Andoumboulou

Also Known As: the French transcription used by Marcel Griaule; also written Andumbulu in English, and Andoumboulouw in one plate caption of Le Renard pâle
Region/Culture: West Africa
Mythos: Dogon Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: They are the first owners of the red fibres and the first keepers of a mask altar, beings who held the masquerade before any human did.
Role in Mythos: In Griaule’s accounts they stand at the beginning of Dogon masking and, in his later cosmology, at the failed first attempt at making people.
Relation to Humans: A woman took their fibres, or their masks, and brought them home, which is how the Dogon say the masquerade reached people. Their song is whispered at night by initiates during funerals, which places them close to the dead and to the telling of how humans came to be.

The song is not sung so much as breathed. At night, in a village that has emptied itself for the occasion, a ring of initiates crouches low and whispers toward beings nobody present has seen. A single voice leads, gravelly and reluctant, and the others answer in a dry, scratchy undertone. The only other sounds are dogs barking somewhere in the dark and the wind coming off the Bandiagara cliffs. The song is addressed to the Andoumboulou.

That scene was captured on tape in April 1956 by the French radio recordist François Di Dio, working among the Dogon of the Bandiagara escarpment in what is now Mali. His record, Les Dogon, issued by Radiodiffusion d’Outre-Mer, includes a funeral piece titled the Song of the Andumbulu. Its words tell of the making of humans and the appearance of life on earth. When the chant ends, a man recites a genealogy and praises the person who has died. The Andoumboulou, whatever else they are, belong to the moment when a community counts its dead back to the beginning.

Almost everything else written about them comes from one research tradition: the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and his long collaborator Germaine Dieterlen. That matters. Griaule’s first great study, Masques dogons (1938), is where the Andoumboulou enter the written record, and it presents them as uncreated beings, the little red ones, who were in the world before humans and who held the things that would become the Dogon masquerade.

In Griaule’s account the masks did not begin as human property. An Andoumboulou woman discovered the fibres, the dyed red fibre that still makes the skirts and ruffs of Dogon masks. The Andoumboulou founded the first mask altar. Only afterwards did a woman of the Yeban, another order of beings, discover the masks themselves, and after her came the first Sigui, the great ceremony of renewal, the first funeral, and death. Griaule tied the carving of the first mask to the death of a mythic old man, Albarga. In this telling the masquerade, the funeral and mortality arrive together, and the Andoumboulou stand at the head of the line.

The version most often repeated in writing about Dogon masks is more compact and has a thief in it. A woman walking in the bush came upon the Andoumboulou dancing. They fled and left behind their masks and their costumes of red fibre, and she carried them home. For a short time she was the chief of the masks. Then the men took the masks from her and hid them away, and the masquerade has belonged to men ever since. The women who still hold a place in it, the yasigine or sisters of the mask, are honoured for that first discovery. A mask called satimbe, crowned by a standing female figure, is said to commemorate her. The Metropolitan Museum curator Kate Ezra, in her 1988 catalogue of Dogon art, put it simply: the Dogon attribute the origin of masks to the Andoumboulou.

The picture on the body is thin. Griaule gives colour and size, red and small, and no more. There is no record of a face, a voice or a gait, and nothing about how they dress beyond the fibre they wore before a woman made off with it. What survives is an image of scattering figures in the bush and a pile of red fibre left on the ground behind them.

Griaule’s later work pushed the Andoumboulou much deeper into cosmology. In Le Renard pâle (1965), written with Dieterlen, they become the offspring of an incestuous coupling among the Yeban inside the earth, living evidence of the failure of Ogo, the rebellious being whose disorder runs through that book. One plate in the volume shows a cave at Yougo Dogorou with a figure of the Andoumboulou painted on its wall. Here the small red dancers turn into something heavier: the first, botched draft of a people.

That cosmology has a problem. In 1991 the Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek published the results of a long restudy in the same villages in Current Anthropology and reported that the religion described in Griaule’s Dieu d’eau and Le Renard pâle could not be found in the field, not even as a fading memory. Ogo, the pivot of Le Renard pâle, was unknown to the people van Beek worked with. The mask-origin story and the funeral song stand on firmer ground than the Ogo material, but almost everything written about the Andoumboulou still runs back to Griaule.

The name has had a second life a long way from the escarpment. The American poet Nathaniel Mackey heard Di Dio’s recording and built a serial poem on it, Song of the Andoumboulou, which opens in his collection Eroding Witness with the record’s liner note as its epigraph and runs on through later books, among them Splay Anthem, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. Mackey read the Andoumboulou not as a failed early form of humanity but as a rough draft of it, the work in progress that people still are. That is a poet’s reading, not a Dogon one. It has probably carried the name to more English readers than Griaule ever did.

Their power, in every version, is precedence. They had the fibre, the altar and the dance first, and the Dogon masquerade, with all its authority over funerals and the dead, descends from what they held. Their weakness is the same story told from the other side. They were surprised, they ran, and they left their things behind. Everything that came after, from the woman’s brief rule to the men’s long one, was built on what the Andoumboulou failed to keep.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Andoumboulou in Dogon mythology?

The Andoumboulou are small red beings of Dogon tradition in Mali who existed before humans. According to the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule, they were the first to have the red fibres and the first mask altar, and the Dogon masquerade descends from them. A funeral song addressed to them, recorded in 1956, tells of the creation of humans.

How did the Andoumboulou lose their masks?

In the version told about the origin of Dogon masks, a woman in the bush came upon the Andoumboulou dancing, and they fled and left their masks and red fibre costumes behind. She took them home and briefly led the masks. The men then took the masks from her, and the female initiates called yasigine are honoured for her first discovery.

What is the Song of the Andoumboulou?

The Song of the Andoumboulou is a Dogon funeral song whispered at night by initiates crouching in a circle in an emptied village. It was recorded in April 1956 by François Di Dio for the record Les Dogon. Its words tell of the making of humans and the beginning of life on earth, and it ends with a genealogy and praises for the dead.

Are the Andoumboulou a failed form of humans?

In Le Renard pâle (1965), Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen describe the Andoumboulou as the offspring of incest among the Yeban inside the earth, a sign of the failure of the being Ogo. The anthropologist Walter van Beek reported in 1991 that this Ogo cosmology could not be found among the Dogon he studied. The poet Nathaniel Mackey later read the Andoumboulou as a rough draft of human beings.

Why did Nathaniel Mackey name his poems after the Andoumboulou?

Nathaniel Mackey built his serial poem Song of the Andoumboulou on the Dogon funeral song he heard on François Di Dio’s 1956 recording. The series opens in his collection Eroding Witness and continues through later books, including Splay Anthem, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006.