Drawing tradition: Dogon children's art in the age of tourism

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Enid Schildkrout

On my first visit to the Dogon, in 1990, when I arrived at Sangha, Mali, as a lecturer with a museum tour group, I was told there would be a film showing that evening. (1) Few of the tourists were interested in attending, as this was not on their program, but I was curious. There is no movie theater in Sangha, and I couldn't imagine what film this would be or where it could be screened. As the hour approached, I was directed down the hill to an open field. There I found a large group of men, women, and children of all ages watching Sigui, the series of films on the Dogon ceremony of the same name, made by Jean Rouch three decades before. (2) The images were projected on a white cotton sheet, and the loud whirr of the generator muffled the sound. But the audience was entranced. Sitting in the front row were Jean Rouch himself, the French anthropologist and Dogon scholar Germaine Dieterlen (1903-1999), most elegantly attired, and, on the periphery, members of a Japanese film crew who were making a television documentary about Rouch's return to the Dogon with Sigui. Rouch told me that when he made the films, between 1967 and 1974, many Dogon did not really know what the ceremony consisted of; they simply figured it out as they went along. Now, of course, with the series as a baseline, it is likely that the next sigui will appear to some to be much closer to "tradition."

Many of the adults in the audience laughed as they saw their youthful selves projected on the white sheet. Rouch's films, and others, are just some of the numerous representations of Dogon culture appearing in books, movies, photographs, and travel brochures that freely circulate both inside and outside the culture. Many of these representations are made by outsiders, with various degrees of cooperation from local people--Dogon and other Malians. Dogon people present and represent themselves to outsiders in dance performances, guided tours, and art for sale. The images express how the Dogon experience their own culture and identity; but because they are made for a foreign audience, they also take into account the encounter between the Dogon and outsiders. (3) One form of self-representation that has so far received little attention in the literature of the Dogon are drawings made by children. Depicting landscapes, masks, and rituals, they reveal what the children see as essential and distinctive about their culture. (4)

Using pencils and colored markers, many Dogon children today fill school notebooks with scenes of Dogon life. On occasion these books are offered to tourists. The drawings are about three things: masks, Dogon's distinctive cliffside architecture, and ritual, particularly shrines and sacrifices. They are notable for their realism: masks are depicted in fine detail and as part of total ensembles, with all the props and accoutrements, not as disembodied head pieces sold to tourists. The examples drawn seem to be mainly those seen in the most common theatrical performances, including the satimbe (woman's mask), the bede (young girl mask), the kanaga (bird mask; Figs. 1, 2), the tall sirigi (house mask), the tingetange (stilt mask), the pulloyana (Peul woman) mask, the hunter mask, the goiter mask, and animal masks including hyena, rabbit, cow, monkey, and antelope. (5) The second theme is the distinctive Dogon architecture, including hillside villages and granaries (Figs. 3, 4), the toguna (men's house), and the gina (clan head's house) with its many open compartments. The third theme is the ritual landscape, especially various ancestral shrines covered with sacrificial materials (including millet gruel and chicken blood). There are drawings of the Hogon, or village elder, of senior men, and of chickens being sacrificed on ancestral altars (Fig. 5). All but the last are things that tourists are inevitably taken to see as they do the village tour, either in Upper or Lower Ogol, near Sangha.

[FIGURES 1-5 OMITTED]

Children's graphic art appears in another context: along the ochre walls of circumcision camps. Tourists are taken to a large wall in the village of Songo, where they see drawings of masks, snakes, and various objects associated with legends and rituals. This is the same wall that members of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti described and photographed in 1931 (Schaeffner ca. 1933). (6) Today the wall paintings, still associated with the circumcision camp, are strikingly similar to the ones documented in the 1930s (Figs. 6, 7). As in Griaule's day, after circumcision the boys demonstrate that they have mastered the meaning of the symbols by repainting the images.

[FIGURES 6-7 OMITTED]

While these drawings on walls and in ledger books may simply reflect what is of continuing importance to the Dogon, one must also wonder about the extent to which the world the children are portraying is being constructed for outside consumption, and whether children are participating in a process of reifying tradition for outsiders. If this is the case, what effect does this have on the culture itself? On the surface, the highly realistic drawings in ledger books seem to be accurate renditions of the children's world except for the obvious fact that tourists and other visitors are missing from the drawings.