Mali is home to one of the few most isolated and anthropologically fascinating cultures in the world: the Dogon tribe. Originally the Dogons were a paganist tribe which hailed from southern Mali where they worshipped the stars and extraterrestrial beings. That is not a misprint; the culture of the Dogon is predicated on the belief that they were visited by amphibious humanoids called Nommos hailing from a planet orbiting the Po Tolo - which in Dogon is the name of the smallest known seed. Dogon tradition espouses that Po Tolo is white in color, and that it is the heaviest star because it is made out of sagala - an uncomprehensibly heavy metal. This has also taught that the miniscule star rotates on its axis, that it has an elliptical orbit with a companion star as the focus, and that the period of Po Tolo's orbit is 50 years.
This star which does in fact exist is known to Westerners as Sirius B, an ultra-dense white dwarf orbiting Sirius A so small and so distant that it is invisible to the naked eye - technology to photograph this star did not exist until 1970. The period of Sirius B's orbit is now known to durate for exactly 50.04 +/- 0.09 Earth years. Centuries before Copernicus and Galileo, the Dogon also knew of the heliocentric solar system in that the planets revolve around the Sun, the rings of Saturn and the four major moons of Jupiter. All of this was taught by a culture which otherwise has very little history of mathematics or astronomy, no telescopic technology, and has for the past thousand years chosen to live in isolation from their neighboring tribes.
Dogon belief holds that there is a third star in the Dog Star system known as Emma Yar, and that this star is circled by a single planet from which the Nommos hail. To date, even Western astronomers equipped with the Hubble Telescope and the most sensitive photographic technology ever known to man have yet to discover a third member of the Sirius star system.
According to legend the Dogon were once the brothers of the Bambara tribe. But in the 12th century intertribal relations soured when the Bambaras and Fulanis adopted Islam en masse, because the Qur'an explicitly teaches that the enslavement of other Muslims within the Dar al-Salaam is haram, but that it is perfectly acceptable to enslave the pagans and idolaters of the Dar al-Harb. And so in the 12th century the Bambaras and the horseback-riding Fulani tribe began to raid Dogon villages for slaves. Over the next few hundred years the Dogons fled their ancestral homeland, completely relocating their society to the central plateaus by around 1490. As hostile as the terrain was, upon high vantage points accessible only by solitary mountain passes Dogon warriors with spears and slings could easily defend their villages from Bambara and Fulani raids.
The central plateaus were not such welcoming terrains either, for they were already occupied by the Tellem people. Very little is known about this ancient culture except for the dwellings they left behind in the caves and crevices of the cliffs. Judging by the dimensions of these stone and mud dwellings, the Tellem must have been a very diminutive people akin to Pygmies. Apparently the Tellem also lived in the plateaus because they sought sanctuary from hostile tribes – archaeologists have excavated so few of these huts because they are extremely difficult to reach even with 21st century rock-climbing equipment. Archaeologists believe that a millennia ago the climate of this region was so much more humid and lush that the Tellem might have been able to climb up sturdy vines to their dwellings - Dogon legend maintains that their predecessors had wings and sticky feet like geckos which allowed them to scale the cliffs.
The flightless Dogons have been unable to inhabit the cliff dwellings of the Tellem, but in the roughly eight centuries that they have been living on the flat tops of the plateaus they have built their own villages, most of them a good day’s hike from any road and accessible only by the dexterous foot, and nothing too heavy to be carried by humans can make it in or out. The style of the Dogon huts is fairly approximate to what they were building a millennia ago back when they coexisted with Bambaras and Fulanis in what is now southern Mali, but due to the hardships of this rugged terrain there are a few main differences. In my own Minianka village, logs and mud constitute 95 percent of all construction materials, but high up on top of the plateaus there are no riverbeds where one can find ample supplies of mud, there are very few trees large enough to make sturdy skeletons. In Dogon Country all structures of any sort were made primarily out of rocks fit together with no mortar. Centuries ago there were more than enough rocks large enough to build a decent hovel, but now that the population has greatly expanded they have to import dynamite to blast apart boulders into usable sizes.
Islam is gradually making headway especially with young Dogon men who have lived in the cities, but up on the plateau, most Dogons continue their traditional animist practices as though monotheism never happened. Here an elderly holy man manages a rock garden which he uses to predict the future.
He is drawing designs in the beds of sand accompanied by the arrangement of sticks, pebbles and cowry shells – which according to Dogon belief are posing questions to the all-knowing fox. In the middle of the night, the fox is expected to come and alter the designs and arrangements ever so slightly, and only the holy man pictured here can decipher the fox’s answers.
Dogon Country has all of its own special development problems. To begin, water access is prohibitively difficult; and obviously there are no bodies of water on top of these barren rock faces, there is very little precipitation, and the Dogons have built their villages upon cliffs which purposefully arduous to reach. The only way for Dogons to eat, drink, wash and bathe is to send their women down to streams in the valleys many kilometers away from the village, and every time a woman draws water she then has to climb many kilometers back up those very steep paths with a heavy bucket of water on her head. In some villages, we’re talking about an entire morning's trek just to draw a single bucket of water. Of course the water in these streams is most likely contaminated with feces and giardia cysts, so right from the bat the Dogons are suffering from more water-borne illnesses than other Malian tribes. Since the sparse water supplies are most immediately needed for drinking and cooking, the Dogons almost as a rule have insufficient water for hygiene purposes, and as a result they suffer from more prevalent trachoma, dysentery, etc. relative to comparable Malian societies. Water is so scarce for human needs alone, thus raising livestock and growing garden crops is exponentially more onerous. And since women have to spend so many additional hours merely drawing water, they have less time than even overworked Minianka women to engage in lucrative economic activity or gain an education.
Over the past half century missionaries and NGOs have been disproportionately active in the most isolated and underdeveloped cranny of Mali trying to help the Dogons achieve the basic necessities of infrastructure. For example, a French group paid the men of one village to carry cement to the base of the plateau so that they could build a catchment basin underneath a spot where rainwater drips down from the cliffs. Their cistern has done a decent job of catching water, but somehow it also caught frog eggs and fish spawn – yes, somehow fish spontaneously generated in an artificial inland pool uphill from any other body of water. So that particular village has more water now, but it’s so polluted with concentrated frog and fish feces that it is even less potable than that from the stream many kilometers away. The women of that village still have to go to the stream to draw water three times a day.
When it comes to my line of work, there’s only so much that can be realistically done. The water table is so far low under impermeable rock - the lowest point of some villages is multiple hundreds of meters above - that hand-dug wells are not a possibility. Even in the valleys below the cliffs, the only way that one could possibly reach the water table is by drilling a well with mechanized drilling tools which are themselves extremely heavy and difficult to transport by hand up and down mountains to the isolated valleys where they could be of any use to Dogon villages. In so many words, the equipment needed to simply drill a well is so expensive that the Dogon could never finance a well project on their own. But even if an NGO parachutes in and drills a well in the valley to provide a particular village with a source of potable water, the women of that village still have to make their arduous hike down to the valleys and back up to use any drilled wells or hand-pumps.
Even worse than the water access problem, there is an unavoidable waste management problem inherent in living on top of a plateau. Even the mud brick “traditional nyegens” built in my own village are not practical technologies in Dogon Country – they’re living on top of solid rock, and short of a ready supply of dynamite it is impossible to dig a latrine pit by hand. Technically, one could theoretically blast a latrine pit with dynamite, but dynamite is already so expensive that the impoverished Dogons would never use it for anything other than to provide rocks for their own houses.
So the vast majority of Dogon men, women and children alike simply urinate and defecate out in the open. In each village, there are clusters of rocks slightly beyond the houses known as “the pooping rocks” where people do their business. These rocks are never marked because the people who have been living in this village for their entire lives simply know which ones they are. Westerners such as myself simply passing by for a good hike are not in the know, so there were a bunch of times when we’d be passing through, wanted to take a break and sat on what appeared to be perfectly good boulders for resting. The villagers kept on giving us really nasty looks, and we couldn’t quite understand why. Then we realized that this part of the village was marked by a pungently sweet odor... and eventually we realized our faux pas...
It would be fair to say that the Dogon tribe suffers from the most acute lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in the entire country of Mali. Therefore, it would be fair to say that, of any culture the Dogons suffer from perhaps the most acute lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in the entire world. There really isn't a whole lot that the Dogons can do by their own means to improve their water sanitation infrastructure.
When Peace Corps Volunteers come into these villages to live for two years, PC Bamako has to first come in and ensure that our own housing needs are adequate - and Peace Corps regulations entail that doing as the Dogon villagers do and pooping out by the pooping rocks is quite inadequate. That means that if a Volunteer is going to live in a Dogon village, PC Bamako usually has to come in beforehand and build these revolutionary new “toilet” things just so that we can live there ourselves. It is next to impossible to dig a latrine pit down into the solid rock plateaus, so they have to take rocks and cement and “dig” up. Instead of digging a latrine pit, they build up a large one-story basin which serves as an above-ground latrine pit, and so our raised nyegens in Dogon Country are on the 2nd floor.
Introducing isolated villages to the wonders of containing poop and pee safely underground is the most necessary task required of those committed to public health in Mali. Though even the raised latrine pit - which is the most appropriate sanitation technology conceivable - is asking villagers who cannot even farm enough millet to feed their families to spend money they do not have on dynamite and cement to build latrines of higher technology and better quality than the houses they are living in. This concept of a toilet is so expensive and so alien to most Dogons who have been pooping out by the pooping rocks for centuries that promoting latrines in these communities will for a long time remain an uphill battle - much more so than with the Bambara clans with supple earth, mud and logs at their disposal.
Infrastructure aside, simply living on top of a barren plateau offers about as little room for growth as one could imagine. Agriculture on the central plateaus is so unproductive that of the many tribes in Mali, the Dogon stand among the least capable of feeding themselves with their own farming output – rivaled by only the Songrai and Tamashek of the northern desert provinces. Yet unlike the Songrai or Tamashek, the Dogon are not situated along any corridors of movement in persons and goods, they could not possibly subsist by trade alone. Dogon villages are extremely dependent upon food aid from the World Food Programme and various Christian and Muslim charities (donated partly out of benevolence and partly out of a hope that their pagan clients will convert).
The logic of evolution and human migration would dictate that just as much as it might have been in the Dogon’s self-interest to live atop the plateaus in the 12th century in order to survive forced conversion and enslavement, now in the 21st century it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Peace Corps and USAID and NGOs can come in and do all the development work we want, but let's be real; rocky soil is not conducive to bountiful harvests, and solid rock plateaus are even less. A society that lives on top of a solid rock plateau can only improve their agriculture so much.
In just about every other society on Earth, people congregate around their sources of food and water, and it does not make economic sense for the most altitudinous Dogon villages to live in their current locations. If Dogon villagers would simply build new dwellings a few kilometers from on top of the plateaus to their valley floors adjacent to the fields and streams, eliminating the arduous commute between where people live and their food and water sources would make this society about 30 percent more productive.
More so, now that the days of forced conversions and slaving raids are over, it would be in the material interests of the Dogon to migrate back to their original homeland with less rocks and fertile soils where they could maybe dig a well and have easy access to water and grow enough food to not be completely dependent on Food Aid in order to survive. This isn't just coming from cynics like me, but a lot of Dogon themselves; a significant number of young Dogon men have grown disillusioned with the Neolithic standard of living and monotheistic charities and have flocked to the cities in search of employment. Even in Sanadougou, we have a small subpopulation of Dogon men who decided to leave the Stone Age squalor for the significantly less extreme medieval squalor of the Miniankas where they at least have a chance of obtaining enough food and water for a hand-to-mouth subsistence.
One of the relocated Dogon in my village is a butcher named Ali (as you could probably surmise, he is a Muslim Dogon). Bambara is only his second language and he speaks no Minianka, so our conversations consist of rather short sentences; when I ask Ali why he didn't stay with the rest of his tribesmen up on the plateau, he was characteristically blunt: "No food. No water."
The reasons that the entire tribe isn't migrating like they did 800 years ago are more complicated; it's difficult to just pick up and leave the rock hut you've lived in your entire your life when 1) your family has been living in the same rock hut for hundreds of years; 2) your family line has been buried in the same cemetery plot going back for a millennium; 3) you have no vehicle besides your own two feet; 4) your receiving of Food Aid is contingent on living in a rocky plateau where agriculture is next to impossible. Moreover, according to one of the great ironies of fate, the Dogons' living anachronism of an all but lost epoch of human history is starting to become a source of unparalleled wealth.
Strangely enough, one of the few promising businesses growing in Dogon Country is predicated on the preservation of the culture’s isolation and underdevelopment: tourism. Now the Lonely Planet niche of off-the-beaten-path tourists are starting to discover this fascinating culture, and they’re willing to shell out a formidable sum of money to pay for hotel campements, restaurants, and guides fluent in both Dogon and French and thereby able to lead them through the caves and breathtaking cliffs and explain the convoluted stories of Dogon folklore and their extraterrestrial-worshipping rituals. And the influx of adventurous tourists is making a significant impact on a certain handful of villages where the industry is based out of - we're talking about entire communities that had no cash crops, no monetary income of any kind out of nowhere developing an extremely lucrative industry of people who want to see nothing more than the squalor and exoticism of a culture which is by all standards still living in the late Stone Age. And by this peculiar paradox, the fact that they have more or less missed out on a millenium's worth of development is fueling this new industry more profitable than any other trade the Dogons or any other tribe for that matter could otherwise ever hope to conduct amongst themselves.
Some of my friends here in Peace Corps Mali are specifically working to develop Dogon Country's sapling ecotourism industry, and we all agree that in principle the growth of tourists coming here is a good thing; it increases the revenues of existing tourism businesses, it helps all of the businesses like masons and plumbers and electricians and food sellers which make a great deal of their business with the hotels and souvenir shops. And eventually, some of that tourism money trickles down to the Dogons themselves - which is a good thing per se, as it provides income which can be spent on shoes, soap, medicine, school fees, etc.
But tourism cannot be a panacea for the Dogon's curse of underdevelopment and poverty. The Dogons' interaction with Westerners has been beneficial for some, but it has unfortunately taught a large number that they can do better for themselves sitting along the trail begging for un bon-bon than they could ever make by tilling the rocks for millet. An entire society of 800,000 people cannot subsist by selling necklaces and carvings to French hikers on holiday.
1 comments:
woww, amazing
Post a Comment