Dyongu Serou

Fonio is a grain so small that a handful of it runs through the fingers like dry sand. On the plateau above the Bandiagara cliffs, in the time when the first people had only just been set on the earth, one man broke ground that was not his and sowed it with that seed. The ground was sacred. The seed was forbidden. He knew both things, and he bent to the work anyway, the iron of the hoe ringing on stones in the heat.

His name was Dyongu Serou, and the Dogon remember him as the first of their kind to die.

He was one of eight. The creator Amma had made a first human pair, and from them came four brothers and their four twin sisters, whom the brothers exchanged with one another as wives. Each brother stands at the head of one of the great Dogon cults. Amma Serou, the eldest, belongs to the sky and to the creator himself, and the head of every family still keeps his altar. Binu Serou belongs to water and to the totem priests. Lebe Serou belongs to the tilled earth and to the hogon, the oldest and holiest priest of a district. That leaves the fourth brother, and the fourth brother got what was left over: fire, the uncleared bush beyond the fields, and in the end death.

The stories give him two trades, and they are the trades of the bush. He was a hunter and he was a healer. His name is explained as witness of healing. A hunter goes alone into country that nobody farms, where the paths are made by animals and the air at midday smells of hot rock and dry grass. He comes back at dusk with meat over his shoulder and a pouch of bark and roots, and people who are sick wait at his door. The same knowledge that kills the animal mends the man, and both of them come from outside the village. The Dogon ancestors set him at the edge of things from the start.

No account says what he looked like. There is no height, no scar, no particular weapon. Museums in Europe and America hold Dogon wooden figures that sit or stand with both hands pressed over their faces, and labels beside them often carry his name, misspelled as Dyougou Serou, with a note that he hides his face in shame after lying with his own mother, the earth. That reading comes from the French art historian Jean Laude, who published it in the 1960s. The myth as it was recorded never mentions the gesture, never mentions shame, and gives the crime against the earth to someone else.

That someone is Ogo, the restless being who tore himself loose before the world was finished, stole a piece of his own placenta, and so violated the earth that was his mother. Amma turned him into the Pale Fox and left him to wander the dry ground. Ogo is the source of disorder in the Dogon universe, and Dyongu Serou is the human being who followed him. He took land out of the sacred fields. He planted the fonio that people had been told to leave alone. It was a small act, a morning’s hoeing, and it was Ogo’s rebellion done over again by a man.

He died of it. Until then people did not die, and after him they all did, because death, once it had got into one of them, spread to the rest. The record does not linger. There is no deathbed and no last word. He farmed the wrong field and he died.

Then he came back, and here the wood enters the story. For the Sigi, the great ceremony that the Dogon hold once every sixty years, a single tree is felled and its trunk is carved into the shape of a snake, a thing several metres long and too heavy for one man to lift. This is the Great Mask. It is not worn. It stands for Dyongu Serou risen again. The Sigi itself moves slowly from village to village for about eight years, the men dancing in single file in the order of their ages; the last one ran from 1967 to 1974. Sixty years is roughly one long human life, so that most people see the ceremony once. The dama, the masked dances that close a period of mourning and send the dead on their way, go back to the same death. Among the masks that come out for a dama is a healer, and the ethnographer Germaine Dieterlen took that mask to be Dyongu Serou himself, the first doctor, still at work. One telling she recorded has him trying to treat a wounded antelope and not doing very well at it.

The Dogon stories of the first death do not all agree, and it would be false to tidy them. When Marcel Griaule published his study of the masks in 1938, Dyongu Serou was not in it. The first to die in that book is an unnamed old man who had already changed into a snake, as the old then did, and who broke a rule by speaking to the young in human words. In other tellings it is Lebe Serou, the earth brother, who dies and returns as a serpent to visit the hogon each night. Dyongu Serou appears by name only from the middle of the 1950s, in the work of Griaule and Dieterlen with elders at Sanga, and most fully in their book The Pale Fox in 1965. The Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek, working among the Dogon decades later, could not find much of that deep cosmology in ordinary use. Everything known about this ancestor comes through one school of French fieldwork, and it is honest to say so.

What he could do follows from where he stood. He knew the bush, its animals and its plants, and he could turn that knowledge to healing. He had fire. And through the Sigi he has the one power no other ancestor is credited with in quite the same way, which is that he went through death first and was seen again on the other side of it, in a new skin.

His limits are just as plain. He could cure other people and could not cure himself. His skill belonged to the wild, and it was no help at all on sacred farmland, where the rules were not his. He brought no gift of grain or speech or law to the Dogon. He brought the thing that every funeral drum on the cliff has answered since, and a carved snake that is made new once in a lifetime so that nobody forgets who went first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dyongu Serou?

Dyongu Serou is one of the eight first ancestors of the Dogon people of Mali. He is the fourth of the four male ancestors, a hunter and healer linked with fire, the wild bush and death. The Dogon remember him as the first human being to die.

How did Dyongu Serou die?

Dyongu Serou died after he broke a prohibition. He took land from the sacred fields and grew fonio, a grain that was forbidden, following the example of the rebel being Ogo. His death was the first human death, and death then spread to all people.

What is the link between Dyongu Serou and the Sigi ceremony?

The Sigi ceremony, held by the Dogon every sixty years, commemorates the death and return of Dyongu Serou. For each Sigi a Great Mask is carved from a single tree trunk in the shape of a snake, and it represents Dyongu Serou risen again. The last Sigi ran from 1967 to 1974.

Do the Dogon statues that cover their faces show Dyongu Serou?

Dogon figures with their hands over their faces are often labelled as Dyongu Serou hiding his face in shame, but that label comes from the French art historian Jean Laude in the 1960s. The recorded myth never mentions the gesture or any shame. In the myth it is Ogo, not Dyongu Serou, who commits incest with the earth.

Is Dyongu Serou the same as Lebe Serou?

Dyongu Serou and Lebe Serou are two different brothers among the first Dogon ancestors. Lebe Serou belongs to the farmed earth and to the hogon priest, while Dyongu Serou belongs to fire, the bush and death. Some tellings make Lebe Serou the one who dies and returns as a snake, so the two are easily confused.

Related Entries

Lebe Serou, Amma, Nommo, Andoumboulou, Adam, Pandora, Andriambahomanana