The Dogon people live in the area of the Bandiagara Escarpment, a cliff 1000 ft high and 125 miles long. Dogon villages are located atop the cliff, at the base of the cliff, and in some cases, on the side of it. The Telem people lived there before, high up the face of the cliff; the Dogon use these sites to bury their dead.

We arrived in Bandiagara, the largest Dogon town about 45 km away from the cliff, at the end of the drive back from Timbuktu. We'd seen plenty of goats on the trip, but we'd seen mostly sheep on the menu. We asked Kone about this, who pointed out that about half the "goats" we'd seen were actually sheep, like the ones pictured here. Since it's so hot, they don't grow much of a coat. The flavor of sheep is much preferred by the locals to that of goat. So, all you Biblical exegetes, it turns out not to be so easy to tell the sheep from the goats.

We visited Songho, a small village nearby. Here are some mud bas-reliefs on a wall. It's a common form of decoration throughout.

This granary is accessed on a typical "Dogon ladder", a forked branch with steps carved into it. Several animal skins hang on the wall, fulfilling some voudoun function.

Songho has a large "circumcision grotto", where the ritual takes place. It's decorated with many images.

One of them reminded me of a cellphone or something. These markings are what we would call gang graffiti. There are five families in Songho: Yanoge, Karambe, Guindo, Degova, Seva. Our guide said he was Yanoge. This wins him the right to be in the first group to be circumcised at the ritual. They are sequestered thirty days afterwards. I think he said he was 14 at the time. Ritualized child abuse does seem to be the universal in human culture, doesn't it? It's impossible to avoid abusing children by somebody's standard. You could almost lose custody of your kids in America for allowing them to sleep in your bed, so paranoid has the culture gotten at physical contact between adults and kids; but in most parts of Africa, putting your kid in a separate room with only a Baby Cam to keep him company is considered as neglectful as a prom mom putting her baby in a dumpster would be here. It occurs to me that circumcision fits also into the category of Tobacco and Meat and War — another ritual practice that has fallen into the maw of the American economic monster which Decontextualizes, Hypermarkets, and makes into an Addiction.

Kone is holding a percussion instrument from the stash behind the rock wall. The other fellow is our local Dogon guide. Saga Tours is pretty diligent about picking up local guides to fill in details about the places we visit. I hope they got a good portion of the money we paid Saga Tours. The boys being circumcised shake these instruments. Women aren't permitted to hear them. But the guidebooks say that white women tourists can since they are so far outside the loop.

This man is making rope...

... out of plastic from old tarps or bags or something.

Bas-reliefs of Dogon masks.

One of the village mosques. I think the Dogon are losing their attention span. Monotheism is religion for the dilettante, people whose minds are one bit deep, too shallow even for detailed superstition, let alone the truth.

We drove to Sangha, a village at the top of the cliff, to spend two nights. This is Golfis, our local guide. He speaks five languages: Dogon, Bambara, Fulani, English, and French; but, as a matter of specialization, seems never to have considered that the moon goes around the earth and the earth around the sun, or the relative sizes of those bodies. This came up when we distributed glasses and tried to describe what an eclipse was. Golfis is 50 years old. He also wouldn't make any sort of connection between his six kids and his observation that there isn't enough food. When I mentioned that Mali had 11 million people and almost no arable land, he said, no, there is lots of land; but when talking about the economy of his village, it was all "we can farm between June and October but the rest of the year there is nothing to do." And then, putting children through school on a tourist guide's salary. Tourists get such a distorted idea of Mali life from tour guides. From what Kone talks about, the consciousness of a Malian is concerned entirely with circumcision and selling weavings. This is obviously not so. I learned a few things from Golfis: a sheep costs 30,000 CFA, and a 100 kilo bag of millet costs 20,000 CFA and will last a family of 8 for a month. Sheep meat costs 1000 CFA per kilo. I took Golfis for Muslim at first because he did not seem to be particularly inside the Dogon religion; but Kone clarified the matter for me our last day with him, by asking Golfis if he had yet become a Muslim. "No," said Golfis, "I'm still free."

Check out the shirt.

Sangha had a truly massive baobab tree. The bands you see across it, and most baobab trees, is a scar from where bark has been removed. They even circumcise the baobab trees.

This soccer ball has seen better days.

The oldest man in a Dogon village is designated as the "hogon", and lives in a special house. This building was on the site of the hogon's house. As usual we don't know what we're looking at.

Nor do they...

Men hung out in these shade structures during the day. Here they are playing oware, a common game with rocks in slots forming a circular track, somewhat like backgammon. Kone, of course, found them unsalvageable idlers.

Women beating millet in large mortars. I notice just now that Golfis is giving them a cadeau at the start of the video clip, as a way of managing their digital rights.

Dried onion-green balls.

A Dogon village on the side of the cliff.

We walked down the face of the cliff on a trail whose upward traffic was mostly women with large loads for the market day in Sangha.

Each of us had two volunteers helping us keep our balance on the walk down the face of the cliff. They aren't really needed, but full employment is an elusive goal. They all want us to write to them, where "write" means "send stuff", and they come pre-loaded with these little business cards. Meet Binla Bolo, of the Sangha Village of Bongo via Bandiagara, Republique du Mali. A discourse upon the Compagnie Chirurgicale Mobile: in places such as China and The Philippines, the extraterritorial t-shirts you see people wearing are mostly overruns from the factories that customized volumes of swag commemorating the 58th Annual Hutchinson Kansas Volunteer Fire Brigade Barbecue. But Mali doesn't make t-shirts; their cotton industry was deliberately destroyed by the World Trade Organization to preserve the cotton dominance of the Confederate States of America plus Bakersfield. The same thing has happened to their rice industry. Rice in Mali may only be grown for export. The rice on my shelf reads: Premium Quality Jasmine Rice from Mali; but the rice on Binla Bolo's shelf, if he has any, is imported from China. Fortunately, any market distortions will be remedied by a giant tax dodge managed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have Binla Bolo's interests firmly in mind. He had better hope that Whole Foods doesn't make millet all popular in the U.S., or his family won't be able to afford to grow that, either. When you go to Africa, take a suitcase full of clothes to give away or barter. We didn't think to do this, but we saw evidence of other tourists who did, including the chirurgists and somebody from Fox News.

Shout out to Yessa A Sangara and the whole of Classe 8e Année.

In Timbuktu, the sand hanging in the air made a halo around the sun which was dark on the inside. A few days later in Dogon country, there was another halo around the sun, but this time there were several white lines in the sky as well — one going through the sun, and two others intersecting it. Very strange.

One village at the base of the cliff had a crocodile pond.

Many villages had shops selling masks. The presentable ones were in front, and the ratty ones, that you were meant to think were antiques, were in back rooms such as this one.

We handed out a few eclipse viewers.

The focal point of our visit to Dogon country was the traditional dance. A group of older men sang, while brightly dressed younger men danced. This dance is a reconstruction of dances performed on serious Dogon occasions, to which we aren't invited.

Is there any record of Busby Berkeley or Carmen Miranda having attended Dogon dances?

Goiter masks.

Hyena and rabbit masks.

Children making onion balls.

It was market day in Sangha, and we took a look around. I spotted some indigo fabric that had a design looking like a total eclipse, and expressed interest. Soon, I was mobbed by various women selling fabric. I held out for the one I liked the best.

We took it to a tailor, who made it into a shirt and delivered it to our hotel in about two hours, for about three dollars.

Ostrich eggs on a mosque in a Dogon village.

Our guides showed us around the cliffside houses. I think that the tourist industry must be near the top tier of employment in West Africa. If you can't make a living, your choices are diaspora, either to the south to work on plantations, or north to Morocco and hopefully bussing tables in Europe, accented with occasional suburban Parisian riots. I can see the guy in this photo throwing a brick, can't you? Will it be a cartoon of Mohammed or a gay couple that sets him off? (The photo isn't representative, actually he is a nice person and will with luck grow up to manage a guest house and subscribe philosophically to taxi-driver-libertarian.)

Our other guide. He was called away before we had a chance to pay him; I hope that he got some of the change. It's hard to imagine, when being transported up and down cliffs by swarms of sure-footed Cute Kids, that Mali hasn't become a major locus of sex tourism. Is the funnest way you can think of to destroy, no, wait, utilize in the market economy, the childhood of the kids who don't get to be guides, to kidnap them and sell them to be exploited as slaves on a Ghanaian cacao plantation? This happens, by the way, a lot; a lot more than Vietnamese teenyboppers hang with Gary Glitter. Sit down with a nice cup of coffee or hot chocolate and think how proud you are not to be a pedophile.

Mudcloth for sale in another village.

Somebody's little pet egret or ibis or stork. (Some birder write to us and say.)

Speaking of birds, an abyssinian roller on a baobab tree.

The roller in flight.

Weaver nests up on the cliff.

Elaborate ladder-inspired pillars.

Meat and mudcloth.

On to Ouagadougou & Tiebele