Mali has no way to stop plunder of its artefacts

By ALEX DUVAL SMITH

SANGHA - Be it in the auction rooms of New York or in Parisian antique dealers' shops, "primitive art" is all the rage.

But historians say the fashion for collecting spears, masks and ancient terracotta vases is leading to unparalleled plundering in Mali, one of the world's poorest countries whose heritage ranks in importance alongside that of Ancient Greece and the Nile Valley.

"What I do is not plundering, it is my way of feeding my children," said Adama Napo as he swung open a door on a treasure trove of artefacts housed in a shed behind the mosque in the hilltop settlement of Sangha.

There was a hunter's headrest, several characteristic wooden statuettes of human figures with hands upstretched, a 1000-year-old terracotta goblet on four legs and a host of carved wooden doors, up to 800 years old.

"I know these objects sell for much more in Bamako [the capital] and of course in New York and Paris. The sellers are local people, who come to me with their heirlooms or with objects they have found. We are all from the Dogon tribe and it really hurts to sell our own ritual objects but we do not feel so strongly about other artefacts around here, and there are a lot," said Napo, quoting prices ranging from $200 for the goblet to $1000 for the oldest door.

After hours of driving through the flat scrubland of the Sahel desert - with its strange-shaped baobab trees and camels grazing on thorn bushes - Dogon country is unmistakable. The granaries, houses and mosques in its villages look as if they were formed from a child's sand bucket. Here, almost uniquely on the planet, little in people's lives has changed since they started painting caves tens of thousands of years ago. Many farm rice in the Niger valley, others herd cattle or goats. Electricity is unheard of.

At Timbuktu, 500km away, salt from the desert and gold from southern Mali were traded at an equal price in the 16th century. A university was established there which has left behind a library of Arabic illustrated manuscripts, perfectly preserved by the ultra-dry desert climate.

The Bandiagara Escarpment is a wonder of nature - a kilometres-wide sheer rock face that rises out of the desert to a height of 300m and in which the Tellem tribe created settlements as far back as 300 BC. Their rock homes and cliff-face graves - perfectly preserved thanks to the dryness of the atmosphere - can be reached only by using ropes hung from the top of the sheer escarpment.

Five centuries after the Tellem disappeared - for reasons still unexplained - local men on ropes risk their lives dangling from the escarpment to plunder objects left behind in the graves of the mysterious tribe. They extract small wooden statues, items of clothing, wooden beds, carved doors, jewellery and other objects useful for the afterlife.

Many find their way into Napo's store at the top of the escarpment at Sangha. "I used to be a travelling salesman but I have been based here for five years. The interest is big enough now for the customers to come to me. I just sit in the garden at the Sangha hotel and when the Land-Rovers come in, I approach the tourists."

He dismissed the suggestion that if Sangha had a museum, the plundering would diminish: "We do not want a museum. What is in it for us? If we have a museum, then the Government will just take our artefacts for a tiny amount of money."

After the artefacts have left Napo's store, they enter an art world that is insatiable and rocketing.

Last November in New York, an African art auction at Sotheby's raised more than $US4 million ($9.5 million). The objects were sourced all over the continent and the majority were sold into private collections. One hermaphrodite figure raised more than $US1 million against an estimate of $US70,000. A Yoruba door from Niger Valley - of a similar style to Napo's 800-year-old Dogon door - fetched $US43,875.

Samuel Sidibe, director of the National Museum in Bamako, has run out of ideas for saving his country's heritage.

Mali, a country 10 times the size of Great Britain but with no economic muscle, has failed repeatedly to win back looted artefacts, even despite the support of the International Council of Museums which publishes lists of missing objects.

Tim Insoll of St John's College, Cambridge, who is one of Europe's experts on West African archaeology, said the plundering was a tragedy not just for Mali but for mankind. He said artefacts needed to be studied in their context: "In Timbuktu and Gao, we have found 11th century Chinese pottery and beads from India. These objects tell us that they were brought through the desert, probably from Cairo. Deprived of their provenance, they just become pottery and beads."

- INDEPENDENT