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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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. 

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