(Drumming and chanting)
West Africa, just south of the Sahara,
150 miles from Timbuktu on the Niger river.
A wilderness of scrub, parched sand and roasting rocks.
Sandstone cliffs run in lines for a hundred miles,
and huddled at their foot, the villages of the Dogon people.
(Speaking Dogon)
"A blessing on your morning." "And on yours."
"How is your health?" "It is well."
"How is your family?" "They are well."
The more important the man, the longer the greeting demanded by ritual.
(All exchanging greetings)
After long wars with people in the more fertile lands to the south,
the Dogon found refuge here.
No one now disputes with them for this parched, harsh country.
And neither Islam, Christianity nor any other alien creed
has yet succeeded in totally extinguishing the intricate beliefs that the Dogon hold
about the nature of their universe and the powers that determine their destinies.
(Speaking Dogon)
An old man draws symbols in the sand, rendering them magical by chants.
Each symbol represents a place, a person, a proposition.
During the night yurugu, the little white desert fox
will scamper across the plot attracted by grains of bait scattered over it.
His footprints will obliterate this symbol, miss that one.
And from such signs the future can be divined,
provided the patterns have been drawn by a wise man
who understands the ways of the gods.
The fronts of the houses belonging to great families are pierced with niches,
each a receptacle for special offerings.
Magically powerful sites are marked with mounds.
Each quarter of the village has its own shrine.
And all such places must be nourished with millet gruel and blood.
But although the West may have had little influence on this village,
the people who live here and in similar remote corners of Africa
have a had a strange impact on the West.
For sculptures that have come from them and other places in the remote parts of Africa
have profoundly changed the ways that the artists of the west have seen the world.
Tribal carvings have been finding their way to the markets of Europe for centuries,
and Europe had dismissed them as no more than bizarre curios.
In 1900, few people in Paris, then the artistic capital of the world,
would have said that such things had anything to do with art,
with the elegant pictures being painted there
by men who delighted in capturing vivid impressions
of the appearance of the world around them.
But a group of young artists were about to start a revolution.
Picasso was among them.
He hung those curios on the wall of his studio
and they struck new, jarring notes in his pictures.
Georges Braque, the cubist painter, declared that African sculpture
had opened totally new horizons for him.
This stark white painted mask, hanging in his studio in 1911,
had been carved in the densest forests of Central Africa.
Today it still hangs in the Paris apartment,
a fuse that once helped detonate an artistic explosion.
Around it stand more tribal carvings.
And among them, other sculptures, ceramics and paintings
that were created by Europeans hands and minds in Paris
but which contain echoes of Africa.
Echoes that have reverberated throughout Europe, from that time onwards.
0bjects like these cracked an ancient and powerful tradition.
For 2,000 years, civilised Europe had carved and painted
in ways that harked back to the naturalistic styles
of the Greeks and Romans.
But here were the sculptures that tried to portray not the outer surface of things,
but their central reality.
Not the visible, but the unseen.
(Tribal drumming)
The sculptures made by the Dogon can hold their place with any from all Africa.
0ften they represent gods,
the ancient beings from whom all Dogon people are descended.
The splendour and variety of Dogon carvings have made them highly prized by outsiders.
And now, 70 years after a few artists in Paris opened our eyes
to the quality of African carving,
they're being treasured by the West
with as much veneration as the work of the West's own artists.
This is Dallas, Texas.
And the opening in the museum of a whole exhibition
devoted exclusively to the sculpture of this one tribe.
It's surely something of a paradox that one of the world's richest cities,
dedicated to the glorification of wealth,
should give such reverential treatment
to the art of a people who, in terms of material possessions,
must be among the world's poorest.
The Dogon themselves do not put their sculptures on display.
These statues are private, secret objects, the dwelling places of the spirits of the dead.
Those belonging to a family are given their tributes
in quiet, enclosed courtyards.
Those which hold within them the fortunes of the entire village
are so precious that they are guarded by the Hogon, the village priest.
He keeps them hidden away within the alleys and courtyards of his own house.
Though the villagers know that he has them, few know just where they're stored.
And the only people who may see them are one or two fully initiated elders
and those who must tend them with sacrifices.
Some of the most ancient and sacred objects are so coated with decades of libations,
that their original shape is lost.
They are so precious that they have to be brought from special hiding places
known to no one at all but the priest,
and placed in the sanctuary with the rest of the carvings, in order to receive their tribute.
(Speaking softly)
(Plucks strings)
(Singing softly)
First, millet gruel.
(Chanting)
"Forgive us, excuse us, unto mulong,
"yunom, melakum, kolowai all you spirits of the bush. "
"Forgive us you spirits of Bongo, our village.
"Forgive us you spirits of Ireli and Tirelli, of Kundu and Sanga,
"of Kani and Kamba, of all the villages of our country. "
(Singing)
The first Hogon came from heaven, the realm of the sun.
When he descended to earth, he had feet of fire.
So hot were they that he had iron sandals to prevent his footsteps
searing the ground and making it forever sterile.
Even today, a Hogon must not walk outside of his village
lest his supernatural powers scorch the fields.
After the sacrifice the whole household must eat the flesh
of the slaughtered animals.
Each person has a particular part of the animal that is due to him.
A wing, a jaw, a shoulder, a leg.
The liver must go to the images.
(Speaking Dogon)
It is little wonder that the Dogon pay so much attention to safeguarding their future.
For they live perilously close to disaster.
Their land is poor, little game browses over these hot sands,
only an occasional solitary antelope.
During the dry season, water has to be carried for miles from wells
in order to irrigate a few small plots in the near sterile ground.
And if the rains fail, the wells may run dry and hundreds may perish.
Many of their most ancient statues have their hands raised to the sky.
A prayer, the people say, for rain.
When rain does come, it fills pools in one or two hallows in the rocks.
Pools that with luck may last almost the entire year,
growing greener and thicker with scum
but full of life... giving water none the less.
(Speaking Dogon)
In these fields these days, the people cultivate onions,
the one crop which they can grow in greater quantities
than they need for their own use.
In February and March, before the heat of the dry season shrivels everything,
the onions are harvested and pounded to pulp.
Dogon onions are traded all over this part of West Africa
and bring back to the Dogon the few things they need from the outside world.
And day after day, women mould the mush into balls
and leave them to dry in the sun and spread their smell over the countryside.
Their other crop is millet, but they seldom have an excess of that
and every grain is carefully garnered.
It's their basic food, and every household has at least one granary in which to store it.
It's by the size and number of his granaries that you can judge a man's wealth.
This wooden door is decorated with a few scratched lines.
But in the past, granary doors were the most richly decorated objects in the whole village.
0n them appeared once again,
the ancestors beseeching rain with upraised arms,
so that the millet may continue to grow and the granary never empty.
Such doors can only be made by one man, a man different from all others.
Alone in the village, he is forbidden to own land or to work it.
He is an intermediary between ordinary folk and the gods...
the blacksmith.
A direct descendant of an ancestor who stole a piece of the sun from heaven
and brought it, a lump of glowing molten iron, down the rainbow to the earth.
Men come to this magician for their tools and weapons.
The priest comes to him for iron images.
For only the smith is permitted to make such things.
Air in the bellows belongs to the living.
Iron comes from below the earth, the realm of the dead.
By bringing the two together, the blacksmith, with his special magic,
forges a link between the worlds of men and spirits.
The son of a blacksmith may marry only a blacksmith's daughter,
for the line of descent from the ancestral blacksmith must be kept pure
and the knowledge handed down only from father to son.
(Speaking Dogon)
"My thanks to you, a blessing on your work, a blessing on your son.
"May Ama the creator bless all in this village."
Young children know little of the mysteries of the Dogon universe.
Their first important confrontation will come when they are circumcised.
And for that ceremony, they must prepare themselves by learning the initiation songs.
(Boys singing)
The ceremony is performed in a sacred cave, high in the cliffs above the village.
Here the boys will also learn the mythological secrets
which will govern their adult lives, and be shown painted symbols,
formulae for the wisdom that has to be passed on to them.
Here and there are symbols of the new world, a motorcar.
But most of the designs are ancient traditional ones
related to images that the boys have seen around them throughout their childhood,
in the natural world, in their village.
They are hieroglyphs, the meaning of which is burnt into the children's minds,
as they endure their ordeal beneath them.
(Drumming)
0nce they have passed through initiation, the boys have joined the Awa,
the society of masks.
(Whooping)
The members of the Awa speak a secret language.
They gain wisdom as they progress through the great cycle of ceremonials
that takes 60 years to come to its climax.
It is they who bring down the sacred masks out of hiding to dance before everybody
in the festivals that mark the important events in the village.
(Screeching)
Every part of the earth on which the village stands
is steeped in significance.
There are corners where no stranger may tread.
Strips of rock which are magically dangerous,
and one place in particular to which the masks must pay special homage,
for there stands an iron image, decked with cowry shells.
A cowry shell is buried at the foot of a baobab tree,
an offering to the spirit of the tree for it's about to be robbed of one of its branches.
(Speaking Dogon)
The blacksmith has been commissioned to carve a mask.
With him has come the head of mask society, the master of masks.
The swollen branches of the baobab contain a lot of wood.
And another smith from a neighbouring hamlet is also in need of some.
Climbing a baobab can be a painful business for its trunk is studded with ferocious spines.
People are not free to wear masks just as they like.
They may only be owned by the members of the Awa
and the right to a particular kind of mask can only be given by the master of masks.
He is responsible for ensuring that protocol is strictly observed.
That no one wears a mask to which he's not entitled.
Nor may anyone make any mask.
Most masks and images can be made only by the blacksmith.
0nly he has the skill or the prerogative.
So after a man has been given the master's permission to wear a mask,
he must commission the smith to make it.
The visiting blacksmith is not making a mask but a statue.
Its shape is already clear in his mind's eye, lying inside the wood.
And he can mark it out roughly so that unnecessary and heavy wood
can be cut away before carrying the log back to the village.
(Speaking Dogon)
The master of masks supervises all stages.
The work must be done in secret,
for no woman or child may see a mask or a statue
until it's brought out at the proper time.
So the work is done not in the village itself but among the rocks just outside.
0nly a few yards away, women are passing on their way to the village.
They know perfectly well what is going on
but no one would dream of being so rude or so shameless as to sneak a look.
(Speaking Dogon)
(David) Pourquoi tous les statues de Dogon...
The master of masks speaks French... this country was once French territory...
and through him I asked the smith what he was carving.
(Speaking Dogon)
"An old woman has died," he said, "and I'm making a statue of her
"for her funeral celebrations."
A statue that will be carried on the head of the chief mourner as he dances.
(Man translating into French)
Why has she got such a thin body? "Because she was an old woman," he said.
(Speaking in French)
But if she was an old woman, then why does she have such young breasts?
(Speaking Dogon)
"To show that once she was a real woman.
"And because her family would like to remember her as she was in her prime. "
II fait la meme chose, comme la vieille femme.
The other smith was carving a mask. A monkey mask, the master said.
(Speaking Dogon)
Was this the first time he had made a monkey mask?
(Translates)
No, he had made three before.
How did he know what a monkey mask should look like?
Was it going to be his own personal invention?
(Translates)
An old blacksmith had once shown him one and told him how to do it.
Apart from the ones he had made himself, had he seen any others?
No. 0nly that first one.
- Seulement ca? - Seulement ca.
The mask must be pierced with holes to take a lattice of rope
which will hold it on the dancer's head.
The actual threading of the rope is never done by the smith.
That is the responsibility of another official of the mask society.
(Speaking Dogon)
It's good. All that remains to be done is to paint it black
with a special vegetable sap.
Some people say that art these days in Africa is dead.
And yet it does seem to me that this mask,
in its simple strength and purity of line,
has much of the quality that many of the older pieces
that are the treasured possessions in our Western museums have.
And yet I know to my certain knowledge, that it was only cut from a baobab tree
some three days ago.
But of course, art with a capital A has very little meaning for the Dogon.
They have no such word for it in their language.
For them a mask like this sculpture is not something to hang on the wall
or put on an occasional table.
For them it is something which has to be seen in a proper context,
on someone's shoulders, surrounded by costume,
in motion, accompanied by the throb of drums.
Only then does is it cease to be a mere piece of hewn wood
and become a powerful symbol that the whole community understands.
And until that moment comes, a mask like this will be put in a sack
and stuffed in some corner in a dusty hut, unregarded.
It's difficult to ask a Dogon if he thinks a carving beautiful or ugly, good or bad.
How do you translate such words?
How can you be sure that they mean the same thing to him as they do to you?
The Dogon don't look at such sculptures as these as ornaments,
but as religious statements.
Their myths, their philosophies
are expressed not in books, nor even primarily in spoken words
but in images.
This stool represents the universe, the earth below linked to the sky
by a giant central tree, the axis of the world.
And on the stool, the first man and woman, created directly by Ama.
The question a Dogon may answer about such sculpture is not, "Is it good?"
But, "Is it correct?"
Not, "Is it beautiful?"
But "Does it speak eloquently of the ancient truth?"
These are Kanaga masks, almost the only ones not carved by blacksmiths.
Each is made by the dancer himself, for his own initiation.
By tradition, after the ceremonies,
many masks were taken up to caves in the cliffs that tower above the village,
there to be discarded.
After the dance was over, they had no further value to the Dogon.
And once hundreds of them could be found
by anybody who clambered up these rock faces.
They have long since been plundered.
It was up here too that the Dogon brought their dead,
to lie among the ruins of ancient buildings made centuries ago
by previous inhabitants of the cliffs.
But some caves do still contain masks, secret caves in remote valleys
known only to one or two of the most important men in the mask society.
Deep in this cleft lies the mother of masks,
which is haunted by the greatest of the ancestral spirits.
It is 20 feet tall and so magically powerful that no man may wear it.
At dead of night, it will be paraded through the village as the climax to a festival.
A festival such as a funeral.
(Singing)
(Gunshots)
The Dogon say that the sounds of their guns are tears for a lost companion.
In staging a mock battle,
the man's relatives portray the life struggle of the dead man,
who fought so hard and valiantly to provide for his family
and to bring honour to his village,
but who was vanquished in the end as all must be.
And yet such an explanation is too simple.
For these funeral celebrations are at once a mourning and a thanksgiving.
A drama and a comedy.
A pageant rich in symbolism, the full meaning of which
is only comprehended by the wisest of men,
and an exciting thrilling occasion that will be the talk of the villages
along the cliffs for months
and will never be a forgotten by anyone who was there.
(Excited shouting, gunshots)
(Singing)
As night falls, whirling bull roarers sound.
It is a confirmation that this night, the mother of masks in total darkness
will leave her cave to give a final benediction on the village.
The pageant and drama continue throughout the night.
(Drumming and music)
- (Gunshot) - (Whooping)
In the blackness, reality dissolves.
Men become heroes from the past
and wooden masks become spirits from another world.
- (Gunshot) - (Whooping)
(Chanting)
The hard light of day evaporates the magic
but in some places you can still catch a glimpse of that supernatural universe.
An old Hogon so aged, that his mind only just retains its hold on this world
and the door of his house, rich with sacred emblems.
Ca. Qui est la? Ca?
The primordial couple, the first man and woman in the world,
children of the god Ama.
(Speaking Dogon)
A crocodile, the symbol of age and of the oldest man in the village
and beside it, a strange headless lizard.
Below that, the sacred tortoise which cares for the family when the man is away.
And above it, Lebe, the twin snakes
that are the movement of water and the falling of rain.
The crook, with which the first blacksmith stole a piece of the sun.
Another crocodile and the lock of the door carved into the shape of an antelope's head
with two straight horns.
0n the pillars, breasts, fertility, a crocodile
and the iron sandals of the first Hogon.
Most people who know Dogon country would say it's virtually impossible
to go into a Dogon village and find a spectacular door visible for everyone to see.
And the reason it's so difficult to find such doors is because
if such a thing as that turned up in say, London or New York sale rooms,
it might fetch anything up to L20,000 or $50,000,
and with prices like that being paid, it's scarcely surprising that most doors and most sculpture
have long since been taken away from the Dogon country.
It's hard to know what should be done about that.
In the vast empty spaces of Africa, it's impossible to police all frontiers
and prevent the export of pieces that a country might want to keep.
And anyway, who is it who can say that people,
lacking so much that money can buy,
should be forbidden to sell their own possessions if they wish to do so?
At any rate, over the past 50 years, Dogon sculptures have left Africa
and they now stand eloquent witness not only to a new way of seeing,
but to a totally different way of living.
- That can't be female, she's got a beard. - I don't know what that is!
- 32? - Yes, kneeling female figure.
- But this must be a hat. - She's got a mask on or something.
Er, you know, you can also see but... It's still great. Look at the earrings on it.
(Woman) This is magnificent, I just love it!
It's not my favourite.
Anything that has that kind of...
chicken blood and grease and whatever and it's been loved and loved and loved,
I've got to appreciate.
- Would you say it was beautiful? - Beautiful?
Imagine people living like that all the time, with that beauty around them,
everything is just functional and just beautiful.
I mean everything is functional and it's meant to be used
and it's utilitarian, and it's a work of art besides.
I love the way the planes meet one another
and the excitement, the coolness, that sort of Marshall McLuhan attitude.
(David) Do you think it's important that people in the West should see these sort of things?
- Yes. - Why?
Why? Because I feel that the juxtaposition of another culture,
makes us know more about ourselves.
(Speaking Dogon)