The cliff dwellers of the Bandiagara Escarpment — Dogon villages built into the 150km sandstone cliff face, Tellem granary towers above the habitation level, Sigi festival masked dances every 60 years, and an astronomically precise cosmology derived before telescopes
Dogon Country (Pays Dogon) is the region of the Bandiagara Escarpment in the Mopti Region of central Mali — a 150km sandstone cliff face (200m high at its tallest sections) above the wide Seno plain, inhabited by the Dogon people who retreated to the cliff in the 13th-15th centuries to escape the advancing Mandé Muslim empire. The Dogon (population approximately 800,000, speaking a language family with 12-13 dialects that forms its own isolated branch with no clear relatives in any other West African language family) build their villages at the base of the cliff, on the cliff face itself (the…
The Dogon retreated to the Bandiagara cliff in the 13th-15th centuries, displacing the Tellem people (whose origins remain unclear — they may be ancestors of the Kurumba people of Burkina Faso, or a distinct population). The cliff provided natural defense against the cavalry-based armies of the Mali and Songhai empires and later the Fulani jihad (1818-1862) that converted much of the surrounding population to Islam. The Dogon maintained their animist religion (despite significant conversion pressure and later French colonial missionary presence) with remarkable tenacity; approximately 30-35%…