africa art

DOGON Mali

15th -21st century AD

front speech clear speech

Amma Nommo

Ogo (fox/jackal) Dama ceremony

kanaga mask sirige mask

pullo walu antelope mask

satimbe mask

Marcel Griaule Ogotemmeli

Germaine Dieterlen Paul Lane

falaise=cliffs

“Dogon country” or “Pays Dogon” east of the Inland Niger Delta is a

very different environment. Instead of rich flat farm land where rice fields

benefit with regular flooding, the Bandiagara Cliffs that stretch between

the towns of Bandiagara and Douentza are steep and dry.

Around the time of the Empire of Ghana (11th-12th century) this region was occupied by people archaeologists called Tellem. They buried their dead in caves in the cliffs. They had a basket and

pulley system to lift the corpse and other funerary offerings up to the caves.

The Dogon arrived in this region around the 15th century CE. They

sought refuge here from wars and the slave-raiding cavalry of the Empire of

Mali and subsequent powerful states in the region. They built their homes up against the cliffs and farmed out on

the plains below.

What you see here are stone and mud masonry granaries (storage bins for grain) safely tucked away up in the cliffs,

not easy to get to.

This is a page from Griaule’s first book (Masques Dogon) about Dogon masquerade. Here he was documenting the movements

of the dancers on the 4th and 5th days of the sigui festival.

In the 1930s, the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule went to Dogon country to do

research on masquerade traditions and beliefs. At first he spent time simply documenting

what he saw, identifying the different characters represented

by the masks, recording the songs, recording the dance steps, and the symbolism of the masks.

As Germain Dieterlen says in the article you are supposed to read on Blackboard, the information Griaule provided in that first book (Masques Dogon) was what the Dogon call

“front speech,” information given to children and strangers. Dieterlen was a student of Griaule’s, and part of a team of scholars who spent a lot of time studying with the Dogon.

Griaule had heard about an elderly blind hunter named Ogotemmeli, who was known as a diviner and knowledgeable elder. In the 1940s he began a series of conversations with

Ogotemmeli to expand his understanding of Dogon religious beliefs or cosmology, what Dieterlen calls “clear speech.” This was published in a later book that focuses on

cosmology called Conversations with Ogotemmeli (translated from the French)

Germaine Dieterlen

Cosmology: Dogon Creation Myth

There are many variations of this myth (and Dieterlen provides confusing details), but here are some key elements:

Creator God Amma brought the world into existence including the Earth from a lump of clay. The first creatures he

created was Ogo who was born prematurely. In some versions he is the result of an illicit sexual act between Amma and Earth

(rape), or the result of incest between Ogo and the Earth (either way something that broke taboos). Ogo rebelled and was transformed into a fox (or a jackal) and lost the ability to

speak. Amma then created four pairs of twins known as Nommo, one of which was sacrificed when they were sent to populate Earth. The surviving twins are said to be the mythical

ancestors of the present-day Dogon people.

These stools with pairs of bisexual twins represent the creation myth visually, with the central post representing the

arc that Amma created and sent to Earth.

Other aspects of the myth include the origin of death among the Dogon — a myth that provides an explanation for the

origin of death, the role of masquerade in accompanying the deceased to the afterlife, and ritual roles for men and women.

The film we watched in class that is posted on Blackboard as African Art video (watch the part about the Dogon again … about halfway through) addresses concerns that other scholars have had about all of this research, saying that while it may represent the very

esoteric beliefs of a small number of elders like Ogotemmeli, all filtered through Griaule’s own beliefs (and possibly leading questions during these conversations), it does not

necessarily represent the beliefs of Dogon society at large then or now.

The fact is that beliefs are complicated and they are understood differently by individuals within society. There is no one single TRUTH about what “The Dogon” believe then or now. So read both Dieterlen and Paul Lane, watch the films, and pay attention to the kind of information they present. Think about how they got their information, who they asked, and imagine what you might want to

ask, if you were able to travel to Dogon country and conduct research yourself.

In the film Samuel Sidibe (then Director of the National Museum in Mali) suggests that foreign researchers, especially Griaule and Dieterlen,

were obsessed with finding mythic origins, and did not recognize that Dogon culture is a “living” culture, like any other, that beliefs change and evolve over time (and space).

Another myth has to do with the origin of death among the Dogon, a myth that also explains something of the

importance of the masquerade. Again, there are different versions of this, but in one version, a woman who

represents the descendants of Ogo (Andoumboulou) discovered some blood stained red fibers (possibly a

reference to menstrual blood or childbirth) and put them on to scare some Dogon men. At first they were

frightened (in mythic tradition, men are often petrified of menstrual blood), but then they thought it would be fun

to put on these fiber costumes. According to Ogotemmeli, death among the Dogon was originally a

transformation from human form to that of a snake, and from speech to silence. In this tradition an elderly Dogon man was in the process of transformation when he saw the young men wearing these red fiber costumes and he

was horrified because of the danger. He cried out, something that broke the taboo of transformation into a snake, and he died immediately, and this was the origin of death among the Dogon. In addition, this also explains the importance of the red fibers that are a critical element of Dogon masquerade costume, possible more important

that the individual masks. Every generation puts on those red fibers to atone for the sins of those first young men,

and this then condemns them to death as well.

Great Mask = sigui (sigi)

Every 60 years, the Dogon celebrate and remember that first

ancestor who died with a special performance known as Sigui (Sigi).

The huge mask created for this ceremony

represents a snake. The French “discovered” the

remains of 9 such masks in these sacred caves where they were stored. Do the math, this would mean that

the first one was carved and danced some 540 years earlier, that is,

about when the Dogon arrived in the region in

the 15th century. There is often some

historical truth in oral traditions.

This is a photograph of some of these sigui masks “collected” by

the French in the 1930s and brought back to Paris where they went into the collections of the Trocadero Musee de l’Homme

(Anthropology Museum), now the Musee du Quai Branly

A variety of Dogon masks on display in a museum

Dogon masqueraders performing for a dama, a funeral ceremony

SIRIGE: a tall checkerboard plank mask

• Stars in great numbers, infinite galaxies in the universe

• Ogo’s journey to Earth • the path of the Nommos’ ark • many-storied family house

(reference to many generations)

above: a page from Griaule’s Masques Dogons, that shows representations of

sirige masks on the walls of painted caves

KANAGA: • Movement of Amma’s hand in

creating the world • A bird (stork)

Compare these drawings of this kanaga dancer to the movements of kanaga

dancers in the different films

Met Museum Mask (Kanaga) 20th century Dogon peoples One of the most popular types of masks in the Sanga region is the type known as kanaga. Like other Dogon masks, kanaga masks are worn at rituals called dama, whose goal is to transport the souls of deceased family members away from the village and to enhance the prestige of the deceased and his descendants by magnificent masked performances and generous displays of hospitality. In 1935, French anthropologist Marcel Griaule witnessed a dama ritual in which twenty-nine out of a total of seventy-four masks were of the kanaga type. These masks are characterized by a wooden superstructure in the form of a double-barred cross with short vertical elements projecting from the tips of each horizontal bar.

This kanaga mask was collected in Mali by Lester Wunderman, complete with its costume elements. When the mask is worn, the back of the dancer's head is covered with a hood of plaited fiber fringe at the bottom edge. The dancer wears a vest made of black strip-woven cloth and red broadcloth strips embroidered with white cowrie-shells; strands of glass and plastic beads dangle from its edges. The kanaga dancer also wears a pair of trousers made of indigo-dyed, strip-woven cotton cloth, over which he ties a long skirt of curly, loosely strung, black-dyed sanseveria fibers and short overskirts of straight red and yellow fibers. For a traditional dama, the preparation and dyeing of the fibers are undertaken with as much secrecy and ritual as the carving of the wooden mask.

During the time spent by Griaule among the Dogon studying their complex belief system, he was initially told that the kanaga mask represents a bird with white wings and black forehead, but he later came to see this literal interpretation as characteristic of the first level of knowledge, that of the uninitiated. The deeper meaning of the kanaga mask apparently pertains both to God, the crossbars being his arms and legs, and to the arrangement of the universe, with the upper crossbar representing the sky and the lower one the earth. The disparity between these two interpretations illustrates the gaps in our understanding of Dogon art.