Bandiagara

The Dogon plateau was settled long before the town existed. Cliff-face dwellings and granaries above the villages belong to the Tellem, who lived along the escarpment before the Dogon arrived, and the Toloy before them; the Dogon tradition holds that they came to the cliffs from the south-west and settled the rock face and the plain beneath it.

Bandiagara itself is said to have been founded in 1770 by Nangabanu Tembély, a Dogon hunter, and grew as a market and a seat of power on the plateau above that older landscape. In the mid-19th century the Toucouleur conqueror El Hadj Umar Tall, who had broken the Bambara kingdom of Ségou and the Fula state of Massina, died in a cave at Degembere in the escarpment in February 1864; his nephew and successor Tidiani Tall made Bandiagara the capital of the Toucouleur empire that same year, and the dynasty ruled from Bandiagara and Ségou until the French conquest at the end of the century. Under colonial rule and after independence the town served as an administrative centre for the surrounding Dogon communes, its name — roughly "large eating bowl", after the communal dish meals are served from — attached to the escarpment as a whole.

From the 1970s the escarpment became one of West Africa's best-known walking destinations, and Bandiagara the place where guides were hired and treks began. UNESCO listed the Cliff of Bandiagara in 1989. That trade ended as the insurgency that followed Mali's 2012 crisis spread into the centre from 2015, bringing jihadist groups, self-defence militias and inter-communal killing to the plateau. The town was still insecure in 2018, with attacks reported on hotels used by UN staff, and nine soldiers were killed and nine wounded in an attack on a police station on 25 February 2021.

Bandiagara is the town of the Dogon, a people known worldwide for their masks, their architecture and a cosmology recorded — and much argued over — by French ethnographers from the 1930s. Mask societies perform the dama dances that guide the dead out of the village, and the Sigui ceremony is held roughly every sixty years along the length of the escarpment. Each village has a hogon, a spiritual leader, and a togu na, a men's shelter whose roof of stacked millet stalks is deliberately built too low to stand under, so that an argument cannot turn into a fight.

Dogon building is part of the culture rather than decoration: square houses of mud brick, granaries with conical thatched caps, shrines set against the rock, and cliff structures left by the Tellem above them. Carving in wood — doors, granary shutters, posts and stools — is the work of the smiths, who with the leather-workers form the two endogamous castes that stand apart in Dogon society.

The town is not only Dogon. Fula herders, Bambara traders and other communities live in and around it, and many Dogon are Muslim or Christian while keeping older rites. Relations between herders and farmers were long governed by agreements on grazing and water, and the breakdown of those arrangements lies behind much of the violence of the past decade. Bangime, a language isolate spoken by a few thousand people in villages of the area, is one of the strangest linguistic survivals in Africa.

Bandiagara is a small town — far smaller than Mopti or Ségou — of mud-brick houses, sandy streets and a market square, with about 17,000 people counted at the 2009 census and numbers since swollen by families displaced from villages around it. It is the service centre for the plateau: the market, the administrative offices, the health centre, the schools and the lorry park that connects the Dogon country to Sévaré and Mopti.

The surrounding economy is farming on thin, rocky soil. Millet and sorghum are grown for the household in small fields between the boulders, and onions and shallots, planted in tiny irrigated plots watered by hand from wells and from the Yamé, are the cash crop, dried and pressed into balls and sold across Mali. Goats and a few cattle are kept, and craft work — carving, weaving, blacksmithing and, once, work for visitors — supplements the harvest.

The conflict dominates daily life. Armed groups impose rules on dress, schooling and taxes across much of the Bandiagara area, villages have been besieged or burned, schools have closed and large numbers of people have fled to the towns. The trekking economy that once employed guides, cooks, drivers and campement owners has gone, and with it a substantial part of the town's cash income.

The plateau eats millet. Tô, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum pounded in a wooden mortar and cooked to a firm paste, is the daily meal, eaten by hand from a communal bowl with a sauce of baobab leaves, okra, sorrel or onions, sharpened with soumbala, the pungent fermented condiment made from néré seeds. Rice appears on feast days and in town, where it is cooked in a tomato and oil sauce with meat.

Onions are the plateau's signature crop and also its flavouring: the small purple-red shallots of the Dogon country are dried, pounded and rolled into hard balls that keep for months and are crumbled into sauces. Fried bean fritters, fritters of millet dough and grilled mutton are the street foods, and fish comes up from the delta at Mopti, smoked or dried.

Drinks follow the seasons and the household's religion. Strong green tea boiled with sugar and poured in three rounds is the ritual of hospitality, as it is across the Sahel, while in villages that keep the older religion millet beer, brewed by women and sold in calabashes, accompanies work parties, funerals and mask ceremonies. Baobab fruit, tamarind and hibiscus are made into cold drinks in the hot months.