits from whom, the tradition holds, the Dogon first received the masks and their secret language.

That cosmos is entered by rite, and two rites reach the public record above all others. The masks belong to the awa, the society of masked men, which performs at the dama, the great funeral rites that escort the dead out of the village and restore the order a death disturbs. The Dogon carve and dance dozens of mask types: the towering Sirige, a plank many meters high that figures a many-storeyed house; the Kanaga, crowned with a double-barred cross whose arms turn up and down; the Satimbe, which honors a female ancestor. And moving above the funerals, larger and rarer, is the Sigui, the ceremony that comes only about once in sixty years and travels village to village across the escarpment over several years — a renewal that in the tradition marks the coming of death into the world and, with it, the gift of human speech. The last full cycle of the Sigui ran through the villages from about 1967 to 1973, and a new Great Mask is carved for it, and the deep knowledge handed on to a generation that will not see it come again. The specifics of the awa’s language, of the fox’s reading of the future, of what is done and said inside the Sigui, are guarded knowledge held by the initiated; they are named here and no more.

Masked dancers wearing the Kanaga, the double-barred-cross mask, at a performance in the Sanga country of the Bandiagara cliffs. Masks of the awa society dance at the dama funeral rites to escort the dead. BluesyPete, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The famous and the fought-over

The Dogon hold an outsized place in the Western picture of Africa, and the fame is double-edged, because the very richness that made them famous is the thing most in doubt. Conversations with Ogotemmêli and Le Renard pâle set before European readers an indigenous metaphysics of astonishing intricacy — a creation unfolding through seed and twin and rupture and sacrifice, a granary that models the cosmos, a numerology written into farm and body alike — and for a generation the Dogon stood as the proof that a small West African people had built a theology to rival any in the world. The trouble is that later fieldwork could not find much of it on the ground.

In 1991 the anthropologist Walter van Beek, who had lived among the Dogon across the 1980s, published in Current Anthropology a restudy titled Dogon Restudied, and its findings were deflating. Van Beek reported that ordinary Dogon did not recognize the great architecture Griaule had recorded — not Amma’s egg in its full elaboration, not the whole numbered scheme of the cosmos — and he argued that the parole claire, the clear speech Griaule believed he had been given, had grown out of an unusual and unrepeatable encounter: a small number of exceptionally gifted informants, a scholar pressing with his own insistent questions, and years of dialogue in which questioner and answer shaped each other. The system, on this reading, was less a doctrine the Dogon held than a thing built between them and Griaule in the telling. Griaule’s defenders answered at once — Dieterlen, and Griaule’s daughter Geneviève Calame-Griaule, and the anthropologist Luc de Heusch among them — that van Beek had simply not been admitted to a guarded initiatory knowledge that only certain elders hold, and that the absence he found was the absence of an outsider at the door. The honest position lies between the poles and is not tidy: a genuine, living Dogon religion exists, devout and coherent and its own; and the famous depth of it, as the world received it, is best named for what it is — a contested reconstruction of the Griaule school, to be attributed to them and read with care, not repeated as unmediated Dogon truth.

The most notorious offshoot of that fame carries the argument to its extreme. In 1976 Robert Temple published The Sirius Mystery, building on a 1950 paper of Griaule and Dieterlen to claim that the Dogon preserved ancient knowledge of Sirius B — the invisible white-dwarf companion of the bright star Sirius, undetectable to the unaided eye — and that such knowledge could only have come from contact with visitors from the sky. The claim is widely regarded as spurious, and van Beek’s fieldwork is the plainest reason: he found no general Dogon tradition of an invisible companion star at all, his informants disagreed about what the term the outsiders had latched onto even referred to, and those who did speak of such a star said, when he asked, that they had heard of it from Griaule. Griaule himself had studied astronomy in Paris and knew of Sirius B’s discovery; the economical explanation is not a starship but a feedback loop — twentieth-century star knowledge reaching the escarpment through the ethnographer and coming back out as ancient lore. The Dogon are not, on the evidence, ancient astronomers, and to make them one is to trade a real tradition for a flattering fiction.

The cliff itself, meanwhile, entered a very different kind of record. In 1989 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List as the “Cliff of Bandiagara (Land of the Dogons),” a mixed site honored for both its human landscape and its natural grandeur, under criteria (v) and (vii) — a vast property of some four hundred thousand hectares taking in around two hundred and eighty-nine villages across plateau, escarpment, and plain. The listing set the seal on the escarpment’s fame and drew trekkers along its length to villages such as the tiered cliff-town of Ireli, and near the painted rock-shelter of Songo where the Sigui leaves its mark — a tourism that brought money and strain in equal measure.

Through all of it the Dogon have remained a living people, not a museum exhibit, and their religion a living tradition. Many Dogon today are Muslim or Christian; many keep the old religion; and a great many keep the old alongside the new, so that the toguna and the mosque stand in the same village and the dama is still danced for the dead. The tradition is present tense, and so are the neighbors with whom the Dogon have long shared this country — the Fulani herders of the plains, and to the west the Mande farmers, the Bambara among them, out of whose country the Dogon once came.

That shared country has lately been badly hurt. Since 2012 an Islamist insurgency has spread across northern and central Mali, and into the vacuum of a collapsing state has come a bitter intercommunal violence between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders, each side accusing the other of siding with armed men, self-defense militias forming on both. The gravest single episode came on 23 March 2019, when gunmen described as Dogon traditional hunters attacked the Fulani village of Ogossagou, in the Mopti region, and killed on the order of a hundred and sixty people — the toll climbing over the following days as the dead were counted — burning the huts as they went. The massacre at Ogossagou drew protest across Mali and abroad; the government ordered the dissolution of the hunters’ militia held responsible, and within weeks the Prime Minister, Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga, and his entire cabinet resigned under the pressure. A second attack struck the same village in 2020. These are recent wounds, laid soberly in the record and not sensationalized, and they belong to a conflict whose blame is contested and whose end is not in sight; they are also, plainly, a chapter in the history of a people who first came to this cliff to be left alone with their own gods, and who are living, now, through a time when the cliff is no refuge.

At the foot of the escarpment the granaries are still filled after the millet harvest, and the onions still go down to market in the dry months, and in the low shade of the toguna the elders still sit where no man can stand to strike another. The great architecture of Amma and the Nommo may be, in the form the world knows it, more Griaule’s than Ogotemmêli’s — that will be argued as long as the books are read. What is not in question is the wall of ochre stone, the villages built into it, and the people who have kept their own way there, in the open and under the old ledges of the dead, for six hundred years.

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