Travel Deals – A dry, biting wind swept in from the Sahara as my young guide, David Dolo; my driver, Mahmadou; and I followed a local animist priest up a rocky trail in Dogon country in central Mali. Below us, the village of Hombori stretched across the yellow plain; above, I could make out hollows in the sandstone cliff face — natural grottoes used as burial chambers for more than a thousand years. After trudging for a half-hour up the punishing cliffside path, we stopped before a cave from which emanated a musty smell. I peered inside at a dozen grinning skulls and, behind them, piles of bones, shreds of clothing, and amulets and totems placed there centuries ago.
“These tombs belonged first to the Tellem tribe,” David said in painstaking English, which he had learned as the adopted son of American missionaries in a village at the top of the Bandiagara escarpment, or Falaise de Bandiagara.
The Tellem hunter-gatherers were driven out by the Dogons 700 years ago, he explained, “and the Dogons began to bury their dead in the same places.” Mahmadou, who came from southern Mali and who had rarely visited Dogon country, stared in astonishment, and asked me to take his photograph beside a skull. “Incroyable,” he muttered — unbelievable.
The Dogons, one of Africa’s most isolated ethnic groups, were virtually unheard of in the West until the early 1930s, when a young French anthropologist named Marcel Griaule embarked on a three-year research trip across West Africa. One of the first places he visited was a vast complex of cliffs rising over the southern edge of the Sahara in French Sudan (now Mali), to which the Dogons fled during the 14th century from what is now Ghana, to avoid forced conversion to Islam. Griaule returned to the cliffs seven times, and in 1946 was granted a series of interviews with a blind Dogon hunter named Ogotemmeli, later turned into a fascinating book, “Conversations With Ogotemmeli.”
I heard about the Dogons through a more mundane source: a dog-eared copy of the Lonely Planet guide to West Africa that I picked up at a friend’s house in Nairobi in 1995. Intrigued by its descriptions of animists living cut off from the world inside rocky redoubts, I made time that year for a one-day visit to Dogon country, during a four-week swing through French-speaking Africa. It was a memorable, and briefly frightening, experience. Our party, consisting of two Dogon guides, a Zimbabwean photographer and me, hiked across a bleak, crevasse-riddled plateau and then plunged down a steep trail to a mud-walled village half-concealed by huge boulders and baobab trees. Read more »