Dogon

The Dogon are an indigenous farming people of the sandstone cliffs and plateaus south of the Niger bend in central Mali, their country cut by the 150-kilometre Bandiagara Escarpment. They speak the Dogon languages, an isolated branch of the Niger-Congo family, and probably descend from groups that refused conversion to Islam and retreated from Muslim-ruled lands; one oral tradition brings them from Mande country near Bamako, and they had reached the Sanga region by the fifteenth century.

Perched along the cliff face for defence, their villages were repeatedly targeted by jihad expeditions and merchant slave raiders, since Islamic law classed them as pagan dar al-harb.

Patrilineal clans are led by their oldest male elder, and traditional religion honours the creator Amma and the water spirits Nommo, expressed in Kanaga mask dances, the long Sigui ceremony cycle and flat-roofed cliff architecture.