Continuing my blog post from last week, I will explore how the “past” or history has marked itself on Dogon Country (land of legends and mysticism)'s landscape this week. Let's begin with a simple skeletal time line of the Dogon Country, which should then reveal itself how the past actually has heavily influenced the present landscape or architect of the Dogon Country.
3200 BC In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years ago.
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Approx 1300 The Dogon people migrated here from the surrounding plains in about 1300 AD as a refuge from other groups entering the area introducing Islam. Today 35 per cent f Dogon people are Muslim but most still follow their traditional religion. A small minority are Christian.
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1490 AD Around 1490 AD, fleeing invaders and/or drought, they migrated to the Bandiagara cliffs of central Mali. The concentration of Dogon villages of the Bandiagara escarpment are one of the most recognizable sights in Mali.
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1862 AD Doors of grain-stores are decorated with carvings and paintings of figures that represent the celestial ancestors of the Dogon.
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1893 AD After the French arrived in this year, slave raids ended, and the Dogon expanded into the plains around the plateau. This migration severed the Dogon from their religious sites, paving the way for Islam and Christianity.
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1920 AD The invading French colonial powers finally managed to 'pacify' the Dogon in 1920, but thereafter almost completely ignored this tiny, isolated, resourceless , semi-desert patch of the vast territory of French West Africa.While their distinctive civilization was able to withstand these military onslaughts, modern tourism is proving to be much more powerful than any invading army, as a force for change.
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1931 AD They gained the attention of the Western world through the publications of Marcel Griaule, who traveled through Dogon country during the famous Dakar–Djibouti mission in 1931.
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1960 AD Formerly known as the Sudanese Republic, Mali finally gained independence and became the Republic of Mali in 1960.
I think the best starting point to record the “past”'s footprints on the Dogon landscape is their escapism from the Islamic spread during the 1300s, approximately 700 years ago. Originally, the ancestors of the Dogon came from Mande, an area in southwest Mali and northeast Guinea that was home to the thirteenth-century Mali empire. The Dogon people migrated after the empire's collapse to the cliffs of the Bandiagara plateau – resulting in the nowadays striking images of villages perched along the escarpment. As I mentioned last week, Mali’s Dogon tribe as a race fled southward into their current home, the Bandiagara Escarpment, to escape slave raids from Muslim kingdoms to the north; because the Dogon were on the run from the physical spread of Islam, they wanted their new settlements to be highly secured; therefore, instead of constructing houses at the base of the cliffs or on the flat lands of the hill tops, they built their villages into the cliff faces directly! - resulting in today's prominent architectural landscape of the Dogon country, a direct example of how the past influences the present day. An interesting fact is that the Dogon people weren't actually the first ones to do this type of “built-in” houses. Before the Dogon arrived here, the previous inhabitants – the Tellen, had already built their own villages into the cliffs, and the remains of these ancient dwellings can still be seen high up on the falaise. Nobody is quite sure how the Tellem actually reached their houses, but it's possible that the escarpment was forested back in the days, so they could have climbed trees, or they could have dropped ropes from the top of the escarpment and climbed down! Whatever it was, these Tellem houses definitely built another layer of “past” full of weird mystique to a landscape that's already quite strange.
Moreover, the complex Dogon cosmology is made materially manifest in both villages and house form. The Dogon House, for example, is described by historian Zahan as repsenting a human being, stretched out on his right, his procreative side, a position which is equally that of the man on the conjugal bed and of the corpse in the tomb. Increasingly, more and more Dogons are converting is Islamic religion, which results in mosque being a new feature of many Dogon villages, once again an example showing how the past connects to the present in Dogon landscapes.
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