The Dogon of Mali, Visited by ancient astronauts?
Down, down into the darkness. The road slipped between two standing stones and disappeared, we followed inching down the winding path.
“The Falaise!” exclaimed Ahmad, our driver. We’d driven over the plateau and now we were on the brink of a giant cliff face, looking southwards into the empty, starless night.
The Dogon people live on the cliffs of Bandiagara, a 200 km long sandstone escarpment in some places 500 metres high. The Dogons are mostly animists who live their lives according to taboos, mythologies, and “secret” knowledge that has fascinated researchers since the1930s.
French anthropologist Marcel Giraule believed Dogon creation myths are informed by an advanced knowledge of the stars, and the solar system. According to Giraule they knew about Saturn’s rings, and the dusty surface of the moon. A link between the Dogons and an advanced civilisation has been suggested. This has created a mystery, a paradox. How could such insular and remote community with “backward” animist beliefs know so much about the universe?
Out of the darkness came signs of life. Ploughed ruts, hobbled donkeys and small camels, loomed in the headlights. We wound through waxy skinned baobab trees until the low mud walls of Nombouri village appeared.
Our hosts welcomed us with a tasty stew. After our meal we gathered in the flickering light of a fire to watch the villagers dance. The village elders sit on bench and the women and children gather round. The talking drums, Bui-na clabash drums and iron castanets strike up and a group of young men began a rhythmic strut. They line up in height order before their chief. They crouch over, their arms dangling in front of their heads as if mimicking an elephant’s trunk. The dancer in front of the chief moves his feet with almost impossible quickness, syncopated rhythmically with the drums. He dances two rounds of beats and then spins away into the darkness, replaced by the next one. The last remaining dancer, the tiniest toddler, makes his best go at it, falls over and receives a whooping reception when he toddles off to the others. The dance symbolises the passage of life into the spirit world and their rebirth into the physical land of the Falaise.
It is followed by another dance where an old hunter lopes through the forest, armed with an ancient gun and his tobacco pipe, taking aim at a beast. The villagers laughed heartily at his performance, although they’ve no doubt seen it many times.
These dances represent the tribes’ stories about their ancestors that date back many thousands of years. The Dogon take part in masked Dama funeral rites, where hundreds of men gather wearing masks, carved in secret. These occasions are these days more commonly performed to tourists than at times of mourning because of the expense of putting them on.
When the evening dancing had finished the villagers disappeared into the darkness.
The morning brought an amazing sight. We were underneath the orange cliffs, stark against the bright blue morning sky. Half way up the cliff, mysterious square shapes could be seen jutting out of the rock. The row of what might have been huts looked like a zip half way up the cliff.
“They are granaries,” our guide Samba said. Much of Dogon life revolves around these stores. The number of granaries in a village denote the collective wealth of the community. Dogons have segregated granaries, the square ones with triangular roofs belonging to the men and the smaller round ones belonging to the women. The men’s stores are divided into four, for millet, sorghum, rice and onions. They have another compartment in the centre. Samba said: “This is for the secrets of the men. Women are not allowed to go into men’s secrets.” In the women’s granaries they keep a little food, their cloth and their jewellery.
We walked out of the village and up to the base of the cliff, following Samba. Samba wore a typical white Dogon cap, much like a triangular Fulani cloth cap, but with strings dangling from the corners to whisk away the flies when the head turns. Standing on a ridge over looking the village he explained, according to legend, how the Dogon came to live here.
During the Fulani Jihads that swept Mali in the 12th century, the Muslim forces destroyed the animist kingdom of Bambara, killing or enslaving them. From one massacre, eight survivors escaped and fled for their lives. After weeks in the wilderness -then the land was then dense forest- a black dog appeared before them. The eight, ancestors of the four modern-day clan families, followed the dog to the cliffs. The cliffs were inhabited by the Tellem people, a race of pigmies who took the fleeing Bambaras in.
Little is known about the Tellem. They lived in the tiny holes dug into the cliff visible 100ft above the Dogon huts, but it’s not clear if they lived in the tiny crawl spaces all the time or just in times of emergency. When the refugees arrived, the cliff was covered in vines that would have allowed the Tellem to get to their holes, but Samba said: “The Dogon say the Tellem were magicians and could fly, they had secret powers.”
The Dogon intermingled with the Tellem people, over the generations the two became interrelated. But the unity wasn’t all harmonious. The Tellem were hunter-gatherers, “first people” without agriculture or herding. They relied on the forest for everything in their lives. The Dogon, however, are pastoralists. To continue their way of life in the shelter of the cliff they had to clear the forest to plant their crops and graze their herd animals. As the trees disappeared, the desert began to creep in. Although Samba wasn’t quite sure when, eventually the Tellem left to find other forests. According to anthropologists they may be the ancestors of the Central African pigmies, who inhabit the forests of Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, many thousands of miles away, superstitions also abound of flying pigmy witches.
Some time after the Tellem left, the Dogon in Nombouri began to move down from the cliff to the plain. As the trees disappeared, so did the predators and the fear that had confined the Tellem to the cliff. They built their village in the shape of a man, with a head, torso and legs. We climbed up further away from the village to the older deserted buildings. The morning sound of the village rang out across the plain; Donkeys, goats, Villagers hollering to each other, a sharp burst of wood flute, and children playing, the Dogon are certainly a noisy people. In the dilapidated old town under the cliffs overhang, one house was kept in good shape, painted in red, black and white triangles. This is the house of the Hogon, the village leader who lives alone and tastes the village water to make sure it’s not poisoned. The Hogon are elected by the clan elders. They only wash themselves twice a year, live alone and are cared for by a servant. The Snake spirit Lébé comes at night, licks him clean and whispers wisdom into the Hogon’s ear. When a man becomes a Hogon he must leave his family and live in solitude.
The Hogons are the guardians of the Sigui, the secret knowledge of the Dogon. The secrets are the stories of their ancestors. According to Griaule, the French Anthropologist, the secrets also included a detailed knowledge of the cosmos. The cornerstone of Dogon society is the Sigui festival that comes around once every 60 years. There the older generation shares its “secret” knowledge with the younger, passes on the stories of their ancestors.
Of the myriad of masks worn during Dogon ceremonies the most important are the Kanaga and the Sirige. Above the face of the Kanaga is a six-pronged emblem, representing the sky and the ground. In between the halves are the land and the people. The wearers of this mask circle the dance all leaping into the air at the same time and twisting their necks, sweeping the ground in circles to symbolise the scattering of life on the on the ground by the creator god Amma. The Sirige enter the dance with a fanfare, their mask is a single carved face up to 15 feet tall which represents Lébé the snake spirit.
The ceremonies represent the renewal of the universe, and are heralded by the rising of Sirius, known to the Dogons as Sigi Tolo, over the southern horizon. The Dogons, Giraule said, could predict its rising with unerring accuracy, a feat of dextrous astronomy.
Giraule was let into the secrets of the elders through his conversations with a blind hunter named Ogotemmeli and his fellow clan elders. The former engineer had arrived one day in 1933 at the foot of the cliff and stayed for 16 years, becoming a circumcised member of the tribe. What Ogotemmeli and other elders told him was shocking and baffling. His 1950 paper The Sudanese Sirius System Giraule revealed the Dogon knew the surface of the moon was dry and dusty. They knew that Saturn has rings, and that Jupiter has four moons.
Also they appeared to know about Sirius’ smaller companion the white dwarf Sirius B -not discovered by European astronomers until 1862, but known to the Dogon as Po Tolo. Even stranger, Giraule wrote, they described an invisible celestial body the Dogon call Emme Ya, the sun of women, which orbited Sirius. Observers have argued for many years about the possibility of a third mass in the Sirius system. The first life on earth, the Dogon elders said, were the Nommo, half human half fish water spirits.
In 1975 Robert Temple, the American Astronomer and believer in the extraterrestrial, posited an extraordinary source for the Dogon’s knowledge. In the book The Sirius Mystery Temple writes that one explanation for this knowledge is contact with a more advanced civilisation, a link between the Dogons and the ancient Egyptians or the Sumerians who also revered Sirus. Or, he suggests, the Nommo spirits are visitors from Sirius itself.
Could the Dogons really have been told of the nature of the universe by extraterrestrials?
During his time with the Dogon Giraule oversaw the construction of a dam on the plateau near the town of Sagat. This dam allowed the Dogon to cultivate onions for market. The women harvest the onions and pound them into little balls, which they dry on the rock for preservation. We walked up to the plateau along the cliff face where the aroma of strong onions radiates off the hot rock. The surface of the rock is marked with little brown circles from previous batches.
It is only the women who harvest the onions, Samba said. “Men only drink millet beer and talk”. The special places for talk are the low huts called Toguna, where decisions are made and disputes settled, in the same way they have done for centuries. The ceilings are low to prevent people getting up and attacking their adversaries.
Overlooking the plane that stretches down to Burkina Faso, at the topmost point of the cliff, is a spot where the elders make sacrifices to the ancestors. They make offerings of black dogs, black goats, and boiled millet, which runs down a kind of alter stone in little white rivulets. The blood of the animals and the white soup mingle on the black rock like the colours on the Hogon’s house. The way Samba said “millet-e cream-e” made it sound like the best thing on earth. As we walked around the onion fields crowds of children followed us, dusty and dirty, they asked for money and food. The women, suspicious of us visitors shouted at anyone who took their picture, perhaps afraid of what the technology was taking from them, or trying to elicit a gift from the wealthy visitor. If super-advanced life forms had visited these people, then they haven’t much to show for it.
The truth is much more prosaic. In his decade living with the Dogon, anthropologist Walter Van Beek re-interviewed many of the elders that Giraule spoke to. Even amongst themselves they disagreed about what the significance of Sigi Tolo, the smaller companion star to Sirius -and even about which star it represented. The timing of the Sigui festival every 60 years, Van Beek says, could not be to do with the rising of Sirius. Scientists have revised its orbital pattern to show it rises every 51 years. All the elders Van Beek interviewed were consistent with one detail. It was Giraule, a keen amateur astronomer and cosmologist, who told them of the star. Giraule was known to take star charts with him on his travels to aide people in their explanation of their beliefs in the heavens, he was aware of the existence of Sirius A, B and had heard unconfirmed sightings of Sirius C. Giraule had made contact with a people who taught him about a way of life almost totally invisible to outsiders. Unbeknown to Giraule however, they too had made contact with him, and learned from it.
The Dogon are a people under pressure. Every year the desert gets a little bit closer, and more people decamp for the city, moving to the trading post of Mopti, or the metropolis of Bamako. The need for firewood depletes the trees around them, increasing the desertification. The road on which we descended into their world was built only four years ago, opening them up to the easy reach of more tourists who arrive with their money and technology.
Sitting on the top of the cliff, looking out over the slow dune sea breaking grain by grain against a cliff that has protected them for so many years, it is not hard to wonder how much longer the Dogon will remain.

Pictures by Hugh Watts