In the Dogon villages
at the foot of the Bandiagara cliff, or perched on the cliff-top overlooking the
great plain that stretches to the Burkina Faso border, young people can always be
found busily writing letters to tourists who have visited them. They fill small exercise
books with captioned drawings of the villages’ tourist trademarks: the masked dance,
the funerals, the water bearers, the togouna (the hut where villagers discuss their
problems) and the separate storage caves for men and women.
For three weeks in May 1999, a week in September the same year and another one in
May 2000, I handed over my digital camera to two girls aged 13 and 15 and five boys
between 15 and 29 so they could extend their efforts at describing this wise and
gentle world to photography.
Dogon teenagers rarely mess around. From a very early age, they are exposed to the
hard work crucial for survival in a semi-arid environment. Since the villagers’ well-being
depends on them and their involvement in a host of daily chores, the classic problems
encountered by urban teenagers are not felt here. If their pictures seem mature,
poised and perfectly framed–almost “professional” in appearance–the reason lies in
the thoughtfulness and care they bring as much to the camera as to their daily tasks.
The boys took the camera with them on walks through the villages, or onto the great
sand dune where in the evening they practice wrestling for the festivities that follow
work in the fields, at the end of the rainy season. They also ventured up steep pathways
in the cliff, piercing through openings in the rock, climbing up ladders made of
tree trunks notched with steps and dangling over the void to reach the storage caves
and grottoes of the ancient Tellem people (see box), where today the Dogons bury
their dead. These are sacred places which strangers are not allowed to visit, but
where Dogon children frolic happily, playing with human skulls and bones, and dressing
up for fun in dance costumes stored in the centuries-old caverns.
The girls did not venture as far afield. They visited their female friends and went
for walks with them, taking photos of their village and their school, where wader
birds and Dogon dancers are painted on the classroom walls. They also photographed
a sandstorm that whipped up one evening behind the high millet stems protecting their
storage caves before putting the camera away moments later to protect it from dust.
Many of their photos were taken in courtyards, which are much more the domain of
the village women than its menfolk. Aside from the unhurried time spent by the girls
in the courtyards, taking shots of their friends talking, teasing and cracking jokes
with one another, there is little difference between the pictures taken by male or
female hands.
Until now, photographic depictions of Dogon life have concentrated on cultural and
social aspects, such as festivities, building styles, crafts and religious activities.
But when the Dogons themselves take the pictures, they barely pay any attention to
these features. The special characteristics of their culture are not the subject;
instead, they serve as a backdrop to much more personal aspects of their lives. They
take photos of their games, the encounters that pepper their daily lives, the long
hours of enforced inactivity stretched out on straw mats or on the scorching rocks
until the terrific heat gives way to nightfall. Or their sorties to gather wild fruit,
brought down from the treetops by throwing sticks, or hunting small animals with
home-made catapults. Every evening I went through the photos, surrounded by a dozen
people peering into the camera’s tiny viewer, and decided which shots to keep and
which to discard to make room on our diskettes for the next day’s shots. Out of 2,000
pictures taken, I kept 70. The Dogons were more interested in seeing the photos they
had taken than in the selection process. Above all, they enjoyed wandering in search
of ideas and being in charge of the camera for a whole day.
These young villagers had no notion of photography aside from the tourists’ legacy:
a few magazines cut out to decorate the earthen walls of their bedrooms, some travel
books about tribal peoples in which they feature, and the sight of foreigners aiming
their lenses at the villages and its inhabitants. An image they never saw, unless
the tourists in question posted a few photos back to them as a memento of their visit.
Given that I was not around when the pictures were taken, the only advice I gave
to the young photographers was what I said as the photos were being sorted out. The
ones we didn’t keep because of a silly look on someone’s face, a bad angle or the
wrong light proved very useful in explaining how a better picture could have been
shot.
Over the course of these miniature advice sessions, the seven photographers started
to pay more attention to angles, framing and light, as in one picture showing an
assortment of items taken from one photographer’s room and arranged on a yellow earthen
step. The Dogons have never seen nor heard of still-life, so they invented it to
depict the colour of objects and adobe, and to show the delightful sunlight that
streams into a room. And wandering in flip-flops along barely discernible paths through
the rocks, or in the maze of passageways where houses stand among huge rocks fallen
from the cliff, or in the quiet of grottoes and courtyards, they also invented the
first photographic record of the Dogons by the people themselves.
These young villagers had no notion of photography
aside from the tourists’ legacy.
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“The Ones We Found”
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Around 700,000 people live in Dogon country, a vast region 50,000 sq. km in size
that stretches from the Burkina Faso border in the east to the area of Sévaré
in the west. The land extends over the entire length of the 150 km Bandiagara cliff,
which rises at times to 300 metres in height.
The Dogon people hail originally from the Manding mountains on the border between
Mali and Equatorial Guinea. As animists, the Dogons refused to convert to Islam and
were forced into exile in the 18th century, moving up the Niger delta until they
reached the protection of the plateau and the Bandiagara cliff. There, they made
contact with a people who lived in the cliff-face and bequeathed their cultural legacy
to the newcomers before disappearing in mysterious circumstances. They were the Tellems;
or, as the Dogons call them, “the ones we found.”
Nowadays, cultural tourism has developed along the great cliff. Encouraged by the
Malian government, this new activity has helped impoverished villages take concerted
action against the spread of the desert and work to improve health and education,
while simultaneously imperilling one of humanity’s most extraordinary cultures. |
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