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Long heralded as one of the planet’s most fascinating and well-preserved ancient societies, the Dogon may now be a potential victim of their own reputation. Anthony Ham descends into remote Mali and asks: “Are we’re loving them to death, or does tourism hold the key to preserving the life that remains?” Then, with surprise, I realise that my name is being called. It’s Antoine, a Dogon youth who’d drawn near the night before, eager to practice his English. By the light of a gas lantern, I’d found his demeanour to be a picture of innocence and hope. Although it’s 6am and he has before him a two-hour climb up the escarpment to school, he’s as fresh-faced and cheerful as the night before. Despite the joyful start to the day, I have my worries about this remote land. It used to be said that the average Dogon family consisted of a mother, a father, two children and a French anthropologist. Ever since the Dogon were ‘discovered’ by European travellers to Mali in the 1930s, their world has been assailed by inquisitive foreigners. Anthropologists, missionaries and a steady stream of tourists, drawn to one of Africa’s most fascinating and well-preserved ancient societies, have fostered an accumulating sense that we may be loving the Dogon to death. Anxious that I be the exception to this avalanche of good intentions, I shared my misgivings yesterday with my Dogon guide, Hamadou Ouologuem, as we climbed down the escarpment to the village of Nombori. Hamadou, a softly spoken man who now lives in the Niger River port of Mopti, is a passionate advocate for protecting his culture’s traditions, even as he recognises the contradictions inherent in initiating travellers into the remote society’s secrets. “I see too many changes since tourists started coming. Many people don’t wear traditional clothes any more. Some even ask for money for photos and children beg for bonbons,” Hamadou had said, pausing to help me negotiate another ramshackle wooden ladder. “But if I go to a village and tell them that they should keep their traditional ways, they may say, ‘If the village is better than the city, then why do you live in the city?’ When they say that, I cannot say anything.” “Would it be better if tourists didn’t come to the Dogon Country,” I asked. “Tourism has caused many problems, it is true,” he said. “But the Dogon can never again live in blissful isolation, even if they wanted to. People will always come here, and they bring much-needed money. What matters is that they come here in the right spirit.” As the sun ignites the cliffs, Hamadou brings me the first tea of the morning and we sit in silence. Antoine, who last night whispered to me that he dreamed of one day becoming a guide like Hamadou, has receded to a tiny speck in the shadow of the escarpment. Guiding travellers through the Dogon Country is a complicated task. Despite outside influences having an effect in some respects, much of the culture continues to live in a world of taboos and totems and carefully guarded secrets. To them, everything in the natural world is invested with spiritual significance. Visiting means keeping to permissible paths and I quickly try to fall in step behind Hamadou, for fear that I might trespass as we wind through the stone trails of Nombori. Unfortunately, I seem drawn to otherwise innocuous mounds, only for Hamadou to take me by the arm, gently warning me that these are sacred sites. Whenever I point my camera at pretty mud-and-thatch structures – granary stores under the overhanging rock or storehouses of sacred masks – that seem no different from others, Hamadou lowers my camera and says quietly, “This one, no.” Like every village here, Nombori has a toguna, a sacred space consisting of eight stone pillars carved with spirits; Dogon believe that all humans derive from eight ancestors who descended from the heavens. It’s here that venerable men gather in the shade to talk and to pass judgement on the important matters of life. It’s impossible for a man to stand inside the toguna, so low is the millet-stalk roof. Hamadou tells me that the design ensures that arguments remain civil as nobody can rise up in anger. The explanation owes much more to common sense than to spiritual matters, so that I’m not sure I believe him. But I like his eminently sensible explanation, true or not. Wary and expressionless, the men – young and old – watch and wait while reclining amid the pillars, barely acknowledging our presence. When we leave, the old men resume a chant-like monologue, instructing the younger men, says Hamadou, in the traditional ways. Leaving Nombori, we pass columns of women on their way to the well. To Hamadou’s greetings, the women reply in unison “Se-o…Se-o…Se-o” (“fine…fine…fine”). Their voices rise up from the earth like a ritual incantation. Further down the village, a sinewy woman in her fifties carries two tourist-type suitcases balanced on her head, a child on her back and a bucket in each hand. She offers to carry me on top. When I decline she smiles mischievously and dances a little Dogon dance. The trail follows the broad, Sere River plain that runs along the base of the escarpment and through fields of onion and sorghum. A boy on a bullock pulls alongside, studies us for a moment, and then continues on his way, clearly with better things to do. While community here and the intricacies of its social code can conjure up images of an Africa untainted, a land where the ancient ways of life have not been lost to the call of expanding cities, an equal share of the Dogon Country’s mystique resides in the exhilarating drama of the land that they inhabit. I have trouble taking my eyes off the sheer cliffs of the Falaise de Bandiagara, an escarpment that is truly one of West Africa’s most astonishing natural sights. With the Sahara engulfing the north and the unrelenting flatlands of Burkina Faso sitting to the south, the feature seems like a crack in the carapace of the continent. It’s these soaring rock walls and a southerly sand ridge that cradle the narrow strip of land that the Dogon call home, giving it the feel of a secret kingdom. High on the cliff faces, hundreds of metres above the valley floor, are cocoon-like caves. These were the homes of the Tellem, the ‘People of the Cliffs’ who lived here in the distant past. A hunting people, they’d chase their prey across the high plateau, ultimately driving them off the cliffs. At the day’s end, hunters returned home by scaling the vertiginous walls using vines and creepers. The Dogon are so in awe of Tellem agility, Hamadou tells me, that they ascribe to them magical powers, including the ability to fly. No one knows why, when or from where the Dogon arrived in the land that now bears their name, but they probably fled here in the 13th or 14th Century, a time of great upheaval and conflict in the region. The most plausible theory is that they found in the escarpment the ideal refuge from the slave-raiding armies of the Songhaï and Mossi. After welcoming them, the Tellem simply disappeared from history in the manner of so many other African peoples. The new arrivals first occupied the homes of the Tellem, but eventually abandoned the cliff-homes and higher slopes in favour of the plains where water is plentiful and the exertions of daily life are fewer. “All of their original villages, they are nearly empty,” says Hamadou. “The life, it’s easier on the plains.” We pass village after village – Idjeli-na, Komokan, Ourou – as they fan out from the foot of the escarpment like a skirt with the Tellem caves as a belt. Tireli, where we shall sleep on the roof of the chief’s compound, is large and prosperous by local standards but is littered with rubbish, especially plastic bottles and aluminium cans, left behind by the type of tourists we love to hate. The detritus disappeared as the darkness quickly enveloped us, as it only can in a land without electricity. From far away down the hill, female voices ring out in a celebration of clapping, songs and storytelling. “When there is moonlight,” Hamadou explains, “girls like to make a circle and sing.” Silence eventually descends as the village falls softly to sleep. In the morning, drums call us to a performance of a Dama ceremony, involving a masked dance. This is the last stage of the deceased’s rite of passage into the next world. When someone dies, the body is often interred in a former Tellem house, but it’s believed that the person’s spirit lives on in the village. The Dama, which occurs at various times after death, according to different practices, ensures that the soul enters the spirit realm of the ancestors. In villages like Tireli, which is now predominantly Muslim, true Dama rituals are performed more rarely and this morning’s dance is held at the behest of paying tourists. I am uncomfortable with the idea, but I’ve been assured that without such shows, the tradition could die out altogether. It may be tradition-lite, but it is tradition nonetheless. In an open square high in the village, expert drummers clad in indigo cloth beat out mesmerising rhythms while dancers circle with mock menace, their faces hidden by animal masks such as the kanaga (a bird-like mask that protects against vengeance) or the house-like sirige. Some are on stilts, while others stir up the dust with their quick, agile steps. They dip, sway and bob, one by one, then all together, then in carefully assigned pairs, bidding the deceased to enter the masks and leave the earthly world behind. The elders watch from the perimeter, perhaps hoping that the young boys who watch from a distance will learn and one day become the custodians of the masks. There is an ancient magic at work here, a sense that I am at once a privileged witness and a trespasser on sacred terrain I shall never understand. I steal a glance at Hamadou. His face is radiant. Thinking of him, of Antoine and of the young men sitting under a toguna, I dare to hope that herein lies the future of the Dogon world. As Hamadou speaks, I can see, high above the village, the trail that weaves up through the escarpment and into an altogether more clamorous world. Tomorrow we shall take that path and leave behind the wonder at large in this fragile, beautiful place. A line of people inches down the hill. From afar, I cannot yet know whether they are those who would carry discord down the mountain or children like Antoine returning from school, filled with all that is good about the Dogon world. |
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