In the matrilineal society of the Dogon people - one of Mali's ethnic groups - the role of women is wide, varied and very busy: they harvest, care for children, weave and carry heavy loads. As I entered the village of Tireli in the heart of Dogon country, I came across a group of girls balancing heavy vessels filled to the brim with millet. With deceptive ease they walked in the intense heat, crossing the village from one end to the other. A few days later, I photographed a similar scene in Begnimato, only this time, it was a stack of four beer bottle crates on a girl's head! Scroll down for more photos of daily life on Mali's Dogon plateau. Fine Art of these and other images can be ordered from the Mali gallery.
The ubiquitous nature of beer and coca-cola. Even in the isolated village of Begnimato, on the Dogon plateau, bottled beverages are brought in from the town of Bandiagara. It remained a mystery to me as to how a stack of bottles so high found its way on this poor girl's head until I found out that a huge load of beer had been brought in, on foot , from a neighboring village which was close to the only road leading to Bandiagara. The road had been built by Germans. Road, beer, germans. I see.
On my exploratory early morning walk in the village of Ennde, I was introduced to a group of weavers. As the sun rose above the small courtyard's mud walls, this scene of a young woman weaving looked almost painterly. The thread she is holding is used to stitch strips of woven cotton into a larger drape which will then go through an indigo tinting process.
After leaving the cotton weavers, I noticed this girl pounding millet in a wooden receptacle. Her vigor and pace were quite remarkable. This is a split moment shot, just a few seconds later the girl noticed me and stopped her work. I greeted her and carried on.
In this picture and the one below, women carry out their daily tasks with their babies strapped to their backs. Is it safe, is it comfortable? I couldn't tell, but I've often seen toddlers asleep as their mothers busied themselves with fairly physical work. In my weeks spent in Mali, I didn't see a single baby carried by a man.
The road leading to the beautiful Dogon village of Niongono was very long, very bumpy, incredibly dusty and at times I really wondered if the driver knew where he was going as there were absolutely no signs and barely any tracks indicating we were going the right direction. As we arrived the sun had started casting golden hues and the rock and mud village became very photogenic.
Elevated view of the Dogon village of Niongono on a late afternoon. Rooftops are used for storage and for drying food.
From the earlier photos, it may appear that Dogon men don't really do much. This couldn't be further from the truth. Dogon society follows a collaborative model in which every age group participate in a range of tasks benefiting the cohesion of the whole village. From a very young age, boys are implicated in their villages' life and it often starts in the field. This boy carries water in hollow calabashes for use in a nearby onion plantation. Water is a precious resource in many parts of Africa, even more so in Dogon country, located in the semi-arid region of the South Sahara also known as the Sahel.
A young man pours water from a calabash to irrigate an onion field in the Dogon village of Dioundourou.
Barack was here. Sort of. Obama is celebrated throughout Africa and it's not different in Mali. I found an image of him, on a boy's sandal, on a very arid part of the Dogon plateau between Dioundourou and Begnimato. Further north, in the malian Sahara, north of Timbuktu, the United States assists the malian military's fight against north african armed groups, with aid in the form of telecommunication and logistical equipment.