Niger River Project

We stop for our second night in Pays Dogon at a village called Ibi, our guide Atemelou’s hometown, if you can call it that. In fact Ibi is an agglomeration of three villages, one on the plain at the foot of the escarpment, the other two ranged precariously along its lower slopes. Our stoping place for the night is in ‘lower’ Ibi, a bleak, exposed place.

During the night our peaceful repose is a broken by a strong wind sweeping in from the plain, bringing with it clouds of dust and sand that whip across the rooftop where we’re sleeping. After a night of little rest, we awake to a washed out world. The sun is rising, but it is only visible as a flat, white disc behind the veil of dust that has been kicked up into the sky. This is the first sign that the Harmattan is on its way, the great seasonal wind that every December to February sweeps south from the Sahara, coating much of West Africa in a fine patina of dust.

The drab morning is pierced by what sounds like gunshots coming from the direction of the escarpment. In fact, this is exactly what they are. Today, the 30 December, is Tabaski, a major annual Muslim festival commemorating Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac.

Tabaski is one of Islam’s most important festivals, and in Mali, as in other Muslim countries it’s marked with a two-day feast, the centrepiece of which is freshly slaughtered sheep or goat. Over about the two or three weeks prior to the festival, it had been obvious Tabaski was coming up, as everywhere we travelled there seemed to be as many live goats and sheep as passengers on public buses; there are no cattle trucks in West Africa.

The gunshots herald the beginning of the day’s festivities. The weapons in question are very ancient and elaborate-looking ornamental rifles that as far as I can tell are home-made. They’re muzzle-loaded with a charge of crude gunpowder – also apparently homemade judging by the number of rounds that fail to ignite.

Venturing outside the Auberge we encounter groups of Ibi’s young men strutting around with their firearms, discharging them at random. There’s no apparent ceremony involved in this; they simply load up, pull the trigger, there’s a click, a hiss, and then, depending on the quality of the gunpowder, an enormous bang that rolls and reverberates along the escarpment with a booming echo.

But it’s not just the young men and their guns that are out. All the villagers have congregated at the foot of the escarpment for the occasion, which begins with prayers. After this, they all mill around, talking, laughing, greeting one another in the sing-song, Dogon tongue that sounds more like chanting than speech. It’s a vivid scene, the colourful dress of the villagers in their best attire bright splashes of primary against the dun-coloured canvas of rock, sand and dust.

We stop for a few days in Segou for Christmas. Segou’s a relaxed place, strung out along the banks of the Niger, once a major centre for the French colonialists’ occupation of what’s now Mali. It was also where Mungo Park first beheld the Niger and confirmed, once for all, that the river flows from west to east, not the other way around as many believed at the time.

Segou was about as far along the river as Park got on his first expedition. Approaching the river from the north bank, the opposite side of the town, Park attempted to cross, but the king of Segou was reluctant to welcome Park into the town so refused his entry. Instead he paid Park off with a handful of cowrie shells, then the currency in West Africa.

For the starving, disease-ridden Park, it was a major boon, enough to stave off death. But such was his predicament that he decided that instead of pushing on to his ultimate destination, Timbuktu, he should cut his losses and head west back to the relative safety of the coast, where European traders were based.

After resting and feasting in Segou for a few days, we head north to Mopti again. This time, though, our goal is not the river, but an area 100 or so kilometres to the east, known as Dogon Country.

The Dogon are one of Mali’s major ethnic groups, and one of its most fascinating. Their home, the Bandiagara Escarpment, is a seemingly inhospitable place, a huge cliff system that slices though a barren plane which stretches all the way to neighbouring Burkina Fasso. But somehow the Dogon manage to scratch out an existence here, living in tumbledown villages that cling to the bottom of the cliff face. Typical of Dogon villages are the characteristic conical-roofed granaries that bear a strange resemblence to witches’ hats.

Perhaps even more fascinating than Dogon architecture, though, is its culture. Although some have converted to Islam, and some even Christianity, most Dogon people are still resolutely animist, ascribing living forms to spirits they believe control the forces of the universe. Each of these spirits must be appeased, so central to Dogon culture is the concept of fetishism, whereby ritual sacrifices are made as offerings to the gods. Each village has its own holy man, known as the Hogon, who is able to converse with the spirits and so plays a key role in the fortune – or otherwise – of his village.

We gear up for a four-day trek through Dogon country. To help us and act as our guide, we have enlisted the services of Atemelou Kiodio, a local from the Dogon village of Ibi, though now studying English in Bamako.

The first leg of our journey is from the large village of Sanga, located about a kilometre from the edge of the escarpment, to Banani, a smaller settlement located at the bottom of the cliff itself. Our path crosses the plateau at the top of the escarpment, before dropping suddenly down the rock face. It’s a steep scramble, but the views along the escarpment are monumental. The sun is beginning to set, casting everything in a fiery glow. Among the huge rocks that pepper the landscape are some of the most ancient-looking and twisted baobab trees that I’ve yet seen in Mali. Beneath one of them, a group of young boys plays a frantic game of football, their scuffling kicking up clouds of dust that catch fire in the light of the setting sun.

As we descend we catch our first glimpse of the Telem architecture for which Dogon Country is also famous. The Telem were a mysterious people who lived in the area before the Dogon came along and drove them out. Somehow, they managed to achieve even greater feats of architectural alchemy than the Dogon, building homes, shrines and burial chambers into natural fissures in the cliff face, rather than at the foot of the cliff, as the Dogons have.

I ask Atemelou how the Telem managed to build in such inaccessible places. Given that Atemelou is a firm Muslim, his answer, indicates to me how strongly animist ideas are still rooted in Dogon beliefs. “Some of them used ladders, but others were in touch with spirits and used magic to fly,” he says. I might have expected a devout Muslim to scoff at any notions of magic, but he delivers this statement matter of factly, without any hint of dismissiveness. I can’t help but wonder if there’s anywhere else in the world where Islam mixes so freely with traditional animist beliefs. It makes for a fascinating blend.

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