Djenné , the city with over 2,000 mudbrick houses in Mali, boasts a grand mosque and the extraordinary sophistication of African civilization with some impressive history chapters, as this writer found.
WORDS AND PHOTO BY RAMDAS IYER
THE OLDEST KNOWN CITY IN SUB-SAHARAN Africa is the adobe city of Djenné, established in the third century BC which became a major urban center around 850AD. I visited this city of over 2,000 mudbrick houses soon after the Tuareg insurgency in 2009 and before the jihadist takeover of central Mali in 2015. Places like Djenné are testimony to the great African civilizations that existed for thousands of years prior to the arrival of European colonists.
Standing tall as one of the wonders of African architecture and the largest mud brick building in the world, the Great Mosque or Friday Mosque of Djenné was built in the Sudano-Sahelian style around the 13th century. While ruling as the 26th king of the Mali Dynasty, Koi Konboro, who converted to Islam, visited Mecca, and built this magnificent structure as a place of worship for his people while promoting Islam as a state religion.
Djenné soon became a center of commerce, Islam and learning especially with caravans plying between the legendary desert city of Timbuktu 500km upstream on the Niger river. Both these Niger river towns became the crux of Islamic diffusion into black Africa. Merchant caravans brought scholars and scribes along with salt, gold, Ostrich feathers, ivory and slaves through Djenné while traveling along the Saharan trade route cities reaching as far as Tripoli, Marrakech, Cairo, and the Arab world.
Unfortunately, this legendary mosque had fallen into disrepair over the course of time due to the often-violent transfer of powers between various dynasties including the well-known Bambara and Songhai empires.
Mali was never visited by Europeans until early French travelers started arriving around 1825 from their colonial perch in Saint-Louis, now in Senegal. These visitors often recorded in their journals a large severely eroded mud structure almost unidentifiable from today’s monument. But thanks to meticulous record-keeping by the Islamic scribes of yore, the Great Mosque was restored to its original grandeur in 1906 by the French colonial government that started ruling Mali, then known as French Sudan, from 1892.
Each spring, festivities occur when Djenné’s Mosque is re-plastered after the rains by the local men along with visitors from around the world in an amazing expression of cultural patrimony.
Mud for re-plastering is cured weeks beforehand by mixing it with rice bran, baobab tree powder, shea butter and calcified fish bones. Low vats of this mud mixture are churned by young men using their feet. The plastering event is a methodical process with crowds carrying headloads of mud in a predetermined sequence bringing them to master masons who stand on high scaffolding that are a permanent part of the architecture. While traditionally, women carry water in buckets to the mud-making vats, the elders and children watch this festive occasion from the sidelines, sometimes dancing in joyous revelry to the sound of drumbeats bringing the whole town together.
Mali boasts of a rich mix of ethnic groups, ancient Niger river cultures, world-famous art of the Dogon and Bambara ethnic groups including the fabled caravan cities like Mopti, Djenné and Timbuktu.
However, Mali has witnessed three military coups, in 1968, 1991 and as recently as 2021, in the capital city of Bamako to the west. The Al Qaeda-connected Salafi Jihadist groups took over central Mali in 2015 prompting France to station and fight with an army of its legionaries.
With four UNESCO heritage sites in the Sahel region and a lack of tourism, I fear a slow destruction of monuments and local cultures due to lack of employment, tourist dollars, shrinking foreign aid and wanton militarization.
Given the difficulties of traveling and enjoying these treasures, this is sharing with the readers the extraordinary sophistication of African civilization in Mali and its impressive chapters of the past.