Dogon people

The Dogon, 400,000 to 800,000 strong, hold the Bandiagara plateau and escarpment of central Mali, south of the Niger bend, with kin in Burkina Faso. Their languages form an independent branch of Niger-Congo, related closely to nothing else. Fleeing old wars into cliff country, they built villages of mud mosques, granaries with sculpted facades and Tellem cliff dwellings stacked above, farming millet on rocky terraces. The Dogon are famed for the Sigui procession held every sixty years, for mask dances in which the Kanaga bird and Satimbe sister spirits whirl, for wooden sculpture of kneeling mothers and horsemen, and for a cosmology of the pale fox and the Nommo water spirits that gripped French anthropology. Tourism changed much since the twentieth century, but mask carvers, Hogon priests and onion growers of the plateau keep Dogon country itself. Bandiagara's cliff villages draw travellers from every continent, and mask dances still close the dry season in village after village.