Dogon

Dogon villages cling to the Bandiagara escarpment of Mali, where the people by tradition retreated to escape Islamization, reaching the Sanga region in the 1400s. They hold that a single creator, Amma, made the world, and that the Nommo, twin water spirits shown as human above and serpent below, are ancestral beings.

The dead are honoured with mask dances. Every sixty years the Sigui festival marks the first death of an ancestor, who died in the form of a snake, with a new great mask.

Blacksmiths, said to descend from the first smith, mediate between the living, the ancestors and Amma. Muslim slavers and jihadists treated the Dogon as unbelievers who could be raided, and the cliffs sheltered their villages.