A Dirty Little Secret

Sanadougou is a religiously diverse society by Malian standards. If asked, about 80 percent of the population would identify as Muslim, 20 percent would call themselves Christian. And in addition to the globally-established creeds to which all Sanadougoukaw will profess, there is a long and proud tradition prior to any of these religions which is truly more fundamental to local spirituality. The Christian pastor in town calls it “une réligion paganiste”, others might object due to the lack of any formal god or gods in this belief system and refer to it as a mere “animist practice”, monotheist chauvinists might impugn it as a mere “fetishist cult”. Whatever it is, the ancient traditions of the Minianka subgroup of the Bambara tribe are not what you would assume to find in a country that considers itself monotheistic.

The first inkling of Bamana tradition I could glean was when I and saw a guys at market selling a strange cornucopia of snake skins, monkey heads, dead parrots and ram horns, etc. At first I thought these wares were mere hunting trophies, but in fact, they were fetishes endowed with spiritual powers. The powers attributed to each individual fetish are generally those attributed to the living animals; e.g. the head of a West African night adder could be channeled to inflict harm upon an enemy, a dog’s paw could augment a woman’s fertility, cowry shells can be used to divine the future and the hair of a white man can aid its holder to find great wealth and love. Devout Muslims and Christians might cite the parable of Ibrahim to condemn such idolatry, but they have to really know who they’re talking to because a lot of people who regularly pray at mosque or church also invoke the power of fetishes in the privacy of their own homes.

When people conduct the Bamana tradition they do not “worship” the fetish, it certainly could not be defined as “polytheism” because they are not “deifying” the late monkey or parrot as something beyond this world. The most proper term to describe this tradition would be “animism”, because they are attributing spiritual properties unto objects of this world. Magic has a great deal to do with it, but the kind of white magic practiced by the likes of Dumbledore and Sabrina Spellman. Whatever you do, don’t call it “witchcraft” – because unlike one who supplicates fetishes for benign magic, a shubaga is one who conjures the fetish spirits and black magic powers for malicious ends.

Though when you see all of these juju skins and claws at market, one cannot help but wonder what happened to the rest of the animal. Usually the fetishtigi gets their hands on their wares by the vagaries of hunters’ success, but every January they are guaranteed a new shipment of inventory after the annual N’yaa ceremony. Like most celebrations in Mali, there were no formal invitations mailed out or even uttered, but those in the know just happen to know. One afternoon last January I heard a hypnotic drumming, balaphone (xylophone) and singing out by the market area; I asked Karitie what the celebration was all about, and he told me “Les paganistes font leur sacrifice!”

“… Quel sort du sacrifice?” I asked.

“Les chiens et les poulets!”

So last year I spent the annual sacrifice ceremony at home guarding my puppy from the clutches of the local witch doctor. But this year I planned in advance and chained Snoop Doggy Dogg up within the confines of my chain-link fence so I could attend without fear. I was told that I probably wouldn’t want to show up until after dinner, because until then full participation in the ceremony is mandatory to all attendees.

Asides from all the singing and dancing, the centerpiece of N’yaa is the slaughtering of dogs and chickens and the ritualistic imbibement of their blood. As the head fetishtigi explained, men must drink the blood to obtain the animals’ power and good fortune for the next farming season. This year was a particularly poor harvest, so the villagers of Sanadougou were willing to sacrifice many more animals than usual: 10 dogs and 30 chickens.

I could almost understand the transubstantiation of dog power into human power, but I had a difficult time stomaching the chickens. “Seriously, chickens are small and weak. I can’t imagine getting a lot of power by sacrificing a chicken.”

“You’re right – that is why we sacrifice 30 of them.”

So I fortunately missed out on the actual slaughter and blood-drinking rites per se, but I stuck around for the beer-drinking rites. By nightfall there were still drums banging and trance-like tunes on the goni, tin can guitar and balaphone and drunken old men doing this clumsy Moonwalk-like dance. And a grizzled old woman sold me an empty Seltzer bottle full of chimichama – home-brewed, millet beer. It looks and tastes like what I imagine apple juice would taste like if it was left to ferment and sour; it’s nothing that I would pay more than a little nominal change for just to say that I partook in a local cultural experience. I wouldn’t even drink it to get drunk for cheap – chimichama is only about 2 percent alcoholic content and the rest is barely-palatable deadweight water.

That doesn’t mean that the hardly-alcoholic qualities of chimichama prevent the local men from getting drunk – they just have to drink an obscene amount of it. They fill 10-liter jugs with this cheap home-brew and chug it all as fast as possible – they would use a beer bong if only American frat boys would join the Peace Corps en masse and show them how to make one. And since there is so much water to alcohol in this millet beer, the N’yaa celebrators pee like broken fire hydrants. Even before I had arrived, the ceremony grounds were full of shitfaced old men stumbling around looking for a good place to take a whizz, a lot of them passed out in the positions they fell in, a lot of them passed out stinking of the 98 percent of chimichama that their bodies no longer had any use for.

About the entirety of N’yaa celebrators would probably identify themselves as Muslim – a good deal of them will also slaughter a sheep as well at Eid al-Iftar and Eid al-Adha, but even an infidel like me cannot fathom how a bunch of old men who gather to drink dog and chicken blood and invoke the power of fetishes and get trashed on millet beer can say with a straight face that they belong to the pointedly austere monotheist religion that is Islam. Muslim doctrine here is generally more liberal than it is elsewhere in the Islamic world, but a religion which is can be summed up in the Shahada that “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet” cannot be so liberal that it can also incorporates explicitly animist sacrifice and idolatry. This is less like someone who calls themselves Jewish eating a bacon cheeseburger and watching The Charlie Brown Christmas Special than it is like someone who calls themselves Jewish regularly attending mass and receiving Communion and praying to Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

When you contextualize the founding of Islam in the 7th century and grasp that Muhammadd and the original jurists of Islam were developing their belief system at roughly the same time that the militant wing of Islam was busy expanding the Caliphate into North African territory, it makes sense that the writing of certain laws was just as much political as it was religious. For example, the code of Halal prohibits Muslims from the consumption of alcohol, the consumption of meat that was sacrificed in the name of pagan gods or idolatry, and it very explicitly prohibits the drinking of blood – i.e. it is forbidden for Muslims to partake in animist sacrifices like N’yaa. Though they might not have had the rites of the distant, isolated Bambara tribe in mind at the time, the Islamic jurists of a millennium ago knew enough of world religions to craft a law of hygiene and cleanlinesss directly and intentionally incompatible with the practices of takfir Arab, Persian, Turkish and African tribes.

I must reiterate the fact that very few Malians would publicly identify themselves as a follower of these rites; it is by no means a secret, but asides from the association with drunkenness and obvious reasons the attendees would like to keep the fact to themselves. The various tribes of the Sahel have spent millennia conquering and enslaving their neighbors, and once Islam arrived between the 10th and 12th centuries many clans converted as a guarantee of freedom – the Qur’an specifically forbids Muslims to enslave fellow members of the Umma but leaves idolaters and deniers of the faith to the whims of unregulated capitalism. Though chattel slavery does not really exist in southern Mali anymore (it does in the northern Songraï and Tamashek lands), Bambara, Minianka, Fulani and Malinke tribesmen alike find it at least in their social interests to publicly present themselves as Muslims – even if they drink millet beer, pray to fetishes, sacrifice dogs and chickens and drink their blood.

Yes, there are some Malians who still conduct ritualistic human sacrifice. To my understanding human sacrifice is significantly rarer than the sacrifice of dogs or chickens, but it is not as rare as it should be. People generally sacrifice other people for the same reason why they sacrifice monkeys or sheep, only this is considered to be a very dark practice associated only with the most evil of evil sorcerers. Albinos are in great danger of being targeted for human sacrifice as their abnormally-pigmented appendages are thought to bring good luck and a dismembered albino head is thought to be able to reveal the future like a really morbid Magic 8-Ball.

Apparently human sacrifice is most common amongst the Bobo tribe of northern Ségou province – a tribe which is distinctly more animist than the rest of the country. In recent years there have been a few Volunteers posted in Boboland who were solemnly warned that a very important festival coming up – though no one could tell when exactly this festival would be, and that when the festival occurred it was absolutely important that they stay in their house and never go outside especially at night because… well… no one would say... But the villagers would continue to reiterate emphatically that during the week of this ceremony they must never go outside. Donné donné villagers started to explain more and more about this mysterious festival until the Boboland Volunteers respectively decided it was time to pack up their bags and move to a different site.

Human sacrifice is allegedly confined to the most isolated, very least cosmopolitan and most animist villages where the rule of law and modern civilization don’t have too much sway. But there was even a human sacrifice-related incident pertaining to a Volunteer posted to a small village on the road to the Peace Corps training center Tubaniso – so close to urban culture that one could get there from Bamako by taxi. So this female Volunteer developed a close friendship with a spinster neighbor, and one day she realized that she hadn’t seen Bintu for a very long time. She was worried, and so she asked all of her other friends in village “Hey, do you know where Bintu is?”

For weeks she couldn’t get a straight answer; some villagers said that Bintu just got up and left, others said that she was “traveling”. Over time the villagers decided to level with their adopted Volunteer;

“Bintu is never coming back… because we sacrificed Bintu… and we ate her.”

Water and Sanitation and Extraterrestrial Amphibians and Penises on the Dogon Plateaus

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.

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.