Some Sirius Shit: Mali (Updated)

The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning, Timbuktu

UPDATE: 2/1. Multiple news outlets are reporting that most of the manuscripts were saved by intrepid and courageous citizens!! The wonderfulness of this news makes the post below seem quite cynical, but I think there is still a kernel of truth in it. :)    

       Yesterday, Islamist rebels in Mali burned two libraries in Timbuktu before the town was retaken by the French. The libraries contained priceless manuscripts, many dating back to a golden age of Islamic civilization. Why burn them?

       I first learned about the Dogon tribe of Mali through Sun City Girls and their song Space Prophet Dogon.

       The Dogon were interesting to Sun City Girls because of their beliefs about Sirius, the dual star system that appears as the brightest star in the sky. The Dogon lore about Sirius is fascinating to many esoterics, who see evidence of extra-terrestrial contact. The best presentation of this view is by far Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of... The Dark Star

  

               The Dogon are some of the most researched and visited people on earth. One of the common threads in all this research is the cultural threat that the Dogon face from the West and, more locally, Islam. The Dogon religion involves many representational sculptures, which are anathema to Islam. Many Dogon have converted to Islam and no longer produce the art that fascinates the West.

                Almost all of this research is based on the work of Marcel Griaule, the first chair of anthropology at the Sorbonne. Griaule was a pilot (supposedly he used to lecture in his flight uniform) in World War I , and first met the Dogon on an ambitious journey across Africa. He was the first to write about the Dogon beliefs about Sirius, and most of the esoteric theories about extra-terrestrial contact are based on his work. Unfortunately, Griaule may have been full of shit.

                  In the film (helpfully posted on YouTube by dmthead2012) Tracking the Pale Fox: Studies on the Dogon, we can see two of Griaule's disciples, the filmmaker Jean Rouch and the anthropologist Germaine Detierlen, interacting with Dogon informants. The condescending attitudes of the two towards their Dogon contacts becomes pretty clear at minute 32:00. Rouch and Detierlen basically lecture a Dogon elder on his own cosmology in a one-sided conversation. By the end of the film, the Dogon landscape has literally become a backdrop for Rouch's philosophizing.

                The Dogon and the Timbuktu manuscripts both represent an idealized, static Africa that only really exists in the minds of Westerners. This Africa exists for the cultural purposes of the West, not for its own intrinsic reasons. Timbuktu is a UNESCO world heritage site, preserved in amber for tourists and scholars.

                 It is of course impossible to understand why these unnamed rebels burned down the libraries. They had destroyed many Sufi sites because they considered them idolatrous and outside of the Salafist version of Islam. Perhaps the libraries were burnt for the same reasons. But why wait until the day before the French arrive to burn down the libraries if they had been destroying shrines already?

                  I think the libraries were burned because they were valuable to the West, not because they were religiously impure. The libraries represented the static Africa that we in the West desire for our own purposes, not the fluid Africa that actually is.