Qualla: Tireli, Mali https://qualla.com/tireli-mali en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:09 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/e/f/t/9/tireli-mali-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Tireli, Mali https://qualla.com/tireli-mali Tireli, Mali: Introduction https://qualla.com/tireli-mali/ Photo credit Wouter van Beek, CC BY-SA 4.0. The village climbs the talus where the plain meets the wall. At Tireli, the Bandiagara Escarpment looms hundreds of meters overhead, a vast curtain of sandstone, and the houses gather at its foot like figures sheltering under an enormous awning of rock. Above the rooftops, dark squares pock the cliff face: the ancient granaries and burial chambers cut into the stone long before any living Dogon was born. This is one of the cliff villages of Dogon country, eleven kilometers south-southwest of Sangha and twenty-eight kilometers east of the town of Bandiagara, and for the people who live here the escarpment is not scenery. It is home, ancestor, and altar all at once.

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Image: Wouter van Beek | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/f/t/9/tireli-mali-wp/eft9-tireli-mali-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Tireli, Mali: Farming in a Hard Land https://qualla.com/tireli-mali/ Photo credit Wouter van Beek, CC BY-SA 4.0. Life here is wrested from a difficult landscape, and the Dogon are famous for the ingenuity with which they do it. In the dry season, photographs from the 1980s show villagers cultivating tobacco in the bed of a stream that runs only when the rains come, coaxing a crop from the c...

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Image: Wouter van Beek | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/f/t/9/tireli-mali-wp/eft9-tireli-mali-farming-in-a-hard-land.mp3 0:06 2 full Tireli, Mali: Market Day https://qualla.com/tireli-mali/ Photo credit Wouter van Beek, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tireli's market is the village turned inside out. On market day, traders settle among the worn 'sitting stones' that serve as benches, and the place fills with color and bargaining. Old photographs catch the texture of it: a schoolboy weaving between the stones, young women selli...

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Image: Wouter van Beek | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/f/t/9/tireli-mali-wp/eft9-tireli-mali-market-day.mp3 0:06 3 full Tireli, Mali: The Masks Come Down the Cliff https://qualla.com/tireli-mali/ Photo credit Wouter van Beek, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tireli is one of the villages renowned for the Dama, the great Dogon funerary ceremony that escorts the spirits of the dead to the realm of the ancestors. In preparation, young men withdraw to make and don elaborate carved masks, among them the towering Kanaga with its arms reach...

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Image: Wouter van Beek | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/f/t/9/tireli-mali-wp/eft9-tireli-mali-the-masks-come-down-the-cliff.mp3 0:06 4 full Tireli, Mali: Between Old and New https://qualla.com/tireli-mali/ Photo credit Wouter van Beek, CC BY-SA 4.0. The wider world has long reached even here. A portrait from 1985 shows a young Dogon man newly returned from Abidjan on the coast, a transistor radio in his hands, the labor migration that has long carried young people away and brought them back changed. Tireli sits within the Ba...

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Image: Wouter van Beek | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/e/f/t/9/tireli-mali-wp/eft9-tireli-mali-between-old-and-new.mp3 0:06 5 full