Bandiagara: Mali Reveals Its Utterly Remote Escarpment

On a recent trip to Mali in West Africa, en route to Timbuktu, I spent time at the painfully remote Bandiagara Escarpment on the edge of the Sahara.


Don't doubt it - its a truly difficult place to get to! You require intent, stamina, persistence and a touch of Indiana Jones and even then its not easy. It has to be one of the world's remotest spots - the Sahel, on the Southern fringe of the Sahara, lost in time and geography. This is Bandiagara.

Its almost a thousand kilometres from Bamako, the dusty, putrid capital of Mali - which itself is truly in the middle of that distant place called Nowhere. And it represents the one major topographical point of interest within thousands of square kilometres of nothingness. The Bandiagara Escarpment - an exuberance of rock face some 150 km long and thrusting out of the Sahara to between 100 and 200 meters high. It comes upon one suddenly; it jerks you out of your somnolence brought on by endless hours driving through drab, dry, flat, baobab strewn reaches of this almost forgotten part of Africa.

If one is travelling by air from Europe, you will probably arrive in Bamako on Air France from Paris. Important advice: Use the five hour flight to prepare yourself for the cultural buffeting that will accompany the heat and smells that overwhelm you as soon as the Airbus opens its doors. Don't linger in Bamako - its a ghastly backwater that only serves to bolster any afro-pessimistic tendencies that you may already privately harbour. Unless, that is, you are a seasoned Africa hand - then perhaps linger for a day or so and dip into the markets, food houses and, for the fabulously brave, the taxis. Not for the faint-hearted is Bamako and yet not by a long way, the worst Africa has to offer. But this piece isn't about the delights of dusty Bamako.


Let's move on, Eastwards, towards Mopti, spectacularly miscast as the "Venice of Africa" (its own obscure fantasy) baking on the sultry banks of the barely moving Niger River. From Mopti its a couple of hundred kilometres to Sanga - and along the way one gets the sense that something is about to happen. The terrain breaks up. The monotonous flatness gives way to movement. Small streams wind through dry valleys flanked by verdant green plantations of onions - yes, onions! In a land where almost everything is scarce and a potato might well represent a meal, they grow onions! A hundred years ago or more a Scottish missionary taught the locals the joys of onion farming and they have never looked back! The crop is dried, pulverised, made into darkly ominous and odoriferous cakes and exported to Senegal and Burkina Faso where, if the locals are to be believed, it is considered something of a delicacy.

Sanga is the end of the road. It exists in splendid, sweltering solitude on the very verge of one of the most exceptional and spectacular sights in Africa. The plateau on which you have spent the past few dreary days suddenly and dramatically terminates and falls away at ninety degrees from itself over the edge of a magnificent escarpment, hurtling down hundreds of feet to the desert below. Nothing prepares one for the suddenness, starkness and drama of this place. The vista is endless. You are standing, toes-over-the-edge, on the Bandiagara Escarpment. There's a hollow silence and a pervasive feeling of remotenessand solitude - a lost-ness unlike anything I have experienced elsewhere. To the south, Ouagadougou. To the north, Timbuktu. In the middle, you. Truly, you have now reached the very middle of Nowhere.

Ancient stories, myths of a people with the powers of flight, ancestor worship and a tradition of beautifully carved masks and doors pervade the area, now inhabited by the Dogon people. The Dogon have survived in this inhospitable, distant place for centuries. Today there are just a couple of hundred thousand of them grouped in tiny, medieval mud-villages along the rim and the base of the escarpment. Indeed their survival has depended on the remoteness of their location. It is said that they fled the central plains ahead of slave raiding sorties by the Muslim empires north of Bandiagara.

Life hasn't changed much for the Dogon. Their tightly-knit villiages evoke a sense of timelessness - people living a medieval subsistence existence in the 21st century. One gets the impression that a time-traveller from Jesus's time walking amongst them would feel perfectly at home in these little villiages with strange, mysterious names - Ireli, Amani, Ourou or Nombori. A simple existence, no electricity, mud-packed dwellings, subsistence farming on arid plots of land that wait patiently for erratic rainfall, water drawn by hand from deep wells and a sense of community and tradition linked to ancestors and, in the case of the Dogon, foxes.

Yes, foxes! Fox divination is a unique and integral part of the Dogon culture. Priests divine portents and answers to the questions and concerns of villagers from the pattern traced by the tracks of night-prowling foxes over a grid-like matrix which the diviners scratch into the red sands of the Sahel. The process is intricate. Each square in the grid contains a question represented by small mounds of dirt or little sticks left for the fox to disturb as is walks over the grid, thereby leaving an answer, decipherable only by the priests. Chants and incantations prepare the grid for the foxes overnight passage and after close examination in the early morning light fox-truths are revealed by the priests to a hushed gathering of Dogon faithful.

Amongst these people, the seeming sophistication of western lifestyles is far removed. One moves, quietly, through the Dogon villages, guided by a local, almost reverently, apologetically. One is hesitant to take photographs lest some unexplained taboo be broken. This is their place, and has been for a long time. It has an authenticity of its own, born of a deeply simple, traditional, eked-out lifestyle, undisturbed for centuries. An lifestyle long since erased from our hectic urban existence. And yet one can't but feel an acheing sadness for these lonely people whom time has left stranded in an archaic existence at the base of their wondrous escarpment, on the fringe of their desert, under their burning sky. But it is not just the Dogon and their villages that are astounding, there is something more - something that staggers belief.

Incredible as it may seem, the Dogon weren't the first inhabitants of this remote precipice. That distinction goes to an untraceable, ancient culture, veiled by time and cloaked by myth and legend - The Tellem. Legend has it that the Tellem were small, pygmy-sized people who inhabited the area until the early 14th Century when they were forced out by the arrival of the Dogon. No record exists of where they came from or what brought them to this place. The single most amazing feature of the Tellem's tenure at the Bandiagara Escarpment is that they built their tiny mud dwellings high-up into the sheer rock face of the cliff itself. Standing beneath the escarpment, looking up at the cliff face, one battles disbelief as you realise that on every minute ledge and in every minuscule cranny in the soaring rock, ancient people built perilously delicate mud enclosures which served as dwellings. Large numbers of these ephemeral little places still exist today, hundreds of feet up the cliffs, completely inaccessible except perhaps to highly experienced rock climbers or an abseiler descending from above. No wonder the Tellem were said to have possessed the power of flight. How else would they have been able to reach their rock-face eyries? Not since visiting the rock-face dwellings of the Anasazi in the deserts of Arizona have I felt so awed.

Bandiagara, Sanga, the Dogon and the Tellem - strange, distant places and peoples, disconnected in time and space from our modern paradigm. Painfully lonely and remote. The haunting experience stays with one long after leaving the Escarpment. Indeed, years later it remains one of the most profoundly memorable experiences I have been fortunate enough to have had.

Back in Bamako, boarding the Air France Airbus, requires a forced mental readjustment to the here and now. It is difficult to believe that the Tellem, the Dogon and the jet are of one planet. Once home, a strange inner calling beckons one back to the photographs taken during our trek throught the Dogon villiages and in a deep inner way it would be comforting to simply be back there.