The real show in Mali is not Timbuktu, or Djenne, but Dogon country, a
cluster of villages preserving ultratraditional rituals and belief
systems that somehow defy all attempts to integrate into mainstream
African culture or for that matter, into commercial tourist
culture. They are Dogons and proud of it. In this picture
we see the site of the ritual Dogon circumcision festival which takes
place every three years in the village of Songho. Thousand year
old musical instruments are brought out to play only for this
event. The ritual paintings symbolizing the village history and
their four founder families are repainted by all the villagers, in the
exact same pattern, at the moment of the festival. Boys aged 4 to
8 get their foreskins hacked off by the ritual knife
on the first stone. They are forbidden from crying, upon threat
of
unleashing a poisonous snake on them. The wounded boys, dressed
in distinctive white gowns, must recover for weeks in a rock shelter on
the same rocky plateau. Their healing is celebrated by a footrace
from the big tree back to this ritual site. The first place boy
wins a swath of land. The second is promised the prettiest girl
in the village. The third wins 3 cows, two of which must be
sacrificed for the village feast. The last place boy brings such
shame to his family that he will be disowned in adulthood and will have
to find his future in another village. No boy ever forgets their
placing in the race, for as long as he lives.
The Dogon gateway town of Bandiagara has its own twice weekly market,
and its own cast of inimitable characters.
Lovely old baobabs and other trees occasionally dot the arid landscapes
of Dogon country.
Banani, a typical Dogon village with straw-roofed granaries situated on
the lowest slope of the Bandiagara cliff. The most traditional,
and visited, Dogon villages are lined up at the base of the cliff or
partway up.
Dogon buildings from this one for the village wise man, who must live
here isolated for life after being chosen for this honour by his
village, have supplanted some earlier buildings and cliff dwellings
left by the Tellem people. Dogons migrated from further west in
Mali and drove the Tellem completely out of the region.
Every neighbourhood of every Dogon village has a Toguna, a place of
gathering for local elders and the meeting place for settling
disputes. All parties involved crawl under the stacked straw
roof, and have only enough room to sit down face to face. The
idea is that anybody who tries to rise up in anger will quickly hit
their head on the low ceiling.
There's nothing as mind blowing in Mali as a Dogon funeral, and we were
extremely lucky to learn of one here in Banani after stumbling into
town. A French couple on their 3rd visit to Dogon country clued
us in there, and we decided to wait the day out in order to attend the
funeral in the late afternoon. And what a show it was. A
ringleader brings the clothing and deathshroud of the deceased woman on
to the ritual stage, and proceeds to participate in a mock spear duel
with another man representing evil forces. Each special ritual
role is unique to one person within a Dogon village and educated
secretly from father to son. The the musketeers prance onto
the stage in a bizarre dance step, the right leg stepping in a
different rhythm from the left leg. In succession, they fire off
their Dogon made muskets into the air, or sometimes right into the
audience, in order to scare the evil spirits away. The drumming
is accompanied by synchronized whoops from the women's section and the
audience is often pushed around to make way for new formations.
At sundown, eardrums numb from the gunshots, the crowd disperses and
filters back into town, where the all night dancing continues,
accompanied by locally made millet beer that the old ladies offered to
villagers and tourists alike
Jesse Buck, an Australian I was travelling with at the time, captured
some video clips of the funeral on his digital camera and spliced
together some excerpts which you can see here on this YouTube video:
