The Dogon live on a 200 kilometre long plateau that is about 300 metres high, on average. They lived in the caves on the falaise, or cliff, in the past but now that there are no more marauding attackers, they live and farm on the vast plateau itself and on the plain below that expends as far as the eye can see down to and beyond the border with Burkina Faso; about 4000 sq. km. in all. The original inhabitants of this breathtakingly beautiful area were the Tellem, pygmy troglodytes who settled here about 10,00o years ago. They moved south eventually, though it is unclear why. The Dogon arrived before they left but seemed to live peaceably enough with the Tellem, farming the land on the plain and later moving into the Tellem dwellings on the cliff. Tribal warfare existed until the French came and calmed things down bringing peaceful coexistence to the area. The Dogon are essentially animists. Some have embraced Islam and Christianity but they hold on to many of their former customs, rituals and beliefs for the most part. There are many (disturbing) stories of snakes and twins and sacrifice, creation, circumcision and excision.
People come to this area for the spectacular scenery, the history, the fascination with animist practice and beliefs, to see the wooden sculptures, the architecture of the Dogon dwellings and the mask dances. It is the architecture that is immediately charming and appealing, particularly the granaries. These are a feature of the Malian landscape that have their origin here with the Tellem and the Dogon. They are storage houses made of mud and rice that have what might look like witch hat, pointy thatched roofs. They have one small wooden door and inside is kept grain, jewels and anything of value. Each husband and each wife has a granary. I have hundreds of pictures of granaries.
What is of most interest to me is how these hardy, beautiful people live: they are farmers and have nothing but a sort of inverted shovel, maybe a zebu, a horse or a donkey and old fashioned metal plough or tiller. Whole families, including little children, work their green and fertile fields every day morning to night during this, the rainy season. They have four months to work the land and stock up for the windy, dry winter months and the hot spring months. This is subsistence farming, although each village has a market on one of the five Dogon days of the week. Days are known as Sangha market day or Tirili market day. There are 10 months of the year. The soil on the plateau clearly gets easily eroded in the rains. USAID and other groups have helped the Dogon by providing bricks, made locally, to make squares that can be filled with topsoil, to then be filled with millet and onions, mostly.
The life is so appealing to one who hunkers after the pastoral idyll and getting back to the earth, but it is clearly a hard life. There is a no-nonsense and yet gracious stoicism here that you cannot but admire. I bought a bag of kola nuts in Mopti to fortify the peasants as we hiked through their villages. Apparently the kola nuts might be addictive but do give strength. They taste quite bitter; you spit them out and then get a sugar rush especially with some water. It is said that they are the original secret ingredient in Coca Cola.
We met an elder of one of the villages who took us on a tour. We respectfully did not go where we were not allowed to go: burial grounds, the Hogon, or chief’s house and other ritual places. The Hogon is always the elder of the village. Once Hogon, he may not wash although Lebe, the snake, may clean him. He may not have a woman with him at night. It is an unpopular role…we saw that there was one men’s meetinghouse per village. These are designed with nine poles holding up a flat, thatched roof that might by three or four feet thick. The height of the structures are maybe four feet tall, max, so that the men will not stand or fight during a meeting. We also saw that each village has a menstruation house where women were sent for five days a month while they were “impure”. We saw jujus and animal skins and bones and skulls and paintings of spirits and legendary figures on doors and walls. In Mali, you must ask and often pay a little something to take someone’s photo. I have done this a lot but have also taken many beautiful discreet photos at a distance with my telephoto lens.
The first night we arrived we saw our first rain. Lasted maybe an hour but filled the land with lakes of water, which rushed and gushed everywhere. It made walking the only way to get from village to village so we hiked a lot. This was hot, sweaty work some days but was cool and fresh on our first day after the rain. Some places we waded up to our thighs in water through streams and rice fields, slipping and sliding in the squelching mud below, (and hoping that there were no snakes in the rice fields as per our experiences in China, the Philippines and Thailand…) We hiked in total silence apart from bird sound and tilling, or women pounding millet with huge pestles and mortars; a daily chore for these women who never seem to stop working all day. Agricultural machinery and mass production bring with them the Food, Inc. horrors. There must be a middle way that preserves the farmers’ lifestyle and values, without destroying it. A few, more well off villages had generators with basic grinding machines, still run by the women of course. We’d meet villagers and go through the long greeting ritual and move on past baobabs, tamarind trees, the fromager, or kapok trees, karite, or shea butter trees, enormous fig trees, palms, acacia, mahogany, bean trees…past fields of every vegetable. We’d stop at a village and have a lunch of pasta and onion sauce, just delicious. Locals might eat their ground millet ground to a paste in their communal plate, with a bright green dipping sauce in the center; this latter was baobab leaves that had been dried on the roofs of the houses and then ground and cooked.
I’ve backpacked and stayed with ethnic groups or tribes in Thailand, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka and Leh in Ladakh. But what happened in the Dogon village of Ireli almost blew these experiences away: a mask dance!
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