The toguna — "great shelter" — is the men's council house of the Dogon, built low and heavy beneath a 22-ton roof of packed millet stalks, carried on eight carved posts of kile wood set in three rows. Its ceiling sits deliberately just above head height: a built-in restraint that keeps council disputes from rising to blows. Every surface reads in deep shadow — chestnut timber sun-bleached to silvery brown, stained by laterite dust, carved with shallow ancestor figures and zigzag relief. It is architecture as gravity: earthbound, sheltering, and unhurried.