THE DOGON PEOPLE OF WEST AFRICA

Over 3000 years ago, the DOGON people of West Africa were among the ethnic groups that traveled away from the Nile valley to reside in the hilly parts of west Africa. This had expressed the old way of life of the nationality that is now a part of Mali.

The Dogan people's first villages were in the Bandiagara region. In ancient times, the Dogon people excelled in numerous artistic civilizations (such as the Igbo Ukwu civilization), including architecture, mining, ancient science, particularly astrology and medicine.

"The earliest known textiles in South of the Sahara are the baste fibre fragments of/from Igbo Ukwu (9th century AD), and clothes found in Tellem caves of the Bandiagara region of Mali (11th century or earlier)," according to the encyclopedia Britannica.

'None of these artistic manifestations appear to be in any way in the early stages; each looks to be fully developed in style.'

Beginning in 3100 BCE, the Dogon left the Nile civilization and wandered over the desert to settle in Soudan now west Africa. This was due to the onslaughts of nomadic populations from Western Asia, which had begun to take over the coastal areas of north Africa from the Nile delta, pushing westward, towards leptis magna in what is now Libya and later Algeria.

It was around this time that the vast sea, roughly the size of France, eventually dried up, causing unrest and wandering groups to move restlessly, not building settled societies in stone as they used to, but constructing makeshift shelters that over time became a part of the traditional architecture of some groups; a situation that was to remain a part of those who survived, into the early medieval era.

"These tremendous victories of the white men were not achieved by conquest," writes historian Chancellor Williams (in 'The Destruction of Black Civilization,' a book that all Africans should read). It happened by accident, on the side of a race that was more concerned with the now than with the future."

This condition hasn't changed much for most of Africa's ethnic groups that were separated from the Nile Valley. 

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