I have just come back from a twelve day trip through Mali, a final taste of West Africa before flying home friday. Mali was amazing. Mali was the name of an ancient empire that ranged across West Africa after which the country was named; the country was also seat of the famed Manding empire, and has been a hub of cross-cultural trade, flourishing art and high culture for as long as anyone can remember. In the south the people speak Bambara, which is quickly becoming the lingua franca of the country, and much of French-speaking West Africa. Most people also speak french in the big cities, which is nice, because there are so many ethnic groups that collide all over the place that it would be tough to know which language to speak even if I had bothered learning more than a few words of each. From the desert nomads, the Tuareg, to the north, to the pastoral Peule, or Fulani people, who range from Mali to Nigeria, to the Dogon agriculturalists, to the Bozo fishers, to the Bambara speakers of the south, Mali is amazingly ethnically and linguistically diverse. It still doesn’t rival Ghana, home to 79 distinct languages (not including dialects), but it’s pretty amazing. And each one is steeped in a history deeper than I can understand. Even on the surface this ethnic diversity gives a sense of how ridiculous the colonial project of dividing up countries using arbitrary lines is.
I left Tamale with my friend Kat at 5am heading to Ouagadougou. We hopped a trotro to Bolga, then a shared taxi from Bolga to the border town of Paga, crossed the border into Burkina Faso, then hopped another shared taxi to just barely make our ten o’clock bus from Po to Ouaga. In Ouaga we got our Malian visas and enjoyed the baguettes, commenting again that the French had managed to do one or two things right by instilling a love of good coffee and bread in their colonies. The British seem to have had remarkably little concern for good food.
The next morning we were up early again, catching a bus from Ougadougou to the northern city of Ouhigouya (wa-yi-gou-ya) where we met a guide, James, who would take us through Dogon country. We crossed the border at Thiou, and enterd Mali at Koro, where we spent the first of many nights sleeping on a mattress outside. The days in Mali are hot right now, but the nights are beautiful and cool. Many Malians asked me if the moon was really as beautiful in other places as there, and some had a hard time believing it was. I met several people who swore Mali was the only country where you could really see the stars. Or maybe it was just the only place they figured people bother looking at them.
The next morning we caught another trotro from Koro to Kanikomboli, on the edge of the Bandiagara escarpment. From the we started our walk, four days, three nights, along the escarpment and up its side onto the spectacular plateau. We stopped in villages at midday, resting three or four hours in the withering heat of noon. The temperatures often climbed above 45 degrees, and there was really nothing to do during the midday heat but eat, drink beer and sleep. The villages along the bottom of the escarpment are mud brick buildings, with wood stuck through near roof level to support the mud that form the roof. The bricks are a sort of sand, clay, straw mix, much like cob (with probably slightly less concern for proportions), formed and dried in the sun. They are then cemented together using a clayish mortar, and plastered over. This area of Mali is renowned for its Sahel mosques, and every village we passed through, despite being a remarkable feat of traditional architecture, had a beautiful, awe-inspiring mosque in it. And these were only the babies of the one we later saw in Djenne.
The best thing about the bottom of the escarpment, though, is the ancient villages. Although the Dogon have now moved onto the plains, their ancient villages are still tucked into grottos on the edge of the escarpment, quite a trek up from the ground (especially when you think of carrying water or grain). When the Dogon arrived at the escarpment, about six hundred years ago, fleeing the rise of Islam in the Manding empire and seeking to retain their traditional animistic practices, they followed the star Sigui (Sirius) along the Niger River, then headed south to the escarpment. When they arrived, the land around was populated by two groups of people, the Tellem and the pygmies. The pygmies inhabited the forest around the escarpment, which was at that time lush and plentiful. The Tellem lived in the cliffs like the Dogon eventually did, only they built their structures higher. Some Dogon believe the Tellem could fly, because even thinking about accessing those places now would require someone with some pretty serious climbing skills. As our guide explained, though, in the days of the Tellem there was enough vegetation around that they would climb vines and trees up the cliff face to store their goods. He also explained that they didn’t actually sleep in the structures, they just stored their food and goods there.
The Tellem structures obviously provided the inspiration for the more complex Dogon buildings: the Tellem built small mud structures around the caves and grottos in the cliff face. While we were wandering in one of the ancient villages I saw dozens of little mud spider homes, all empty, built onto the rock. It struck me as obvious where the Tellem had learned to build their dwellings. They lived as spiders do in the cliff walls. When the Dogon came along, driving the Tellem out and cutting down trees to start agriculture, they still built their dwellings into the cliffs for protection from animals, but they adapted the building idea, using the mud brick technology they had imported from southern Mali.
On our second day we climbed up the escarpment through an anachronistically green and cool canyon. We got the top of escarpment and stayed the night at a village calleed Begnemoto. Looking out over the plains below, from the top of the escarpment, probably about 200 metres up, it’s difficult to understand how anyone can live there. The soil is quickly turning to sand as it is used intensively, and though animals are kept and their waste carefully returned to the soil, it is not enough. Every year there is less soil, more desert. Although I have read that colonial practices, the emphasis of cash crops over subsistence agriculture, had a serious impact on desertification, destroying traditional checks and balances that kept the Sahara at bay, I have no idea whether this holds true for the Dogon people. This is a group of people, after all, that cut down all the trees to make way for agriculture. The rising population here means that this land can’t not be farmed. People need every ounce of food they get from this place, even if that means destroying it in the process. It’s a funny, fucked up cycle.
The houses on top of the escarpment are stone, adapting tradition to available material, and equally beautiful. We spent two nights on the plateau, and eventually descended back to the plains through a village called Dorou, where we left our guide, who was great, if a little too into partying (but then his job is to walk around a beautiful place and spend the nights with friends, so who wouldn’t be party-focused?) and caught a ride down to Bandiagara.
From there we went to Mopti, where, finding our intended hotel full, were led by a guide to a god-awful little Fisheries Ministry guest house. We were too tired to argue and the room had a fan so we shrugged and paid the $10 for it (Mali is not as cheap as Ghana). It was a concrete box so ridiculous after the beautiful stone and mud structures of Dogon Country, that just cooked when the fan wasn’t on. Of course there were much better places in town, but we were too tired to go looking. We wandered around Mopti a bit sat and had a beer that afternoon in a little restaurant and planned our trip to Djenne. Mopti is at the confluence of the Beni and Niger rivers, and although the town itself isn’t much, is full of trade from Bamako to Tombouktou.
The next day we headed to Djenne, down the Beni river (which was basically dry near Djenne) to see the famous mud mosque. This mosque is the largest mud-constructed building in the world, and is a truly remarkable building in a truly remarkable city. Djenne itself is ancient, founded by the same group of people who founded Tombouktou, and populated by families who have been there since the dawn of time. As one American guy we met said, if your family hasn’t been in Djenne for two thousand years, you’re not really from there. The whole city is constructed with mud, beautiful architecture that doesn’t rival the mosque, but complements it. We wandered around tiny alleys, and little courtyards, really feeling like we’d stepped back about a thousand years. While the tourist strip down the middle of Djenne is a little obnoxious, since everyone’s asking you for something, we found that stepping out of that people were incredibly friendly and interested in us.
We stayed in Djenne two nights and returned to Mopti to do a trip on a riverboat up the Niger river for a night. We visited the ancient village of Mopti, on the opposite bank of the Beni as the city, and then spent a night on the bank of the Niger, sleeping in the sand. We ate Capitaine (also known as Nile perch) from the river and drank wine and stared at the stars. It was only waking up the next morning, looking around, that I realized what I was looking at.
Humans have been in West Africa for such a long time it’s impossible to imagine it without them. But that night on the river we didn’t have to hide our food, because no animal was coming to take it. We didn’t have no clear a space to sleep, because it was sand as far as the eye can see. The human footprint on this area, that we call the Sahel, is so heavy that there is nothing, except maybe fish and mosquitos, not there by human design. All over Mali, Burkina, even northern Ghana, people are adapting the landscape so completely to their uses that nothing that doesn’t fit into this scheme remains. Seems like we might have a parallel for . . . almost everywhere else in the world. But we can see the results here, the increased desertification, decreased soil productivity. By making the land what we think we need, we kill it. Another paradox of progress: the more we take for ourselves the less we have.
