Amma, the Nommo, and the Ritual Year

The Dogon of the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali maintain a living religion centred on the creator Amma, the primordial Nommo who order creation, and a rich cycle of ritual and masking. Its most celebrated observances are public and well documented: the great Sigui ceremony, held roughly once every sixty years and moving in sequence along the villages of the escarpment, renewing the world and marking the passage of generations; and the dama, the collective funeral rite at which the carved masks, including the towering sirige mask, are danced to lead the souls of the dead away and restore the balance the deaths disturbed.

The dramatic cliff-side villages and cultural landscape of the Bandiagara escarpment were inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1989, recognised for both their architecture and their living tradition. The religion is practised today alongside Islam and Christianity in the region, and is described here in the present tense.