The Tourist
Mali, West Africa 2000 : A Dogon village in the Bandiagara
We had climbed from the bottom of the escarpment to this village at the top. Our guide said that only he knew of some of the places we visited, but it was hard to believe him when this Dogon Dancer had obviously seen white tourists with cameras…surely not someone with a pistol, though. Maybe that meant that he had watched television on his visits to the settlement of Bandiagara.
The young men of the village performed a masked dance for us and the villagers gathered to watch, laughing and chattering as they waited. They were as interested as we were. The men make their masks in secret; they don’t want the other dancers to copy their ideas. I don’t know if the Dogon choose one man who has made the best mask, but our guide liked this man’s mask the best. Alberto collected masks and had never seen a ‘white man’ mask before. He admired the use of the pistol and camera and offered to buy the whole costume, but the price was too high.
The village was small and consisted mainly of tiny, pointy-roofed storage buildings…about the size of a telephone booth. The people slept in the open or under an open-sided roof. There are many caves in the escarpment, but in thinking about it now, I don’t think they would sleep in them. They believed the spirits of their ancestors lived in the caves.
P.S. You can’t see the wooden pistol the man was carrying. He had one.