She Says - Mali’s Magnificent Dogon Country (part 1)

19-20 October (written from notes taken while trekking – no, I didn’t carry the computer!)
Last night as it got dark, Xander was able to put the bike within the walled area of the auberge. Everyone around (where did they all come from?!) was a big help, using people power, sand ramps from the auberge’s 4WD, and a plank of wood to get the bike up the stairs. Wish I’d got photos! It happened so quickly I wasn’t prepared. Our room last night was too hot, the fan didn’t circulate very well so we didn’t sleep well. I think we’ll take the camping-on-the-roof option when we get back! We got started a bit late, got on the road at 8am, and headed for Djiguibombo, about 25km away along a decent dirt road past small fields of onions and other crops. I was happy with our guide straight away as he started telling us what we were seeing, about the small villages on the way, and that it was OK to stop if we wanted photos.

Djiguibombo was great. We stopped first to see the chief of the village, who also runs a small campement, where we had cold drinks and met several men and boys. We then had a tour of the large village. People were very friendly and willing to have their photos taken, usually in return for a few kola nuts, a caffeine-rich seed that is a desired treat and used to be found in Coca-Cola. After seeing intricately braided hair on women all over, I was able to finally take photos of one young girl – I hadn’t felt comfortable asking any other time. I asked Tiemo if I could pound millet with some women we passed, as I’ve been seeing it taking place in villages all over the country and have been really tempted to ask Xander to stop while I go try! Pounding millet was no problem with the older woman Tiemo asked for me, but he had to negotiate for photos, as we had run out of kola nuts but had more back in our bags. Tiemo had to promise to send some back ‘plus a small gift’ (I think 1000CFA), and he got a young boy to come back with us and run the errand when we were ready to leave. Pounding millet was easier than it looked, especially once you got into a rhythm. The seed heads are placed in a deep, carved wooden bowl, and a long thick stick is used to pound the seeds off the heads. The sticks are worn smooth after generations (or maybe just months!) of pounding, so no splinters to worry about. Like many of the villages we would see during our trek, there were a mix of religions including Christian and Muslim and the traditional animists. Tiemo said the local saying is each town is “30% Muslim, 30% Christian and 100% animist”, as they still hold tightly to their animist traditions, even after the influence of other religions. Making offerings or animal sacrifices is still an important way of life here. We saw the animist ginna bana, an offering area or altar with small alcoves for placing offerings, and holes at the top for birds to nest (trying to remember, I think the birds took away the ‘essence’ of the offering). When women are menstruating, they live in a separate hut, called the maison des règles, in a special part of the village, as they are considered ‘unclean’ to deal with normal duties. Another important building is the togu-na, a low roofed structure built on stone or wooden legs that the men use to discuss any problems, the theory being that no-one gets angry when they are sitting down!

After a rest, we started our actual trek. We followed the road for a while, then turned off over the rocks. We passed a small garden set up on the rocks, containing aubergine/eggplant, hibiscus, small papaya and baobab trees, chillis and calabash (like a pumpkin but used only for the hard shell to make bowls and water containers, etc). The garden was fed by water that collected into a pool on the rocks. We walked down to the edge of the escarpment, the lifeline of the Dogon people – wow, I didn’t know it was going to be like this! It’s a shame it was hazy from sand storms, but the view over the edge of the escarpment, down to the tiny village below, and across the sandy plains was stunning. Our first stop was a small stream that ran into a pool with trees all around it, like a little oasis. Then we walked up to the escarpment edge, and looked over to a larger stream and small waterfall and a bigger oasis of large trees, sweetly singing with dozens of birds and sounding for all the world like a tropical rainforest – here, at the edge of the Sahara desert! We followed the edge of the escarpment down a tiny cliff-hugging path into the forest, stopping at the beautiful pools within, before exiting onto the flat plains below the escarpment to the little village, Kani-Kombole. All through the pool area were tiny, bright red dragonflies, and I disturbed a group of bright yellow butterflies drinking from moist mud. Down here among the millet fields, it was very hot, as we had lost the cool breeze we’d had up on top of the cliff. We also found out where sesame seeds come from! I can’t say I’ve truly pondered it, but did wonder. Turns out they come from small thick pods on a little green plant.

We stopped in a small campement for what Tiemo called ‘a small shower’ (quick bucket of water over the head and arms, very refreshing!) and lunch, which was a tasty mix of spaghetti with tomato sauce and vegetables. This included the local sweet potato, which is more like a cross between the sweet orange sweet potato we know and a normal potato. After lunch came a rest period, as the heat is too much in the middle of the day for comfortable hiking. As it was already after 12pm when we arrived in camp (about an hours’ walking across around 3km), neither of us was complaining! We looked around the camp, which had carvings all over the place, examples of the famous giant masks, beautiful doors, etc. We set off again close to 4pm for a tour around the very pretty village, with its decent sized mud mosque (somehow more beautiful than Djenné’s giant version) and murky pond full of tortoises. We learned that the baobab tree is used for many things, including bark rope, leaves in sauces, and the huge pendulous fruit called monkey bread can be eaten when young and made into a maraca when dried. We also got to climb our first tree-trunk staircase, a rather tricky Y-shaped construction used to reach the roofs of buildings and best attacked sideways! We visited the chief and his tiny poky ‘shop’ of carvings, falling I love with a few large pieces we had no hope of taking away with us!

Leaving Kani-Kombole, we walked for about an hour (around 2km) across a reasonable sandy track through the tall millet fields to Teli, a gorgeous village with the old Dogon houses partway up the escarpment, and the even older Tellum houses set high above them, accessible only by ropes. I can’t describe the feeling when I saw those tiny round houses wedged into the cliff for the first time, this is what I came here for! I only know about this area from Michael Palin’s Sahara, and I love old cultures and architecture. While many of these buildings aren’t that old (Tellum only 11-12th century, Dogon in this area only moved down to the plains in the last 40 years) and have been well maintained, this is a truly traditional group of people, going about their daily lives with minimal influence from the rest of the world (yes, there were occasional TVs and radios). Depending on which story you hear, the Dogon people either gradually or forcefully pushed the Tellum people, supposedly pygmies, out of the region, and then used their houses to store the dead. Many of the old houses are now full, so the Dogon are moving around the cliff face to use other houses for storage. No-one’s really sure how the Tellum got up to their houses, but the Dogon have been using rope made out of baobab tree bark.

We spent the night in a lovely little campement, and were treated to music played by one of the staff on a 2-stringed banjo-like instrument, before enjoying a tasty dinner of chicken in a red sauce and couscous flavoured with peanut oil. Before dinner we were able to watch life passing by below the building, including watching kids dancing to another boy laying the banjo-instrument. I really enjoyed the cold shower that night, it was very refreshing to wash off the day’s dirt and sweat and enjoy the warm evening afterwards. The only problem was the slightly disturbing sensation of sharing my shower with 2 frogs...The campement was much better than I expected, a nicely decorated mud construction with carved wooden doors for the rooms, and clean and well-kept. We chose to sleep on the roof as the rooms are just too warm right now (cool during the day for resting but stuffy at night), so they set up with mattresses and strung a mosquito net between various points on the roof. Don’t think this is strange, it’s common to sleep on the roof in these hot places! We overlooked the village, and could see many different types of crops being dried on roofs around us – corn, chillies, peanuts, beans, and millet. Our sleeping spot looked directly at the old cliff village. I can’t believe I’m here! The place is just so different to anywhere I’ve ever been before, and more than that, the scenery has been stunning. I went to bed very happy, after listening to music and staring at the incredible array of stars above us, far away from the city lights – we haven’t seen so many stars since our last nights in Portugal.

The next morning, we woke early due to our outside location, but that was great as we were able to take dawn photos of the old village from the roof. We set off early to explore the old village in the cliff, being able to walk around the old Dogon houses and stand right under the Tellum houses. There was not a lot of evidence of use, but the areas are still used for occasional sacrifices/offerings, and of course access to the burial houses, so we were able to explore fairly well. We saw old sacrificial altars of monkey and bird skulls, stuck with mud onto the cliff face, and the painted altar areas. They use black, white and red geometric designs on the altars, as well as snake shapes. Sadly, there are very few holy men (hogon) still in the Dogon country. We were able to explore the famous granaries of the area, small mud constructions with thatched roofs and stilted legs, accessed from a small portal near the top, which is usually nicely carved in the newer villages. The views over the village and plains below from halfway up the escarpment were fantastic. We spent about an hour up there, poking around the little buildings. On the way out of town, we saw the town’s blacksmith working in his small open hut, although he hadn’t yet started on his day’s work so we couldn’t see him in action. We also stopped to see the local hunter, a very important person in Dogon villages. He had a great coat decorated with skulls and porcupine quills, and one wall in the compound was covered with skulls of various beasts that had fallen to his gun. We then had a very hot, dry, but short 1.5 hour/4km walk along the sandy plain to Endé, our stop for the day. Another ‘small shower’ from Tiemo greeted us in another nice campement, then we had lunch. There were more tourists closer to Endé – we saw one on the track and several in camps – and it is a reasonably well-visited place as there is vehicle access.

After lunch, we visited the various artisanal stalls around town, particularly as I wanted to find a wedding gift for my best friend who gets married next month. Tiemo told me it’s traditional to give something like a wall hanging or tablecloth, which was perfect as I had been shown some tablecloths in the campement, stained with indigo, which is a local strong export. I was fascinated by the processes of creating dyed cloths here, as I had seen examples in the Bamako museum, and was able to see the elements of, if not the actual, process from crushed balls of indigo plant leaves, to a vat of dye, to cloth tied and ready to dye, to of course the finished products. The cloths I saw were made by a women’s cooperative, by the women standing right in front of me, so it was nice to know whatever I bought was going back into that exact community. While I liked the thick raw cotton of the more traditional, handmade local cloth, our limited pack-size, carrying weight, and luggage room on the bike led me to buy a more commercial, but very light, cloth that was tie-dyed in a lovely diamond pattern. Hope my mate likes it! We also saw bogolan mud cloth being dyed. We had first seen this dyeing technique in Djenné, where we saw only the finished products. Mud is used to stain the cloth black, and dyes made from bark of trees such as acacia and baobab are used to create yellow and orange colours to make the rest of the pattern. This was always done on thick cotton, and came in a whole range of sizes and designs, many showing animals, village life or geometric patterns. I really liked the stuff and it was terrible not to be able to buy anything. However, it was just too thick and heavy and I don’t know what I would do with it anyway! I really liked the designs, so I settled for photos instead. The togu-na meeting place in Endé was a work of art on its own. The wooden pillars holding up the low roof were carved with people, religious figures from the creation stories of the Dogon people.

We headed up to the old village, and I was able to see an actual indigo plant growing. These plants are not cultivated, which I found very strange for such an important resource. Instead, people take seeds and sprinkle them around paths and let them grow wild. To think that blue dye was such a special item once and here they just let it grow wild! The old village was not as good as the one in Teli, but still very impressive. The whole area is a UNESCO World Heritage site (yes, we continue our WH touring through Africa!), and Endé is a popular village to visit. A lot of money has been put into renovating and protecting the old houses, however, they have done a lot of new work, so what you see is rather sterile and newly constructed. Tiemo pointed out parts that have actually been removed to put new buildings up. Not a good way to be protecting heritage! Tiemo found it very disappointing that their heritage is being altered like this. Once again, there was a great view over the newer village, and we had another wonderful view of the old village from our roof camp. I saw my biggest insectivorous bats ever that night, they were closer in size to some of the fruit bats we’ve seen but were definitely catching insects. We were not alone in camp that night, but at least it’s not the busy season. I can’t imagine what it must be like at peak time! Sleeping on the roof is very comfortable, and although it can be cool in the early hours, we are only sleeping in light liners and are plenty warm enough.

I carry Dr Otterboro in my backpack with his head sticking out so he can ‘see what’s going on’. This has caused a few funny reactions, with a man in an English shop getting a shock, and a woman shopkeeper in Portugal threatening to attack him because he was a rat! (although with a great sense of humour). Here in Dogon country, he has become my bébé (baby) because I carry him on my back just like the local women! They strap a cloth around their bodies that tightly wraps the baby onto their backs. The women then go about their daily business, working in fields or carrying things on their heads. Kids have to really put up and shut up here! Every time we go past kids in the villages, there are lots of hellos and asking for bonbons (sweets) and pens (reminding me alot of trekking in Nepal all those years ago). Then they see Dr Otterboro and start asking about my bébé! We’ve heard plenty of warnings to be wary of kidnapping in West African areas like Mali and Mauritania, and I have to say it’s a real danger in Dogon country - in fact I get kidnapped several times a day!!! Little kids love to grab our hands as we walk through villages and just walk with us. I’ve had as many as three kids clutching my arm at times!