Bandiagara Escarpment

The Bandiagara Escarpment is a sandstone cliff that runs for about 150 km across central Mali, rising in places some 500 metres above the sandy Séno-Gondo plain to the south-east. Along its foot and ledges cling the villages of the Dogon people, and the combination of dramatic geology, architecture built into the rock and a living culture led UNESCO to list the whole Land of the Dogons, as a mixed cultural and natural site, in 1989.

The first people known to have lived on the cliff were the Tellem, who carved small chambers high in the rock face and buried their dead there, safe from the flash floods of the rainy season; these cave openings can still be seen dotting the cliff above the villages. The Dogon arrived around the fourteenth century, according to their own traditions near Kani-Na and Kani Bonzon at the southern end, and spread north along the escarpment, settling in defensible positions against the cliff wall. Their villages combine houses, granaries for millet and sorghum and, in each village, a toguna, the low meeting shelter for men, roofed with eight layers of millet stalks and deliberately too low to stand up in, so that heated arguments cannot turn into fights.

The Dogon are known far beyond Mali for their masks, their sculpture and a cosmology recorded in the twentieth century by the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule. Masked dances mark funerals and the most important of their ceremonies, the Sigui, is held only once every sixty years and moves from village to village over several years; the last began in 1967, and the next is due to start in 2027. The Dogon reached the Sanga area in the fifteenth century, and it later became the base of Griaule's research.

Getting there

The town of Bandiagara, on the plateau above the escarpment, is about 33 km from the site's reference point, and villages along the cliff are reached from there by rough tracks. The nearest airport is Mopti (MZI), at Sévaré, about 83 km away.