Nommo--The Spirit of Water--In the Dogon World

In 1979-1980, I spent a year in Bandiagara (the capital city of the Dogon of Mali) for the purpose of collecting data for my Ph.D. thesis. During this period I was conducting field work in several plateau, cliff and plain villages. The excerpts of interviews I have selected to present in this article spring from different sources, but most have been collected among the Warme clan of the Dogon. Some data I collected in 1988 in the villages of Toroli (Mali) and Loroni (Burkina Faso); other data were collected by my students, mainly Christine Ricord (1992) in the Dogon village of Thiou (northern Burkina Faso).

The Dogon form a West African ethnic group that belongs to the Mandingo cultural group. Mande is a historical area located in western Mali that has given its name to a family of West African languages. Besides the Dogon, many other West African ethnic groups are said to originate from this area. Today, the Dogon dwell mainly in the so-called Bandiagara Cliff in the fifth administrative region (eastern Mali), but several important villages are to be found in northern Burkina Faso. The Dogon became world famous through the writings of the French ethnologist Marcel Griaule about the water divinity, Dieu d'eau [1].

The cultural concepts these interviews express present to us a "traditional representation" of the world that, as we know, is less and less acknowledged and shared by younger generations today. Indeed, the growing and systematic migrations of the Dogon towards the Ivory Coast, the repeated interior migrations of this population towards big cities such as Bamako and, finally, the opening of the Dogon territory to tourism have together reinforced— irrevocably—the process of conversion to monotheistic religions, the primary of these being Islam. This evolution is detrimental to the reverence for ancestors and the clan traditions associated with a concept of the natural universe that seems to be widely shared within the cultural Mandingo world.

In this endangered peasant culture, collective identities, native cults and systems of authority were closely linked historically to water control and its preservation, on which the perpetuation of collective life depended. This control of water was at once social, in that some categories of people were denied the right to have access to the sacred wells; political, in that the history of local political formations and power hierarchies pivoted on control over water sources; and ritualistic, being related to the rites of rain or yearly purification.

To understand how crucial water and control of water are in the Sudanese-Sahelian regions and to show how this can be the object of rich discussion, let us look at the accounts of the Dogon people. For them, wells are inhabited by invisible beings to whom sacrifices must be made. These spirits are called "Nommo" and "Nyerum"—it is "Nommo who holds water" and "Nommo who holds men." Nyerum is a kind of female bush spirit, usually described as living not in the water, nor in the well itself, but at the "mouth" of the well, and she must be conciliated with the appropriate sacrifice; otherwise if angry for some reason, she may drag a person into the well to be drowned. In one of these stories, an elder says, "If you stay 3 days without drinking you will die. . . . For Nommo and Nyerum we make offerings to ask them to give water. . . . Last year, the well in our village ate our child, so we made sacrifices for all the things that were inside the well." To save themselves from drought, people must organize offerings and sacrifices such as the rites of rain. "Where rites have been forgotten, the water is scarce and therefore there is no life." When Nommo wants to leave the sky and descend into the earth, he borrows the rainbow's path and, wherever he is, the water is strong. Nommo also figures prominently in the stories explaining the origins of significant Dogon cults, such as that of the Binu, which finds part of its explanation in the primeval myth of death. This myth explains the discovery of...