Local traditions and culture in Mali

In Mali if you go to lunch in a restaurant at telenovelas' time (soap operas time) you are lost!!!
Mexican and Venezuelan telenovelas have invaded Africa too. In Mali people see these telenovelas translated into French and they are very popular, even between men. So if you want to have lunch at telenovelas' time you'll have to wait until the break, like it happened to us :-((

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This could be considered as a tourist trap as well. During your excursion to the Dogon country it will be almost impossible to avoid them. They tell you how lucky you are because these dances are rare to see and oops! just that day there is I don’t know which important event and there will be a performance! The truth is that they do these performances every day as soon as they see a group of tourists arriving to the village. And they make you pay the performance very expensive! Ok I payed just to get them to be quiet but I was not interested in it and I preferred to go around the village to take some pictures. But dances were so long that I took all the possible pictures about the village and I still had enough time to see half of the performance :-)). Luckily I sat next to our guide and he explained me the meaning of the different “scenes”, otherwise it should have been very boring!
Nice colors

Picture 3: the man dressed in blue marks the step. All the warriors have to follow him
Picture 4: warriors fight, not very comfortable!!
Picture 5: they want to kill the warlok :-((. But after that this same person sits in front of the warlok to play with him. Mah!

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In small villages it will happen to you to see this kind of constructions
(picture 1). They are, together with mud huts and mud granaries, very common in Mali. There are good to protect yourself from the sun but there are used as stalls. The village’s local markets are basically a group of these stalls. Leaving Mopti direction to Timbuktu we found another kind of constructions (huts), very different with regard to the first ones
(picture 2). Even the granaries are different, completely made of straw (picture 3). Maybe they belong to a different tribe.

These fabrics form part of Malian clothes. They are made of natural materials and decorated using natural dyes. We are not talking about simple accessories, something to put some color to their dresses. From these fabrics (the designs, colors, materials) you can understand lots of things about the owner like his tribe, social status and even if he is married or not. The picture shows some fabrics waiting to be sold.

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I found these constructions very nice, as they look like the smurfs’ huts. Made of mud and slightly elevated from the land by a wooden structure to avoid humidities, each hut corresponds to a family. Sometimes, if the family have more ressources, the man has his own granary and the woman has another one (usually bigger!). Women introduce the grain after the harvest through the roof. The wooden sticks on the wall are used not only to keep the consistence of the mud architecture but also as a ladder. Then, when the family needs the grain, it is taken out by a child who introduces himself in the hut through the small window. Don’t you believe me? Look at the second and third pictures!
You can find these granaries everywhere in the country

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Women in Mali are very elegant! And it is not a matter of a good dress or nice accessories; I am talking about a natural elegance. You can see a girl or a lady dressed with very poor clothes but she behaves and walks as if she was the star model in a fashion show. La classe!!

The baobab tree ("Adansonia digitata") is very typical in this area. Also known as the upside-down tree (the sparse branches resemble roots) it is very spectacular and some of them can reach 25 m high. Its fruit is called “pain de singe” (monkey’s bread) and its taste is not very different from cola, with a final acid taste. I have read that some baobab trees are more than 4000 years old!

I don't know how to describe this: it's a kind of fruit with a final acid taste that it seems to have the same effect than our cola: if you eat it you cannot sleep at night.
Following the advice of our Dogon guide we bought a bag full of cola before starting our trip to Dogon Country. Foreigners use to offer cola to old Dogon people when they arrive to their village as a sign of respect.