TELLEM, BANDIAGARA ESCARPMENT, MALI

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The Bandiagara Escarpment is a range of sandstone cliffs that reaches across present-day central Mali between the Niger River and the border of Burkina Faso. Rearing up more than 1,500 feet in some stretches, the ridges provide a natural barrier against hostile incursions as well as many natural shelters that have preserved the wood sculptures produced by generations of successive, interrelated cultures.

The Dogon people, after leaving their homeland in Mali, arrived in the Bandiagara region sometime around the fifteenth century. They developed settlements of cliff dwellings in the shadow of the escarpment, and the existing inhabitants they met as they occupied the area they called tellem (‘we found them’), a term that now describes the region’s pre-Dogon culture and sculptural style. A portion of the Tellem population may have fled upon the arrival of the Dogon, while some were integrated into the incoming society. The Dogon assimilated not only the Tellem’s people but also their art – they appropriated certain Tellem sculptures and used them for their own ritual purposes, claiming the power of the figures in the process.

What followed was a period of artistic fusion between the two groups’ traditions that poses a degree of difficulty when distinguishing clear attributions in Bandiagara objects. However, Tellem figures are known to share certain attributes: a tall, narrow form with short bent legs, columnar torso, and large columnar head. They frequently show vertically raised arms fused to the head, typically with joined hands, and they are often fully encrusted with organic material, obscuring the figure’s features and original details but endowing them with a striking sense of ritual power.

This fine example stands in the classic pose, hands joined at the apex, its silhouette slightly swaying with a sense of vitality encased within great age. Features are vaguely discernible beneath the extreme encrustation, including a bearded face and a stacked succession of breasts, belly, umbilicus, and genitalia. The melange of anatomical characteristics appears to depict a hermaphroditic image.

The raised arm stance is an iconic trademark of works from the Bandiagara. According to Hélène Leloup, ‘the statues with raised arms form part of a group of statuettes of different styles found all along the cliffs: Djennenke, classical Tellem, Niongom and Komakan. These figures played a role in rainmaking rites performed by all the different inhabitants of the cliffs: a cultural adaptation by osmosis responding to the chronic lack of rain along the dry cliffs.’ (Leloup, Dogon, Paris, 2009, p. 127).