Great Mosque of Djenné

The Great Mosque of Djenné is the Friday mosque of Djenné, a small but very old town in central Mali. It is used every week for communal prayers and is the heart of the town’s religious life. It is also one of the most famous buildings in Africa: its tall earthen towers and bristling walls appear on postcards, in films and games, and on Mali’s national coat of arms.

It is often called the largest mud-brick (adobe) building in the world. Almost everything in it, from the platform to the roof, is made of earth taken from the surrounding floodplain, together with palm wood. Because earth is soft and rain is strong, the building survives only because people repair it every year. This makes the mosque not just a monument but a living tradition.

The building we see today was completed in 1907, but it stands on a site where mosques have stood for many centuries. Its story connects medieval West African kingdoms, Islamic scholarship, a nineteenth-century reform movement, French colonial rule and the challenges of protecting heritage today.

Start from outside, on the market square to the east. You see the qibla wall, the wall that faces Mecca and that Muslims face when they pray. Three huge box-shaped towers rise from it; the central one is about 16 metres high. Each tower ends in cone-shaped pinnacles topped with ostrich eggs, and between them eighteen buttresses, each with its own pinnacle, give the wall a rhythm like a row of pillars.

The whole mosque stands on a raised platform about 75 metres square and 3 metres high, reached by six sets of stairs. The platform protects it when the Bani River floods. The outline of the building is not a perfect square: its walls are slightly out of line, giving it a trapezoid shape.

Inside, the eastern half is a covered prayer hall about 26 by 50 metres. Its heavy earthen roof is carried by nine parallel walls pierced by pointed arches, which together form a “forest” of about ninety thick rectangular pillars. Only a little light enters through small windows, so the hall is dim and cool. Vents in the roof are covered by pottery lids that can be lifted to let hot air escape.

The western half is an open courtyard surrounded on three sides by arcaded galleries; the western gallery is reserved for women. In the central tower of the qibla wall is the main mihrab, the niche where the imam leads prayer, and beside it the minbar, the pulpit for the Friday sermon.

Djenné’s buildings are made of earth from the river plain, mixed with chopped straw and shaped into bricks that dry in the sun. Traditionally, masons in Djenné used rounded, hand-shaped bricks called djenné-ferey; rectangular bricks made in wooden moulds became common in the twentieth century. The bricks are laid in earth mortar and then covered with plaster made of earth mixed with materials such as rice husks.

The bundles of rônier-palm sticks that project from the walls, called toron, do several jobs at once. They decorate the surface, they help the thick walls cope with cracking, and they act as permanent scaffolding for workers. Clay pipes stick out from the roofline to throw rainwater away from the walls.

Earth is a clever material in a hot climate. Thick mud walls stay cool during the day and release warmth at night. But earth also dissolves in heavy rain, so an earthen building is never “finished.” It must be looked after like a garden.

Each year, before the rains, the people of Djenné hold a festival to re-plaster the mosque, often called by its French name, the crépissage. In the days before, plaster is prepared in pits and left to cure; it has to be stirred regularly, a job that usually falls to boys, who happily play in the mud.

On the day of the festival a race decides who will be first to bring plaster to the mosque. Men climb the walls using the toron and palm-wood ladders and smear fresh plaster over the surface, while others carry plaster from the pits. Women and girls bring water. Members of the masons’ guild direct the work, and elders who have taken part many times watch from places of honour in the market square.

The festival repairs damage from the previous rainy season, but it does much more: it renews the bond between the building and the community, passes on skills from one generation to the next, and turns heritage conservation into a shared celebration with music and food.

Djenné lies on the floodplain between the Niger and Bani rivers, at the southern end of the Inland Niger Delta. During the annual flood, from about July to October, the town becomes an island reached by causeways. This watery landscape supported rice farming, fishing and river trade.

About three kilometres from the modern town lies Djenné-Djeno (“old Djenné”), excavated by Susan and Roderick McIntosh from 1977. Their work showed that people lived there from around 250 BCE, that the settlement had a city wall and many thousands of inhabitants by the late first millennium CE, and that it traded over long distances before the arrival of Arab traders from North Africa. This overturned the older idea that West African cities were created by outside contact. The old site was gradually abandoned by about 1400, while the present town, first settled after about 1000 CE, flourished.

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries Djenné was a key link in trans-Saharan trade. Salt from Taghaza in the Sahara and gold from the forest zone to the south, as well as enslaved people, passed through Djenné and Timbuktu. The Songhay ruler Sonni Ali took the town in 1471 after a long siege. The chronicler al-Saʿdi, writing in the seventeenth century, called Djenné “one of the great markets of the Muslims.” Djenné and Timbuktu were also centres of Islamic learning, with many Qur’an schools.

The earliest written account of the mosque is in al-Saʿdi’s Tārīkh al-Sūdān, completed in the mid-seventeenth century and presumably based on oral tradition. It says that Sultan Kunburu (Koi Konboro) became a Muslim, had his palace pulled down and turned the site into a mosque, and built himself a new palace nearby. His successor added the towers and the next ruler the surrounding wall.

No one knows exactly when this happened. Suggested dates range from about 1200 to 1330; the French-language tradition often gives 1238. Because the story comes from a chronicle written centuries later, historians treat it as a foundation tradition rather than a precise record.

The architectural historian Labelle Prussin proposed a more complicated history in which the mosque was rebuilt several times, under later Djenné rulers, by the Songhay ruler Askia Muhammad around 1500, and again after the Moroccan invasion of the 1590s. What is clear is that by the nineteenth century a large, very old earthen mosque stood on the site.

In about 1818–1819 the Fulani reformer Seku Amadu (Ahmadu Lobbo), founder of the Massina state and inspired by Usman dan Fodio’s jihad in Hausaland, took Djenné. He regarded the old mosque, a converted palace richly decorated, as too sumptuous for the austere Islam he preached. He let it fall into ruin, closed the small neighbourhood mosques, and in the 1830s built a large, low new mosque without towers on another part of the site.

When the French explorer René Caillié visited Djenné in 1828, disguised as a Muslim traveller, he described an earthen mosque with two massive towers, “rudely constructed, though very large,” abandoned to thousands of swallows. Djenné later passed to the Toucouleur empire of al-Hajj Umar Tal (1861), and in April 1893 French forces under Louis Archinard occupied it.

The French journalist Félix Dubois visited soon after and described the ruins of the old mosque, whose interior was then used as a cemetery. His book Tombouctou la mystérieuse (1897), with a reconstructed plan and drawing, made Djenné famous in Europe and America.

In 1906 the town arranged for the old mosque to be rebuilt on its original site and for a school (madrasa) to replace Seku Amadu’s mosque. According to French-language accounts, the colonial governor William Ponty approved the project at the request of a local religious leader. The work was completed in 1907 under Ismaila Traoré, head of Djenné’s guild of masons, who was famous throughout the region. The colonial administration supported it administratively and financially, and forced labour was used.

Old photographs suggest that at least some outer walls follow the lines of the earlier mosque, but it is unclear whether the interior pillars kept the old arrangement. What was almost certainly new was the symmetrical group of three large towers in the qibla wall.

Since 1907 the design has changed only a little. The mihrab tower once had a pair of large recesses; the walls originally had far fewer toron, and two extra rows were added in the early 1990s. In 1930 the French army built an inexact cement copy, the Missiri mosque, at Fréjus in southern France for West African colonial soldiers.

For the people of Djenné the mosque is first of all a place of worship and the centre of an Islamic community with a long scholarly tradition. The terrace in front of the eastern wall holds two tombs, including that of Almany Ismaïla, an important eighteenth-century imam. The market held every week on the square in front of the mosque ties religious and economic life together, as it has for centuries.

The mosque has also become a national symbol. It appears on the coat of arms of Mali and is widely used as an emblem of Malian and West African culture. Its form influenced other mosques in the region, such as the Great Mosque of Mopti (1935), and a wider “neo-Sudanese” style.

Local people have repeatedly defended their own idea of the mosque. They resisted modernisations that changed other Malian mosques, such as tiling over the walls, even as a loudspeaker system was installed. According to French-language sources, the mosque was closed to non-Muslims after a fashion photographer’s shoot inside and on the roof was considered to have broken an agreement with local authorities.

In 1988 UNESCO inscribed the “Old Towns of Djenné” on the World Heritage List. The property includes the historic town, with its mosque and nearly two thousand traditional houses built on low mounds (toguere) above the flood, and the archaeological sites of Djenné-Djeno, Hambarketolo, Kaniana and Tonomba.

Conservation has not always been smooth. In January 2006 the sight of workers inspecting the roof for a restoration project funded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture sparked a riot in the town, in which one person died. In November 2009 the upper part of the southern qibla tower collapsed after heavy rain; the Aga Khan Trust funded its rebuilding.

In July 2016 the World Heritage Committee placed the Old Towns of Djenné on the List of World Heritage in Danger. It cited insecurity in the region, which was preventing protection work, as well as deterioration of building materials, urbanisation and erosion of the archaeological sites. The armed conflict in central Mali has also cut tourism, an important source of income for the town.

The 1907 building raised a debate that still shapes how the mosque is interpreted. Félix Dubois, returning in 1910, was shocked; he blamed the French administration for the design and mocked the towers as looking like a cross between a hedgehog and a church organ. The ethnographer Michel Leiris, travelling in 1931, likewise called it the work of Europeans and reported local dissatisfaction.

Against this, Jean-Louis Bourgeois, in a detailed study published in African Arts in 1987, argued that French influence was minimal, perhaps limited to the interior arches, and that the design is “basically African,” built by the traditional masons’ guild with traditional techniques. Other writers on Sudano-Sahelian architecture state that French engineers gave guidance and that colonial architects promoted a symmetrical, monumental “neo-Sudanese” style of which the rebuilt mosque became a model.

The disagreement is partly about evidence (what French officials actually did) and partly about categories. Djenné’s masons had always rebuilt and reshaped earthen buildings; a “traditional” building that is renewed every year is never a fixed original. Recent scholarship tends to see the mosque as a local creation made under colonial conditions, in which Djenné’s own politics also mattered: much of the Islamic elite, humiliated by Seku Amadu’s destruction of the old mosque, wanted it restored on its original site.

The Great Mosque challenges Western heritage ideas that prize original fabric. Almost none of its surface is more than a few years old, yet its authenticity lies in continuity of form, material, skill and community ritual. The anthropologist Trevor Marchand, who trained with Djenné’s masons, has shown how knowledge passes through apprenticeship and the guild, and how the annual festival reproduces social relationships as well as walls.

Heritage status has had mixed effects. A survey of the town in 1984 identified 134 architecturally important two-storey houses, but by 1995 about 30 percent of them had been demolished and replaced, despite World Heritage restrictions. A Dutch-funded project from 1996 to 2003 restored around one hundred older houses, sometimes by complete rebuilding. Residents have sometimes resented rules that limit how they may modernise their own homes.

For the early history, the key written sources are the seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles, especially al-Saʿdi’s Tārīkh al-Sūdān (translated by John Hunwick), and they disagree about Djenné’s relationship with the Mali empire: one claims Mali attacked Djenné ninety-nine times without success, while the Tārīkh al-fattāsh presents Djenné’s ruler as a vassal. European testimony begins only with Antonio Malfante (1447), Portuguese writers and, for the building itself, Caillié (1828) and Dubois (1890s). Archaeological work in the town and at Djenné-Djeno remains the main independent check on these narratives.