SUBSAH-034 - museum specimen

Dogon, Yougo Dogorou (Bandiagara escarpment)

Mali - Yougo Dogorou, Bandiagara escarpment, Mopti region (French Sudan at the time of the Dakar-Djibouti mission) - West Africa

Restricted

At Yougo Dogorou the story is told of how human beings got the masks and the roaring wood. Two women of the village heard drumming and the whirring of a rhombe and crept close: the Andoumboulou, small beings of the country's first age, were dancing and drinking millet beer around an earthen mound where the great mask stood propped, an old man named Albarga sitting guard on an iron seat. One woman's husband told her to drive them off with stones, and the Andoumboulou fled, leaving everything behind — skirts, hoods, the wooden mask, and a rhombe of iron; the men seized the abandoned gear and kept it as their means of dominion over the women who had found it, and iron bullroarers are still forged now and then in memory of that first metal one. Whirled on its cord until it roars, the slat is the voice of the first ancestor, who died in serpent form; men of the Awa mask society raise its drone to open the masked ceremonies, and a man spins it at the approach of women, who must keep clear of anything to do with the masks. Its name, imina na, “great mask,” it shares with the carved serpent remade every sixty years for the Sigui, the procession that sets out from Yougo Dogorou.

a man spins a "rhombus" (bullroarer) at the approach of women, who must keep away from anything involving masks

Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, la Charriere collection Dogon notice ("Black monkey" zoomorphic mask, Mali, Dogon)

Object

Quai Branly 71.1931.74.1994: an enye-wood blade with sisal-fiber cord, 44.5 x 4.5 x 4 cm, made by Ambara Dolo as a reconstruction of the great bullroarer of Yougo and acquired at Yougo-Dogorou on 11 November 1931.

Function

A whirled slat sounded by men of the Awa mask society; the Dogon hear its roar as the voice of the first ancestor, who died in the form of a serpent and from whom all Dogon are descended. It announces the masked ceremonies that culminate in the Sigui, the once-in-sixty-years rite whose procession sets out from Yougo Dogorou.

Map confidence

medium - Representative point at Yougo Dogorou village (14 deg 31 min 47 sec N, 3 deg 13 min 13 sec W), the village from which the Dogon Sigui procession sets out and the recorded provenance of the Yougo rhombe; an anchor for the village, not a precise find-spot within it.

Source location

Quai Branly 71.1931.74.1994 / ccObjectID 212084; Mission Dakar-Djibouti object card

• Spirit voice
• Initiation rite
• Death and rebirth
• Female-origin myth

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