My taxi ride from Mopti to Koro basically came down to being my only first-hand experience of the Dogon country. Of course, I was hardly ever going to set my own foot on the Dogon soil, but from my privileged seat in the car I had a good view of the stark and unforgiving landscape we were passing through. At least on the face of it, you couldn’t exactly claim the God had blessed the Dogon with the paradise on Earth to live in. But then again, home is always a home and maybe they would have vigorously disputed my claims and reservations about what I saw. However, I wasn’t among those who were going to envy them. Whichever way you looked there was an apparently arid land, or an outright rocky terrain where even weeds must have had a tough time to grow. Only once in a while you would spot a baobab tree and the best the country could offer in terms of vegetation were some sinewy, half-scorched bushes of the variety you could see in Sahara, too. Or at least that’s what they looked to a non-expert like me.
And yet, undeniably so, there was some haunting beauty and twisted serenity to those vast expanses that met my eye.
And then, the vegetation would thicken in places somewhat and you would start seeing people, mostly women with those trademark baskets on top of their heads, their children and domestic animals – mostly goats - cavorting by the roadside. Just where people are, there are their settlements, as well, and we passed through villages with such names like Djigouibombo and Kanikombole. Not even travel guides listed them into existence in the mind of a western traveller.
Then the landscape got barren again and once more it felt like we were snaking across the surface of Mars. With a lot of rocks and red dust, this place really more belonged on Mars than on Earth as I knew it. Except for the road, which was even paved a great deal, and an occasional lone bicycle rider, you would be excused to think that you were on another planet.
Because this was Sahel where temperatures could occasionally soar up to blistering 45°C. Luckily, it was right now „cold“ period so we had freezing 35°C or so. You didn’t have to be a geographer to know that water here must be what gold, or oil, is in other parts of the world.
And yet, in this arid land, only sparsely dotted with tiny oases, the Dogon had created one of the most intriguing cultures of Africa. Travel guides focus on local architecture, cliffs dotted with caves and similar things. But I had known about the Dogon much before my decision to swing by into this part of the world. And not for what travel guides tout, but for the fact that their astronomy obviously vastly surpassed in knowledge what arrogant and self-centred general opinion of modern-day western world usually deems possible in such far-flung and old civilisations. I still remember the book titled „The Secret of the Sirius B“ which had long disappeared from my shelves and was now probably gathering dust elsewhere. It told a story of a twin-star to the shiny Sirius which can’t possibly be seen by a naked eye from our planet. Even our modern astronomers learned about its existence relatively recently. For the Dogon, that star had ceased to be a secret centuries ago.
To the utter dismay of modern-day scholars who seem to be at their most comfortable when denying that there was any serious scientific knowledge before what we call „modern age“, and particularly if that knowledge includes something we’ve not even discovered yet, the Dogon mythology seems to speak of the four satellites of Jupiter, Saturn’s ring, the spherical shape of the Earth, the central position of the Sun in elliptical orbits of planets, the spiral structure of galaxies and the fact that we were in one of them... all the things for which advanced western civilisation at the same time happily lit bonfires with an occasional heretical scientist to spare on top.
So that was the country and the people I now had no time to visit. But I decided I owed it to myself to return here one day, whenever my inner voice would guide me back.
On the face of it, of course, just as entire country of Mali, the Dogon land was poor and often just having its first taste of what we in the west for decades had been taking for granted. There was this small town – or village - of Bankass that we passed through, which had not been electrified before 2006. And they proudly announced that fact on a roadside signboard.
And when some two and a half hours later we finally arrived in Koro, the local centre, a main town of the „cercle“, the name for some administrative regions in Mali, I found another signboard proudly announcing that Koro, too, had got its electricity grid only in 2006.
This was basically the last stop in this direction for all those who didn’t intend to cross into Burkina Faso. This way, this was as far as you could go while still staying in Mali. And for the rest of us who wanted to go on south, this was the place to pick an onward transport.
The main Koro square, and I somehow suspect there are very few in town which seriously compete for that title, was the place. Bush taxis arrived there and from there they departed. The Burkinabe guy who had been recommended by Guele back in Mopti to me as a possible help, nicely explained that as soon as the van was full - this time it was a van – we would start. I nodded, thanked him and roamed around the square taking pictures. I couldn’t think of a better way to kill the time.
In principle, Koro seemed to have little to offer to a tourist. Apart from an imposing Sahel-style mosque, that is, which somehow seemed more magnificent than you’d expect in a town like this. Complete with sharp sandstone towers and bristling with spikes every bit as proudly as the one in Djenné, it stood hardly a hundred metres away from the van station. In other words, it seemed entirely out of place. In a town where otherwise the most notable landmark is a pygmy pyramid on the main square, which apparently moonlights as some sort of monument, and is closely followed at the spot number two by a relatively large metal signboard, also there, ominously warning that „SIDA est partout“, or AIDS is everywhere, this wonderful mosque simply couldn’t belong there.
But there it was.
For all its meagre and pretty desolate looks, Koro is said to lie on one of the main trade routes between Mali and Burkina. This one in particular is called „the road of fish“ as the fish seems to be one of the main merchandises the Malians export to their southern neighbour.
Legally, that is. In a more underhand manner, close by and more or less parallel to this fish road, there seem to be some well established routes to smuggle contraband, particularly alcoholic drinks. Whether authorities turn a blind eye or those vast expanses are simply too difficult to patrol, I can’t say.
Well, in a town where the list of landmarks ends at number three, all of them just numbered, one pretty soon runs out of things to take pictures of. Even if locals are always nearly inexhaustible source of photographing motives. But if you at one point start taking pictures just because there’s nothing better to do, then even that stops being fun. So with an increasing frequency I started making ever smaller circles around the van, perhaps subconsciously hoping it would draw the missing passengers.
At one point the young Burkinabe guy came up to me and asked if I’d be willing to speed up things by again purchasing more than one seat.
„How many?“ I asked.
„We need two more people. You buy one, I’ll buy the other one.“
He evidently – and rather atypically for an African - seemed to be in a hurry, too. I had hardly ever seen anyone here on this continent to be in any hurry. But this one was.
I gladly jumped on the opportunity which not only greased the skids considerably, but also again bought me a privileged seat next to the driver. I knew that the fact that we had just purchased two empty seats wouldn’t prevent the driver from picking up some more passengers along the way as soon as the chance arose and thereby our relative comfort would evaporate, sooner or later. With bets going on sooner.
But what really mattered was the fact that after a one-hour wait we were ready to go. Considering how much I had waited in some other places during my trip, this was more than fine. I couldn’t complain.
