nonmo

A small corner of the internet. More soon.

Nommo, from the Dogon of Mali

to make one drink

The Dogon live in the highlands of central Mali, with many villages built into the sandstone cliffs of Bandiagara. Their religion honors the Nommo, primordial ancestral spirits of water. The name is said to come from a Dogon word meaning “to make one drink.”

They are also called the Masters of the Water, the Monitors and the Teachers.

This site spells it nonmo. Scholars usually write Nommo or Nummo.

The story, as it was recorded

  1. One

    Amma, the sky god, makes Nommo, the first living creature.

  2. Eight

    Nommo multiplies into four pairs of twins.

  3. Scattered

    One twin rebels against Amma’s order. Another is sacrificed and scattered, and the Dogon trace their Binu shrines to the places the body fell.

  4. Water

    The Nommo make a lake to live in, and give of their own bodies so that people have something to drink and live by.

The word

Water and speech run together, and a word can be woven.

In 1948 the French ethnologist Marcel Griaule published his conversations with Ogotemmêli, a blind Dogon diviner. In that account the Nommo teach people to speak and to weave, speech moves like water, and cloth holds words. Soy, a Dogon word for cloth, is said to clothe the wearer in words.

One telling, not the only one

Most of what the outside world knows about the Nommo comes from Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen’s fieldwork, which began in the 1930s. When the anthropologist Walter van Beek returned to the same area decades later, he could not find the same creation story and argued that leading questions had helped to shape it. Griaule’s daughter, the linguist Geneviève Calame-Griaule, rejected that view.

The argument is unresolved. The Dogon are a living people, and no outsider’s version speaks for all of them.