8 December 1997 | Summary by Jacob Gelt Dekker

At midnight, on the rhythm of clacking finger-gongs, a monotonous high-pitch chant of the village griot rapped the birth story of the new moon. Tribesman fell in with cascading hums. Women's feet rattled dull roars on hard and dry desert soil. Matchstick thin adolescents' legs danced and jittered under quivering bodies in every faster rhythms.

Masks, gateways to the supernatural, communicated with the other forces, those of love and those of death, the sacred and the transcendental. Nietzsche said, " In song and dance man become members of a higher community. He has forgotten how to walk and speak; he is about to take a dancing flight into the air. His very gestures bespeak enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, just as the earth yield milk and honey, so from him emanates supernatural sounds. He feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like to the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams."

Djigoubombo, the entrance to the Bandiagara escarpment, Kanikombole, Ende, Tell, Nombori and Bamba, primitive villages in a 200-kilometer long canyon, have been household names for Africa-philes since French anthropologist Marcel Griaule made his famous Dakar-Djibouti trip in 1931 and re-discovered the Dogon. Sometime in the 13thcentury, Dogon, ambitious Middle Niger raiders, entered Bandiagara valley, replacing local Tellem cultures. Who the Tellem were, nobody knows. Tellem graves tell a story of traders, highly skilled in forgery and pottery, small of body-size often thought of as pygmies, and, considering their nearly unaccessible cave dwellings, they must have been ferocious climbers. But in 1979 William Fagg, another famous anthropologist, still remarked sneeringly: "There is little more warrant for the very existence of Tellem, than for Trojan origin of British kingship".

Hundreds of caves in the steep escarpment wall hold Tellem remains of thousands. For centuries, Tellem were buried in their family dwellings with stone and iron artifacts and, depending on status, rich collections of woven woolens and cottons, all since mummified or petrified by the dry hot desert winds. Dwellings of dead and living were the same. The dead lived amongst the living and the living amongst the dead. Only masks, as human-nonhuman interface, may protected the living from wandering restless souls of the recently deceased.

Much later, Muslims and Christians introduced segregation of the living and the dead. Egyptian dualism of life and death was brought along by Judaism, after it was incorporated into the new doctrines of Islam and Christianity. Today, Dogon live in neat villages, well distanced from the necropolis of cliff dwellings.

Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy at Cornell University, noticed to his utmost surprise that Dogon hold that the planets as well as the Earth rotate around their axis and revolve around the Sun. They hold that Jupiter has four satellites and that Saturn is encircled by a ring. . . Unlike every astronomer before Kepler, the Dogon are said to depict the planets moving correctly in elliptical, not circular orbits. Dogon contend that Sirius has a dark and invisible companion star which orbits Sirius. . . . once every fifty years. They state that the companion star is very small and very heavy, made of a special metal called "Sagala".

In all absurdity, Sagan, with racial arrogance and contempt so common for Western scientists, suggested that the Dogon got hold of Stanley Eddington's book, The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1928, and worked the astronomical facts back into their myths and ritual celebrations. Therewith, Sagan preferred to ignore that sigui, Dogon' s ritual celebration of the star fonio( Sirius B), was held every sixty years (fifty plus ten for the old Mande system of numeration), far before Eddington lived or was published.

The Dogon hold their science a secret It is only in the conundrum of night, in the pitch dark of full moon when patronizing strangers are far removed, that the griot dares to invite the deceased from their caves. With them he recites the long tales of observations and derivations of the lives of planets and stars, all they learned from the Tellem and what the Tellem learned from the cultures in the East. . . . thousands of years ago. . . . long before Marcel Griaule, William Fagg, Stanley Eddington and Carl Sagan existed and their ancestors could read or write.