Figure - woman

The Dogon have fascinated travellers and researchers for many years. Poles, who began their research in the Dogon country at the end of the 1970s, have also contributed to the knowledge of their culture and traditions. However, the participants of the Students' Ethnographic Expedition Africa 76-77 were not the first Poles in the Bandiagara Escarpment. The title probably belongs to Jerzy Giżycki (1889-1970). He was a writer, diplomat, traveller and adventurer. He travelled for many years in West Africa, first as a secretary and photographer of the Ferdinand Ossendowski expedition, then as an employee of the French Ministry of Colonies. He came to the Dogon in the early 1930s. He wrote about them in his book White and Black published in 1934. A dozen or so photographic plates depicting scenes from the Dogon people’s life have survived in the collection of the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Łódź. Another Pole in the Dogon country was Wacław Korabiewicz (1889-1970), a doctor, reporter, traveller and collector of ethnographic items. During the Second World War he was in Africa as the Delegate of the Polish Government in London and took care of Polish refugees in the camps of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Later he worked in Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) at the King George V Memorial Museum, and in the 1960s as a doctor at an epidemiological post in Ghana. He documented his stay with the Dogon from this period in his 1967 publication To Timbuktu. The next Poles in the Bandiagara Escarpment were Professors Michał Tymowski (born in 1941) and Władysław Filipowiak (1926-2014), who participated in 1975 in an international symposium in Bamako, Mali (Premier Colloque International de Bamako). The programme included a several-day trip to the Dogon country, which was guided by Germaine Dieterlen, a French anthropologist and an excellent expert on Dogon culture, and Rogier Bedaux, a Dutch archaeologist conducting research on the culture of the Tellem, people who had inhabited the Bandiagara Escarpment before the Dogons arrived.

Ewa Prądzyńska