A journey to the Dogon in Mali 1976 – 1977

This time, 1976, we decided to travel by plane to Bamako; from there by ‘public’ transport to Mopti and Sangha where we would meet our guides Amadinge and Dolo Asegrama, and the men who would carry our luggage. There wasn’t any road left other than the ones for walking. Our group existed of several men and women, and six children: two sons of a colleague at the Academy of Architecture and my four children: David, Job, Adam and Gaia.
The first night of the journey to Kundo Ando, the village where we were going to stay, we slept on a cliff under overhanging rocks. The skulls of the ancestors only a few hundred meters away. In the evening Amadinge, an initiate of the Dogon tribe, told us about the spirits of the ancestors. I translated his story for the children. Adam looked at him with an attention in his eyes that told us that the spirits were equally alive for him as for Amadinge himself. We had entered the animist world of ancient Africa.

1976, December 15. Today we walked to Kundo Goumon, one hour to the north from our village Kundo Ando. The journey went through crevices, along steep rocks and some villages, a journey that gives more energy than it takes. That feeling surprises me each time: there is something present in the Dogon region that seems to be the opposite of everything we are used to. Kundo Goumon is an old abandoned Dogon village with only two old women and a few children living there. The water comes from a hole in a rocky wall. The villagers don’t live in a Dogon hut but in a hole. The Tellem constructions stand high above the village on a ledge two, three meter wide as magic signs of a vanished people. The people living here maintain contact with the ancestors: it’s their reason of existence. The ancestors are there: their bones and pots the witnesses. The men have left in search of work.

1976, December 31. While I shit green between the rocks of the Falaise, the red-yellow sun rises above the plain of Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso), that endless plain of sand, scattered trees and fallow fields. Today there is a feast in our village. We bought two hundred kilos of millet for 10,000 FM, and two sheep for 10,000 FM. The sheep were slaughtered this morning and are being roasted now. The kids play with our balloons. The sun gets hot and the sand begins to burn under my feet. The men bring the konyo (beer that they brewed from millet) from all the corners of the village to the fig tree in the centre of the village. It took days to brew the beer in tall earthenware pots above fires. We hope to film the people when they start dancing this afternoon. An old man pours some konyo on a stone near the fig tree. Offering characterizes the life of an animist. To give precedes the getting like a baby’s shitting during birth precedes its drinking, and also dying often goes together with the last offering of the body.

1977, January 1. Saturday morning. Everybody happy? The Italian who gave Alma and me a lift from Napoli to Rome in 1963, asked each time before we entered his car again: everybody happy?
Last night we danced for hours during ‘our’ New Year’s eve, turning around in circles around the tam-tam of some boys which themselves moved also all the time. Alternatively, the song of a man from the male group with the voice of a boy, man and woman at once, got a counter song from and by the group. I danced behind William who danced behind a boy. The women stood apart, intimately together, a solid group, in which not only all the good sides but also the weak sides come together, as Judith briefly summarized their encounter.
An old man was dancing and laughed intensely happy. He was enlightened and liberated – pure joy about the dancing people and the intense integration of us all. His talk with the Ammir was impressive by the gestures, the physical gestures of his thoughts, in which he convincingly communicated: “let the people dance, as long as they are happy to do so”. In this village, people convince each other; they don’t win and they don’t lose; they talk in the same way as they produce their rhythms together. It’s always a dialogue.
The moon disappeared behind the high rock wall. It was about 01.30 h. …the opposite of sunrise, but it remained light. The clouds float in endless movements along the firmament; the stars shine with great intensity, especially Venus. I see the stars transform into great metal hexagrams hanging motionless in the sky as static, surrealistic Dali paintings. I close my eyes and wait. When I open my eyes, the metal balls have disappeared; the stars shine again in all their simplicity, as if we are shepherds. We lay on our dusty mattresses in the sand between the walls of clay and stones with the sky above us. Gaia wakes up: “Moontje, moontje”, she calls and plays with the right-angled flat cover of the chess game, as if she experiences the wood as love.

1977, January 5. During sunrise I went outside to lay on a rock. The sun, hidden by mist, only became visible after it rose above the horizon. While I was laying down like a dog, happily and quietly, I realized how good it is to lay down wherever one wants, as dogs, cats, sheep, goats and chickens do wherever they like. Nobody here is surprised. Everyone does it. My body walks around as if it has regained its contact with the earth: quiet and content to walk without a direction or goal. Kundo Ando became my sacred spot where I would like to be buried as I would like to be buried at the farm. But there is a difference. The farm is my sacred place with links to the family and neighbors, while here the whole environment and all people foster the link with their dead and the cosmos. Their space stretches itself far beyond the visible limits. Their huts are small; their imagination limitless.