ABSTRACT
The creation story of the Dogon people of the Bandiagara cliffs in southern Mali and the plains of northern Burkina Faso in the area of the Niger bend in West Africa is one of the most elaborate and fascinating traditional explanations of the origins of the world and of human culture. Unlike biblical and similar stories of creation in other African oral traditions, in the Dogon creation story the idea of an all-powerful and all-knowing divine creator is subordinated to an evolutionary process in which God (Amma) emerges as a supernatural but imperfect progenitor. In place of the traditional idea of creation out of nothing, the Dogon creation story offers through the magic of the divine logos a more scientific explanation that anticipates the modern big bang theory. In the Dogon creation story, we can see a projection into the cosmos of ideas that essentially belong to reproductive biology. Underlying these ideas is what appears to be some knowledge of the role of chromosomes and of DNA in the formation of every new life, as formulated in modern genetics.
