Dogon Villages

Alu drove us right up to the church and the adjacent mission house.  As we were unloading our stuff,  Faana, the church caretaker appeared, to welcome us.  He opened the padlock securing the door to the mission house and welcomed us in. It was a stone built house with a living room, three good sized bedrooms, a toilet with shower and a kitchen.  The shower was connected up to a 45 gallon drum perched on a stone pillar built into the side of the house.  There was no electricity and boys from the village brought water up from the well to fill the 45 gallon drum. Over the course of the day the water heated up, so in the evening we could have a warm shower.  The house was clean and comfortable, with mattresses on the iron frame beds and settees and a piano in the living room.  So we spread out our sheet sleeping bags on one of the beds and made ourselves at home.

Faana asked it we had enough food with us. Our standard travelling kit included candles and matches, torches, insecticide, and we had plenty of drinking water left from our Timbuktu excursion, but we had no food. We intended to buy some from the local markets.  Faana generously invited us to his house to share an evening meal with him and his family after the sun went down and we accepted.

The church was still active although there were few members.  Mac’s father, Rev McKinney started the mission in the early 1930’s and the house was where Mac was born and grew up.  In the late 1930’s the Muslims also came to the village to establish a mission and they were more successful.  About 45% of the villagers were Muslims, with 10% Christians and the remainder were still traditional animists.
  
On the drive up we mentioned to Alu that we wanted to see a bit of the village and the surrounding country, including the cave dwellings.  He promised to ask one of the men in the village to be our guide.  Sure enough, as we were settling in a chap arrived.  He said his name was George, but clearly that was just a familiar name for our benefit.   
 
Friday was market day in Sanga so George suggested that we went to see the very colourful, energetic and noisy market.  The route from our house to the market involved clambering down rocky paths and scrambling up short rock faces.  This wasn’t a shortcut this was the village path and whilst we were trying to keep up with George using our hands and feet to negotiate the rocks we were overtaken by women with pots on their heads, babies on the backs and talking to each other. The market stalls were piles of rocks forming pillars over which branches were placed to support a thatch or corrugated iron roof.  Some stalls were formed in the gap between two large boulders with a rough roof to keep off the sun.  Other stalls were formed by walls built using dry stone walling techniques. People had walked over 17km to reach the market and there was a cloud of noise from hundreds of melodic voices meeting, greeting and bargaining.  The Dogon people we discovered like to talk. 

Since we were eating with Faana we didn’t buy any food. We did however buy a big bag of Kola nuts which we knew would be appreciated by the older people we met as we visited the villages on the plateau.  We then walked around one of the villages and saw intricately carved wooden doors with designs depicting the life and history of the Dogon country.  George told us about the fetishes and the stone shelves built into the outside wall of some houses to store the fetishes.  Some walls looked as if they had hundreds of pigeon holes in which were displayed fetishes made from stone, wood, leather, metal, feathers and other things.
  
The mission house caretaker, Faana, returned in the evening to say that unexpected visitors had turned up at his house and they needed to talk that evening.  However he offered to bring us food prepared by his family.  So as we were sitting outside enjoying the afternoon sun he returned with his daughter our evening meal.  After the sun set we sat outside and looked at the stars in a brilliantly clear sky.

We had agreed with George to be up early to make an early start.  Our breakfast, prepared by Faana’s family unexpectedly arrived just after dawn and we found a bottled gas burner in the kitchen and made tea in our mess cans. 

This article is part of a series describing our tour of West Africa
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