Dogon Country

Two years ago I knew absolutely nothing about West Africa. When it seemed that I might be getting myself hired in the Gambia I had to go online and discover where it was. My regional ambition started small; I bought a guide book that focused exclusively on Gambia and Senegal. After a few months in the Gambia, a friend left the country, giving me her budget travel guide to West Africa. She was sure that I'd get more use out of it than anyone else she knew, which at the time, I did not believe. Naturally, I began looking through the pictures. Most were standard fare: crowded markets, masks, city traffic, impressive mosques, waterfalls and beaches; but a handful of photographs distinguished themselves. These were the Dogon. The images of their villages, perched on cliffs or tucked beneath them summoned up all of those lazy adjectives about indescribability and other planets. Their aesthetic has a remarkably pure and consistent otherness; it does not look influenced. It looks like a source. I read the captions. The pictures had been scattered throughout the guide book; but every time I was strongly compelled to find out where the image had been made, it said Dogon. After four or five pictures I could tell a Dogon village from any other in an instant. I decided to go there. However, the few times I tried arranging trips, they fell through. It is a fairly inaccessible place and I never had a generous amount of time for transport and visa processing. As two years slipped by I noticed that most of the times when I had immediate and total respect for African music, cloth and paintings, they were from Mali and with the textiles, specifically from Dogon.

I've traveled through and around roughly thirty countries, most of them thoroughly, many of them I love. However, there is nowhere I have seen that is capable of making a more powerful impression than Dogon country. If it did not spend nine months of the year in painfully dry and foodless circumstances and if it were not astonishingly and infuriatingly full of flies during its brief wet season, I could ignore my need for cities and my love of surfing and live there. Our visit lasted three nights and three physically exhausting days.

We spent the cooler six hours of each day hiking between villages, streams and overhangs, descending and ascending the steep kilometer high escarpment through ravines and goat trails. In every direction the view is memorable. We were far from the touristic villages, which kept the impression from being spoiled by familiar accents and appearances—in fact, several small children burst into fearful sobbing at the sight of us.

I have no intention of exhaustively cataloguing the various experiences of this trip; instead I will offer a few disconnected paragraphs.

The Tellum:
A significant amount of this region's magic comes from the remains of a civilization that used to coexist with and perhaps preceded the Dogon people. Clustered into the least accessible cracks in the layered cliff face of the escarpment, sometimes more than seven hundred feet in the air, are miniature cylindrical mud structures. Most of these buildings could not be reached without considerable training and specialized equipment. Locals on the escarpment will tell you one of two things about these extinct people: they could fly and/or they were magical. Rationalists tend to postulate Swiss Family Robinson arrangements or now defunct networks of creeping vines. It is hard to visualize anything of the sort. Whatever the explanation, these dwellings inevitably induce the sort of mind boggled brow furrowing that enlivens the imagination and makes it difficult to concentrate on walking straight.

The Blister Beetle:
Sometime in the evening, while a kerosene lantern was attracting all of the village bugs into the center of our relaxing place, I was savaged by a blister beetle. I did not know this for another twelve hours. These idiot creatures deposit topical poison on things they do not like, typically in a limited area, but in my case far more widely. At first this poison is not an irritant. Gradually, however, it causes burn blisters to form, swell and fill. This nauseating progression happened in my sleep. One of its attacks focused on my right knee in a place where the blister was bound to be continuously disturbed and made to burst. Since the fluid from the blister engenders new blisters if it is not wiped immediately from the skin and since I sleep on my side, the central blister on my knee was the size of a spherical quarter by the time I woke up. The flies began to weaken my sleep, having somehow infiltrated my mosquito net in considerable numbers. At that point I noticed pain and sought to identify its source. The implausible swelling on my leg woke me completely and my mind went to work. I had heard of blister beetles so I was prepared to accept that my tendency always to be selected by belligerent insects was continuing undiminished; but when I ran my hand over my arm and found a second smaller blister, and found a third along my torso, then a couple more around my waist, my thinking changed. Most of these areas should have been protected from bites by the weight of my clothing; so my hypochondria began to list more sensational African nightmare diseases in an attempt to get attention and unseat reason. Sean and Tuuli were soundly sleeping. I sought our guide, hoping to find reassurance in his local knowledge; but he was not around. The hotel owner, in his place, was not sure but thought that it could be an insect. I climbed back up to the sleeping roof and tried to make noise until Sean or Tuuli woke, at which I succeeded. Sean knows the blister beetle well and assured me this was he, which meant I had some early morning tactical lancing and draining to do, which sucked. We had no bandages or disinfectant, so I used vodka and an old sock. It made the day's twelve kilometer hike a bit more tender. Now they are fine.

Night Market:
For purely social reasons, some Dogon villages organize night markets. These differ from the day markets in several ways: far fewer children and far fewer elderly people are around; most of the natural foodstuffs such as beans, grains, fruits, spices and nuts are not on sale; millet beer is sold and consumed throughout the market; there are drunk people. Sean and I followed Haruna through the poorly lit maze of seated vendors, quite a number of whom were selling an arbitrary assortment of pharmaceutical items, toiletries and other individually packaged western goods; when we slowed our pace of walking we were typically passed a calabash of millet beer. This substance is surprisingly good considering it is made without a shred of modern technology or concern for hygiene. Except for unusual batches, it couldn't be stronger than three percent alcohol and it is served air temperature. It is not carbonated and a mealy white sediment accumulates at the bottom as you drink it. The mellow flavor contains a subtle honey like sweetness and a substantive almost musky yet vaguely citrus body; somewhere between homemade hefeweisen, mead and white wine, but so weak as to be consistently drinkable. A calabash is a wooden gourd, halved and cleaned for use as a communal drinking pot. Our reliably drunk and supremely entertaining porter (hired by our guide to carry his bags and find us millet beer) ensured that we were continuously thrust into singing and drumming and shouting circles of people who would dip their calabashes into old margarine buckets and oil drums to offer us the millet beer that they loved to see foreigners drinking with pleasure and not from politeness.

Also I have picked up two food habits here that I wish I had begun earlier—since Gambia could have accommodated either one with ease: kebbah and kola nuts. The former is a tree fruit that looks bruised, manky and rotten until it is cracked in half, at which point it reveals some seed clusters that are enclosed by bright orange fruit fiber and juice. They taste remarkably like sour patch kids; consuming the seeds is optional. Kola nuts are widespread throughout West Africa and are given on special occasions or to prominent people as gifts. They are abruptly bitter and crunchy and come in white or magenta/lavender varieties. People seem to disagree about their primary effects. I've heard everything from increased concentration and vivification of colors to intensified sexual potency and stomach settling. I think they taste good. I enjoy the process of eating them, the desiccating potency of their bitterness and the sweetness of water after they are finished.

In Mali I have been focusing my attention on the work of Population Services International, a USAID funded organization that works throughout the world on social marketing issues. I visited their Malian headquarters in Bamako and some of their subcontractors in Mopti; but I do not yet feel that I can begin writing about their activities in anything like a comprehensive manner. After meeting with their cohorts in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso I intend to complete the article.
* posted by Nathaniel at 8:51 AM