The Adventures of John & George: Mali Days 12 to 13

Dogon Country (info here) or Pays Dogon as the locals call it, is one of the "must see" parts of Mali...

The Dogon were traditionally a cliff-dwelling people who live along a huge stretch of the Bandiagara Escarpment that juts out of the desert in the southern part of Mali, overlooking Burkina Faso. Tradition has it that the Dogon travelled to this part of West Africa sometime around the 15th century, fleeing their villages on the west bank of the Niger River whilst under invasion. Due to the lack of arable land (and for security) the set up lots of small family villages along the cliffs. Nowadays, for practical reasons, the villagers have mostly moved down on to the flats.

The Dogon are supposed to be fine mostly agriculturalists, having developed irrigation system in an area known to be infertile and inhospitable. Most villages are surrounded by crops of millet (though they'd all been harvested by the time we travelled trough so it was mostly sand again), while the wetter areas near creeks and waterholes are filled with onions that they mash up into balls and dry for later use.

The thing the Dogon are probably most famous for are their granaries. Made of mud, with strange "witches hat" thatched roofs, these granaries fill every village - some with elaborately carved doors. They are raised off the ground by rocks to protect the grain both from vermin and from water in the wet season. Many of the villages are built on the rock of the escarpment, so any rain that falls has nowhere to go but flow along the rock until it can be absorbed in the soil somewhere.

The houses themselves are built from stacked rocks on a timber frame

This is the centre of the village of Djiguibombo.

In the hut on the right, the elders meet and discuss the problems of the village. This is also where sacrifices are carried out (not human, just goats and chickens etc) - as most of the Dogon are still animists - and there's a large sign that (in french) says that women aren't allowed to walk there

The Dogon are also apparently famous for their carved doors. Whilst being quite fancy, it's pretty difficult to buy an authentic one these days, and the Dogon country sees so many tourists that the prices are way too high (these guys just don't like to haggle for some reason). Some guys will take you around the back of the village to show you an authentic door that their friend wants to sell off his house - though I'm quite sure that this guy goes through about four doors a week to tourists who want something "authentic" and will pay a little more for the privilege...

After wandering around Djiguibombo we went for a
walk down the escarpment to see the villages below

a donkey with his/her little friend...

women pounding beans and millet

Everything's mud brick in Mali. So at each village there's a large hole in the ground where water collects, makes mud, mud becomes bricks, hole gets bigger, water collects in hole and so on...

If the locals have enough cash, an ostrich egg is the preferred decoration for the minaret (spire?) of the mosque - it is supposed to symbolise fertility and purity.