http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/1197/23/The-mask-and-the-kanaga.aspx
The mask and the kanaga
As the conflict in Mali intensifies, it is not just the country’s traditional
mausoleums and ancient manuscript collections that may be under threat of loss
or destruction, writes David Tresilian
The publication of a further appeal for the protection of Mali’s cultural
heritage by UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, on 14 January has drawn renewed
attention to the threat that the armed conflict in the country now represents
for its cultural heritage.
In her appeal to the international community and to the French and other armed
forces operating in the country, the organisation’s director-general, Irina
Bokova, called on “all armed forces to make every effort to protect the
cultural heritage of the country, which has already been severely damaged.”
As reported in the Weekly on 17 January, such threats include not only the
reported intention of the Islamist Ansar Dine rebels in the north of the
country to destroy the region’s traditional mausoleums, believing them to be
un-Islamic, but also the possibility that tens of thousands of ancient
manuscripts kept in private libraries could be damaged, looted, or smuggled
abroad.
The danger facing northern Mali’s traditional mausoleums, many of them located
in the cities of Timbuktu and Gao which are occupied by Ansar Dine rebels,
first came to international attention in June last year, with reports that many
of them had been deliberately destroyed. Associated with local folk beliefs or
non-orthodox understandings of Islam, the mausoleums were targeted by Islamist
rebels wanting to impose their views on local populations in many cases
apparently against the wishes of the populations concerned.
According to one rebel spokesman quoted by the BBC in July last year, the Ansar
Dine rebels intended to destroy all the mausoleums, presumably including that
of the 16th-century Songhai emperor Askia Mohamed in Gao, a UNESCO world
heritage site, on the grounds that they could be idolatrous. It is understood
that the destruction is continuing, and UNESCO has placed the ancient city of
Timbuktu, which enjoys international protection as a heritage site, on its list
of properties in danger of destruction.
While the Islamist rebels have thus far stated their intention of protecting
the region’s ancient manuscripts, as revealed in Ayman el-Sisi’s report from
Timbuktu in the Weekly last week, international observers remain concerned
about the survival of the manuscript collections, which are often uncatalogued
and kept in sub-optimal conditions. Even if the collections are not
deliberately targeted by the rebels, the armed conflict in the country raises
the risk of their being damaged by bombing, looted, or smuggled abroad.
However, it is not just northern Mali’s traditional mausoleums and ancient
manuscript collections that could be lost or damaged as a result of the
conflict in the country. In its appeal to the international community to help
safeguard the country’s cultural heritage, UNESCO, acting in association with
the Malian government in the capital Bamako, has also drawn attention to other
heritage elements that may thus far have been passed over by the international
media.
Naturally, the risk to the mosques, madrassas and mausoleums of Timbuktu,
remarkable examples of the traditional earth architecture of the region, has
attracted particular attention, as has the risk to the mausoleum of Askia
Mohamed in Gao, built in the early 16th century and now believed to be in
danger of destruction. However, two further UNESCO world heritage sites in Mali
could also be at risk of damage as a result of the conflict in the country.
These sites, the Old Towns of Djenné and the Cliff of Bandiagara – Land of the
Dogon, are among the most important cultural sites in West Africa. Damage to
them as a result of the present conflict would constitute a major loss for
humanity as a whole.
The mosques and mausoleums of Timbuktu: The city of Timbuktu, today in northern
Mali, was a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout West Africa in the
15th and 16th centuries, and the city’s three great mosques of Djingareyber,
Sankore and Sidi Yahia recall this period in its history.
The Djingareyber Mosque was built by the Malian sultan Kankan Moussa after his
return from a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325 CE and later reconstructed and
enlarged between 1570 and 1583 by the Qadi of Timbuktu, Imam al-Aqib. Its main
minaret still dominates the city today, with a smaller minaret on the eastern
façade completing the Mosque’s external profile. Inside, the Mosque is arranged
around three inner courtyards.
The Sankore Mosque, built in the 14th century, was also restored by the Imam
al-Aqib between 1578 and 1582, the dimensions of the inner sanctuary being
rebuilt according to measurements that al-Aqib had apparently taken of the
kaaba at Mecca during a pilgrimage to the latter city. The Sidi Yahia Mosque is
said to have been built around 1400 by sheikh al-Moktar Hamalla in honour of
the holy man whose name it bears, and it was also restored in 1577-78 by the
Imam al-Aqib.
Apart from these three great mosques, 16 cemeteries and mausoleums have also
been listed by UNESCO as parts of the world heritage site at Timbuktu. These
include the mausoleum of sheikh Abul Kassim Attouaty, who died in 1529 CE, and
the mausoleums of Sidi Mahmoudou, who died in 1547, and Qadi al-Aqfb, who died
in 1583.
Both the mosques and the mausoleums are built using the traditional earth
architecture of the region, in which mud bricks faced with mud plaster are
used, typically with scaffolding timbers also projecting from the facades. The
renewal of the mud plastering each year gives the buildings their
characteristic rounded shapes, with the timber scaffolding lending them a
dramatic spiky profile.
According to reports coming out of Mali last year, the mausoleums of Sidi
Mahmoudou, Sidi Mokhtar and Alpha Moya, listed as part of the heritage site of
Timbuktu, were destroyed by Ansar Dine rebels in June. In December, further
reports indicated that at least three others had also been destroyed, including
those of Al-Hassan and of the Al-Houseyni twins.
In the neighbouring city of Gao, also occupied by the Ansar Dine rebels, it is
the dramatic 17-metre-high pyramidal structure of the mausoleum of the Songhai
emperor Askia Mohamed that has received international protection as a world
heritage site. Built in 1529, the mausoleum complex contains the emperor’s
pyramidal tomb, two flat-roofed mosque buildings, a cemetery and an open-air
assembly ground.
According to UNESCO, it is “the most important and best conserved vestige of
the powerful and rich Songhai Empire that extended through West Africa in the
15th and 16th centuries,” and “a magnificent example of how local traditions
adapted to the exigences of Islam in creating an architectural structure unique
across the West African Sahel.”
Djenné and the Land of the Dogon: Some of the fiercest fighting in the present
conflict in Mali has been around the town of Mopti 460 km northeast of the
Malian capital Bamako at the confluence of the Niger and Bani rivers.
It was apparently rebel attempts to take control of Mopti, believed to be the
northernmost town still controlled by the government, that led to the French
intervention earlier this month to halt the rebel advance. However, a glance at
a map of Mali also reveals that Mopti is close not only to the de facto border
between northern and southern Mali, but that it is also close to the two other
major heritage sites in the country, the Old Towns of Djenné and the Cliff of
Bandiagara – Land of the Dogon, both of which may now be at risk of damage as a
result of the conflict.
The first of these, the Old Towns of Djenné, consists of a set of 15th-16th
century settlements built on hillocks as protection from seasonal floods that
still boast some 2,000 traditional mud-brick houses, along with mosques,
madrassas and other public buildings. The city of Djenné itself flourished
between the 15th and 16th centuries along with the more northerly cities of Gao
and Timbuktu. Because of its traditional architecture and still comparatively
unspoiled aspect, it has been described as “the most beautiful city in Africa”
and a particularly important example of Islamic architecture and urban-planning
in a West African context.
Though continuously inhabited from perhaps 250 BCE, the settlements at Djenné
today reflect the history of the Muslim Malian and Songhai Empires in this part
of West Africa, as do the neighbouring sites of Gao and Timbuktu. Yet, only
some 60 km or so to the east lies the Dogon Plateau, one of the best-known and
most important surviving representatives of the region’s traditional religion
and culture.
–Dogon masks, sculpture and sacred objects subsequently became among the
best-known and most-sought-after examples of traditional African culture
abroad, with the Dogon kanaga, a double cross-like motif found on traditional
Dogon masks and head-dresses and believed to represent the relationship between
the forces of the earth and those of the sky, being adopted by the influential
review Présence africaine as a mark of African identity and cultural heritage.
The land of the Dogon, listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site, consists of a
landscape of cliffs and sandy plateaux with characteristic architectural
elements consisting of houses, granaries, sanctuaries and togu-na, or low-cast
communal meeting-places. Age-old religious and cultural traditions continue to
live in the region, including ceremonies and rituals employing traditional
masks and involving the honouring of ancestors.
Some of these traditions, performed in happier times to visiting tourists, made
the Dogon villages one of the most-important destinations for visitors to West
Africa, though here as elsewhere the success of such events with tour-operators
raised concerns about the debasement of traditional religious practices.
Dogon villages, dramatically placed beneath the towering escarpment of the
Bandiagara cliff, typically comprise square granaries with thatched, tapering
roofs, along with two-level family houses decorated with sculptured motifs. The
large togu-na communal meeting places are believed to have long functioned as
places for debate and decision-making, their characteristic low roofs made of
branches being supported by sculptured wooden poles.
Arms up to the sky: Dogon totemic sanctuaries in which sculptures representing
the ancestors were kept can take the form of caves or niches or specially built
houses. These sculptures, the oldest of which are now prized objects on
international art markets, have long been among the mostly widely recognised
forms of traditional African sculpture, with sculptures made by the Djennenké
or Tellem peoples of the region between the 10th and the 16th centuries, their
arms raised up to the sky as if seeking to touch the heavens, being instantly
recognisable as traditional sculptures of the Dogon.
Ever since the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule studied the Dogon in the
1930s, reconstructing Dogon cosmology through conversations with Dogon elders,
notably one elder named Ogotemmeli that Griaule subsequently immortalised in
his Dieu d’eau, entretiens avec Ogotemmeli (Conversations with Ogotemmeli),
Dogon culture has been perhaps particularly familiar in France, with the Musée
du quai Branly in Paris staging a major exhibition on aspects of the Dogon in
2011.
This exhibition, probably one of the best that this still comparatively new
museum has yet put on, will have come as a revelation to many visitors. Not
only had the organisers, led by curator Hélène Leloup, herself the author of a
standard work on Dogon statuary, managed to gather together hundreds of Dogon
statues, arranging them by date, type and sub-region, but the story of the
encounter between the Dogon culture and French anthropology exemplified in the
conversations between Griaule and Ogotemmeli is surely one of the most
intriguing episodes in the history of western anthropology.
While less well-known, and Griaule’s Entretiens avec Ogotemmeli has scarcely
achieved the fame of the contemporaneous Tristes tropiques, it is an episode
that is of similar importance to the studies carried out by the French
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss of the indigenous peoples of Brazil at much
the same time.
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