From Bandiagara to Paris: Reflections on the Travels of a Dogon Sign

"What is a sign?" writes Roland Barthes. "It is a piece of an image, a fragment of something murmured which I can recognize: without recognition there is no sign" ("I Hear" 54). In Dakar, New York, and Paris, the tributes manifested in 1997 for the tremendous, unaligned institution that is Présence Africaine speak first, I believe, to the sign by which it announces itself. Being drawn to all that is "in-between"--l'intermédiaire--as much by inclination as by habit, I am interested in the journey of this particular sign, differed from the parietal walls where the Dogons draw it to the first publication of the Présence Africaine cover where it is reproduced. I am also interested in the space between the emblem it has become and the printed characters that are affixed to it, a space from which Présence Africaine beckons us and murmurs a surreptitious speech, to borrow V. Y. Mudimbe's well-known expression.

The symbol adopted by Présence Africaine (fig. 1D) is one of those signs collected by the ethnologist and "grand Dogon" Marcel Griaule on the occasion of his first trip to the Bandiagara cliffs of Mali, during the Dakar-Djibouti mission (1931-33). It is part of a group of rupestral paintings collected by Griaule, either by tracing or photo negative, which he then catalogued and analyzed in his doctoral thesis, Masques Dogons (Dogon Masks), published in 1938 by the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris. Specifically, this drawing appears at the Pêguê Dolo site. Twenty-five centimeters high and painted in ochre, the drawing is composed of two parallel, t-shaped branches that open toward the bottom. The tip of its upper extremity ends with a closed, oval-shaped bulge. Due to the restricting nature of the medium--a rocky shelter--that influences the position of the painter at work, the direction of the drawing is not entirely fixed. Ephemeral in nature due to bad weather and the organic materials used (earth, blood, bird droppings, millet), these drawings could not be dated. They must be constantly "refreshed" in order to attain a permanence that, though constantly threatened, is indispensable. It is said that these signs, which existed before words, are drawn in order to fix speech. As a Dogon informant explained, if the signs were forgotten, "les hommes oublieraient les mots et ne sauraient plus quoi dire dans les circonstances variées de l'existence" (Calame-Griaule, Ethnologie 513) 'men would forget the words and would no longer know what to say in the various circumstances of life' (638). Which is not without remembering the Derridian concept of writing that is the written word preceding the spoken . . . .

The sign under consideration is one of these paintings and represents a mask that is worn (fig 1). One further notes that the lower part of the drawing indicates the legs and sex of the dancer. The portrayed mask is a Kànaga mask, or awa danu pini, mounted by a cross with two branches running horizontally. At first glance, it may be read as a bird with wings spread (godi). On a second reading, however, it refers to the Creator involved in the swirling work of his creation (Calame-Griaule, Dictionnaire dogon 143). The lower fork "rappelle alors le geste du Créateur lorsqu'il a terminé son oeuvre: il s'arrêta, jambes écartées, l'une au sud, l'autre au nord, tournant le torse vers le sud et le visage vers l'est [. . .]" 'reminds us, then, of the Creator's gesture once he had finished his work: he stopped, legs spread apart, one to the South, the other to the North, turning the torso toward the South and the face toward the East [. . .]' (Griaule and Dieterlen 21-22). If the doubling of the arms evokes the rotating movement of...