A dancer bends forward until the top of his mask touches the dusty ground, then swings upright in a single sweeping arc. The mask is a kanaga, a flat wooden shape with two horizontal bars and short vertical arms, painted in black, white and red. Around him dozens of other masked dancers move to the beat of drums. This is a Dogon funeral ceremony on the Bandiagara cliffs of Mali, and the dancers are escorting the dead out of the village.
The escarpment and the Awa society
The Dogon live along the Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone cliff that runs for about 150 kilometres in central Mali. Their villages sit on the plateau above, the scree slopes, and the plain below. The area was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1989 for both its landscape and its culture. Masks among the Dogon belong to the Awa, the society of masked dancers made up of initiated men. Members learn the dances, songs and a secret language connected to the masks. Women and the uninitiated are expected to keep their distance from certain stages of the rituals.
The kanaga and the dama
The kanaga is the most recognisable of the Dogon masks. Interpretations vary: some say the shape represents a bird with outstretched wings, others a creator god pointing to the sky and earth. The dancer’s swinging movement, touching the mask to the ground, is one of the most striking sights of a Dogon ceremony.
The masks appear above all at the dama, a ceremony held some time after deaths in a village to send the souls of the dead to join the ancestors. Until the dama is performed, the spirits of the dead are believed to linger and can cause trouble. The ceremony can last several days.
Other masks and the sigi
The kanaga is one of many types. The sirige mask carries a tall plank that can rise several metres above the dancer. Other masks represent animals such as antelopes and hares, and characters from Dogon society, including people from neighbouring groups. Once every sixty years the Dogon hold the sigi, a great ceremony that moves from village to village over several years. It marks the renewal of the world and the passing of generations. The last sigi began in the 1960s.
Tourism, conflict and masks abroad
For decades visitors came to watch masked dances, and some villages staged performances for tourists. Since 2012, conflict in central Mali has made the region dangerous, and tourism has collapsed. Many Dogon communities have suffered from violence and displacement. Dogon masks and carvings have been collected since the colonial period and are held in museums in Paris, New York and elsewhere. Their bold geometric forms influenced European artists in the early twentieth century.
Outside Mali, a kanaga mask usually hangs still on a museum wall. On the Bandiagara cliffs it was carved to swing, bow and touch the ground, carrying the village’s dead toward the ancestors.
