The Dogon Ancestors
Appendix I
from
Benjamin Banneker: Surveyor,
Astronomer, Publisher, Patriot
by
Charles A. Cerami (pp.217–219)
John Wiley & Sons, 2002
The Dogon people are thought
to have fled from the headwaters of the Niger between the tenth and thirteenth
centuries to escape from pressure to convert to Islam, and there refuge of a
great escarpment that is part of the Bandiagara
cliffs has kept them intact and rather isolated*. They live today, as they have for centuries,
mainly by raising grain, especially millet, and they trade their products with
another
Several things make
Banneker’s relationship to the Dogon especially significant. They have a complicated theology and
cosmology that is based on an elaborate numerical formula. Even before most other advanced peoples, they
saw the structure of the world as being related to the human body. The hand, for example, made the number 8
central to this, apparently based on the number of fingers without the
thumbs. So 8 and its multiples were
basic, just as 10 and the decimal system were basic for the Romans. They believe that the old Nummo
spirit, architect of the world, laid out eight covenant stones that outlined
the human soul. He also provided eight
ancestors as progenitors of the eight Dogon clans that would make up human
society. Very elderly Dogon say that
when men began trading, they counted in eights; and even when the French came
as colonists and talked of “hundreds” (or centaines), the Dogon considered
that to mean 80.
Serious researchers speak of
an “indigenous literacy” among the Dogon, a system of writing that predated the
coming of Europeans. They have also
found that Dogon technology has long covered mining, metal processing, cotton
planting and textiles, food storage, architecture, erosion control, and
irrigation.
There are indications that
the Dogon people knew long before the Europeans that Earth orbits around the
sum. Some experts in African studies are
convinced that they also knew about other planets and even worlds beyond the
solar system. Those who insist this is so
have tried to explain it by showing that the Dogon may come upon the Egyptians’
way of using crystals to shape lenses that could serve as simple
telescopes. There are doubters who say
that even if this were so, there is no such lens arrangement that gives enough
magnification to account for the disputed belief that Dogons were centuries
ahead in knowing that the “Dog Star” has a unique twinkle because it is
actually a double star (called Sirius A and Sirius B). They supposedly even knew that the interplay
of their two orbits took either fifty or sixty years to be completed.
The disbelievers would appear
to be the more credible—until it is realized that in the late 1700s, Benjamin
Banneker reportedly said Sirius was both his favorite star and his lucky star,
called it a double star many years before professional scientist of the advanced
world confirmed that fact. Some have
used this to assert that he mystically inherited this knowledge, as if it had
been transmitted through the DNA. But
the simpler explanation would appear to be that Grandfather Banneka**
had talked of certain ancient wisdom to Molly, who passed it along to Benjamin
when he was a boy. Banneker may later
have adapted it to fit his own updated astronomical thoughts.
This finding has the multiple
function of pinpointing the location of Banneker’s hitherto-unknown African
roots, for no African people other that the Dogon are know to have had any
special interest in the star called Sirius.
It does not, of course, reveal the identity of the ancient Dogon who had
the original insight about the dual nature of Sirius. Since it is provable that the difference
between these A and B stars is invisible without magnification many times
greater that any African people are known to have had, the only explanation
would have to be that a great early Dogon thinker, having noted wobbly twinkle
different from any other, simply had the astonishing insight that two stars
locked in a strange dance might be producing such an effect. It was, after all, just such a capacity for
pure reason that made Benjamin Banneker a finer astronomer that many who had
much superior equipment.
A less exact but very telling
personal trait ties Banneker to the Dogon.
Europeans who have lived among the Dogon describe them in the very same
terms that were so often applied to Banneker by contemporaries. Antonin Potovski, a French photographer who has worked and taught
in
*Editor/compiler’s
note: Their region of
** “Banneka” is what he called himself. He was the eldest son of a king, “Captured in an enemy raid and sold to slave traders. (Some scholars believe that his given name was Banne and that Ka was a family name.)” See Cerami page 5.