George turned up with a trainee guide and a porter.  It was exhilarating stepping out over the rock of the plateau in the early morning sun when it was cool and refreshing. We passed through a couple of villages, walking up a gentle incline. People were stirring with daily chores as the sun rose. Women were already up and about and heading toward village centres and wells carrying pots on their heads.  Herds of sheep and goats were nudged toward grazing grounds by small boys and men with hoes set off for the onion fields.

Nimbly as mountain goats George and the other guys negotiated a twenty foot scramble which we struggled down carefully.  As we walked toward the edge of the falaise, George in the lead, the two young men helped Margaret to scramble down short rock faces and through steeply descending natural tunnels.  Here George recounted the local legend of an argumentative and unruly local man who became increasingly violent.   The Dogon elders finally decided that this man had become an unacceptable threat to the community and he was banished to one of the natural tunnels.   The paths threaded through spectacular rock falls where we ducked through crevices between gigantic boulders the size of three storey houses. 

Then suddenly we emerged onto a ledge teetering on the brink of the precipice.  The view, south across the plain to Burkina Faso was breathtaking.  George pointed to a distant line halfway to the hazy horizon.  That, he said was an encroaching wall of sand from the desert.  The farmers had planted trees to try to slow the creep of the sand but every year it moved steadily toward the fields and the farmland.  The path across the face of the cliff seemed a bit adventurous until we gingerly rounded a corner and saw kids scampering all over the rocks.  When they saw us approaching the ran over to greet us clearly absolutely at home skipping over edges and ledges hundreds feet above the jagged rocks below that would mean certain death for the unwary. Peering apprehensively over the edge, George showed us a deserted village at the base of the cliff.  Most people, he explained now lived either on the plateau or on the plain.   

As we toured through more villages we saw burial sites where the bodies of families were interred in natural caves.  The entrances were bricked up with loose stone slabs so that the grave could be opened up to place another body inside.  For some reason there was a gap left in the entrance wall of each grave so that you could look in and see the skulls and bones.  Though very private people the Dogon stopped to talk as we walked through their villages.  We chatted to the local headmaster who had taught George to speak English.  He recounted the tale of the Tellem people, whom it was said fled to this site 1077, about the time of the Norman conquest in England.  This was when the Empire of the Soninke Kings was at its height.  This Empire had sophisticated administrative systems, tax collectors and border controls. The capital city also boasted stone built houses. It seems the political development of Africa and Europe was on a par at this point in history. He was very interested in our journey, where we had come from, what we were doing in Gambia and where we planned to go.  As we chatted, women with bowls on their heads walked with sure footed certainty up rocky paths to a small plateau where a group of five women were pounding grain. Their synchronised pounding in one large pot looked for all the world like a party of bell ringers.   

In one village we walked through a large long natural tunnel where there were food stalls set up.  As we approached the far end, walking in the gloom of the cavern, there was a group of young girls singing together.  The intense sunlight at the entrance momentarily blinded us and then an amazing sight opened up. We stood gazing at a vision of beautiful rich green and stunning blue. The bright green of terraced onion fields was contrasted with the intense blue of pools and streams of water, all set off by an immense and flawless pale blue sky.  After the drab surfaces of the rocky villages and the dim interior of the tunnel this looked like a vision of Xanadou.

On a path between onion fields separating two villages we came across an old man tending divination tables drawn in the sand.  The man drew lines in the sand to make small oblong areas.  Then he stuck straws, twigs and stones in various configurations within each rectangular area.  Finally he buried ground nuts strategically in the table.  He explained, through George, that foxes came at night and rooted around looking for the nuts and in doing so disturbed the arrangement of the table.  From this scattering of the contents of the table the old man could predict the future for his clients. 

We returned to the mission house for lunch.  In the afternoon we explored another part of the plateau where there were extensive terraced onion fields and large ponds of irrigation water where the people fished.  This area was some distance from the busy villages we visited in the morning. Here there were abandoned villages which seemed almost intact but eerily quiet.  Given the scarcity of building materials I was surprised that the buildings had been untouched by people building or repairing houses in the other villages.  George explained patiently, as if to a backward child, that the spirits of the people who lived in the deserted village were still there.  To remove or desecrate their homes, or disturb the community burial sites, would bring untold misfortune on anyone ignorant enough try.

Our route back through Sanga in the pleasant early evening light took us past the new mosque.  The Imam and some of the elders were resting under a mango tree and I was greeted warmly as I approached. After greetings and a gift of Kola nuts to each man we discussed the progress being made in converting the locals to Islam.  The Imam said the Muslim community had been growing steadily for the past seventy years but the Dogon were proud people with strong animist traditions.  His eyes twinkled when he said Allah was understanding and patient and there was plenty of time!

We walked up some concrete roads recently built by a French development organisation to open up the Dogon country to tourists and hopefully stimulate a new source of income to benefit the area. There were also new schools built by the Mali government and a new health centre in Sanga, sponsored, built and maintained by an Italian charity.

The early morning sun the next day flooded across the plain and lit up the ochre cliff face with a warm yellow orange light, scattering shadows of trees and stone buildings.  From the top of the road which curved off of the plateau and hairpinned down and down into the plain we gazed across at the full extent of the cliff face.  We could just make out the village on the edge of the cliff where we saw the children cavorting above the abyss.  Casting our eyes downward we could clearly see the stone houses and the conical mud brick granaries of the deserted village at the base of the cliff.  Away from the base, the busy settlements of the plain stretched out to the south like tiny matchboxes randomly scattered on either side of a dusty road on which a tiny plume of dust was raised by an invisible vehicle. 

Returning our gaze to huge light brown cliff face we searched for the fabled villages of the Tellem.  As our eyes adjusted to the light they swam into view. We were completely knocked out by these incredible constructions.  There were three storey stone houses, the same colour as the cliff, built into enormous caves and fissures. The architecture of the cliff villages included smaller buildings and large conical granaries.  These improbable buildings were erected about 1000 years ago by the Tellem people fleeing from invading armies.

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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. 

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The Dogon Country is in southern Mali, immediately south of Timbuktu and on the border with Burkina Faso.  It is a mountainous rather than a desert region, with people living on a high plateau.  At one side of the plateau a cliff face drops hundreds of feet spectacularly down to the plain below.  The Dogon people are very private and don’t particularly see the need to share their culture and community with strangers.

It is said that they migrated there from Egypt in 1480 to preserve their animist beliefs from the spread of Islam. It’s not that they are unfriendly, they will smile and chat. But they are not comfortable with people wandering into their villages taking photographs of them and their houses.  Perversely this makes the Dogon country very interesting.  Over the last five centuries they have successfully guarded their animist way of life, living in stone build houses in the rocky landscape and so it is possible to visit an ancient African culture.  Certainly various Christian and Moslem missions have arrived to try to convert the Dogon but they have not been largely successful. 

So we wanted to go to Dogon country next and we discussed the pros and cons with Mac.  He told us that we could spend a few nights in the old mission house in Sanga, where he had been born. He grew up there with his missionary parents.  They were Americans who had travelled out in 1933 to live with the Dogon people in the village of Sanga and try to establish a Christian community.  In that they were moderately successful, there was a small church in the village run by the locals.  The old mission house was still there and the Christian community had plans to turn it into a kind of a hostel for travellers. Mac said we would be welcome to stay there for a few days at minimal cost.   That sounded good, so he made a few phone calls to people he knew and arranged for a man with an old four wheel drive truck to collect us the next day.

Alu, the man with the truck turned up just after breakfast.  He was a friendly looking guy in his mid fifties, who smiled broadly as we shook his hand.  Alu helped us to load our box of bottled water and our rucksacks into his truck and we said our goodbyes to Mac and the other travellers and then set off.  Steve and Joyce and their thirteen year old daughter Debbie, the Canadian family, seemed to be slowly coming to terms with the poverty and deprivation in Africa and were a bit more relaxed and talkative. We wished them well with hopes that Jeff would eventually turn up so that they could spend Christmas together as a family.

The road to Bandigara, the gateway to the Dogon Country, was quite good as we headed south east towards the mountains.  As we climbed, the desert scrub was interrupted by occasional outcrops of rock and the road twisted and turned, the altitude allowing better views of the yellow and grey dusty landscape.  Bandigara was a small town with the simple rectangular mud brick houses with corrugated iron roofs which were so common in Mali.  Most of the travellers heading for the Dogon pass through here.  Some use it as a base for trekking or climbing, some stop to find a guide. Once we reached Bandigara and turned off toward Sanga we found ourselves on fairly rough mountain roads.  We were now in Dogon country which encompasses the plateau, the falaise (cliffs) and the plain below. 

Our destination, Sanga was high on the rocky plateau.  The rocky road twisted and turned with spectacular views of rich greenery, and intense blue pools and stretches of water, which we later found was onion fields and the results of irrigation.  We quickly realised that the Dogon are cheerful happy people who to love to talk.  Their pleasant sing song language always made us smile and their greetings were long and complex.  The greeting started as the other person approached, reached a crescendo when they passed and tailed off as they went their separate ways.  Alu would suddenly start a greeting, from the car, to a man on a bicycle heading toward us, who couldn’t possibly hear him. No doubt the man on the bicycle had also started greeting Alu.  As they passed Alu wound down the window and slowed down.  The happy melodious rapid fire exchange of greetings flowed backwards and forwards as the cyclist passed, waving.  The greetings continued as we parted, Alu turning round to get the last few salutations off.  All this occurred as we inched along the narrow rocky roads, with boulders on one side and substantial drops on the other. 

At a village a very old looking man with walnut wrinkled skin, sparkling eyes, brown teeth and white hair sat, under a wind twisted tree.  Wearing long brown robes, a skull cap and woven shawl he lifted a hand in greeting.  Alu asked if we could give him a lift and we readily agreed.  As the old man climbed into the front seat he sang out a long series of greetings and salutations.  The rhythm was similar to Wolof but we had no idea about the language, but his lustrous eye contact and smiling face invited a response.  So we chimed back in all the Arabic and Wolof greetings we knew, some of which he understood, most of which flowed right past him.  It didn’t really matter; it was the exchange of mutual greetings which was important.  After several minutes the verbal exchanges subsided into a satisfied silence.  Alu turned round and said.

 ‘He says thanks for the lift.’

We smiled and nodded.  We dropped the old man off just as we entered Sanga in the early afternoon. 

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