Journey to Timbuctoo

By: Ian Ripper
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:42:23
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My trip to Mali (Guerba’s Journey to Timbuctoo), the vibrant heart of West Africa, amazed my in the variety and beauty of it's mud buildings. Perhaps most famous of all is the huge mud mosque at Djenne. The triple minaretted structure was built on the site of a royal palace as long ago as 1240. There have been several rebuilds along the way, and the current building was mostly constructed in 1907. The walls are made of mud bricks, and coated with a cured mud plaster. Palm fronds were inserted at regular intervals to add strength to the structure, and with the branch ends left protruding, they provide an instant scaffold for the annual repairs.

Apart from an electric megaphone, the building does not use electricity, yet the thick mud walls and cunning design for ventilation ensure that even on the hottest Sahel days the building is deliciously cool inside. Every year after the rains, the building is replastered with mud, and the whole exercise is woven into a festival so that all the community is involved. The women fill mud pits with water several days before the event, and young boys play in the mud as a way of mixing it. The townsmen then race to see who can be the first to deliver the mud to the selected builders, who start the re-plastering in front of an audience which includes past master plasterers. The mosque is made of local materials with local labour yet could not really be improved upon for design or functionality. A true marvel and environmental masterpiece!

We were not allowed into the mosque on this visit (hospitality had recently been abused by some photographers taking inappropriate images), but the east facing prayer wall faces Djenne market and the building forms the natural and cultural centre of this busy town on the Niger river.

Our trip then took us even further into the desert to the Bandiagara escarpment, home to the Dogon peoples and more exotic buildings. The Dogon are a tribe who went to live in caves on the steep Bandiagara in order to escape the drive to Islamification that swept this region about 600 years ago. Since that time, the Dogons have settled into villages at the base of the escarpment and have developed their own unique architectural style. The huts and granaries are square section (unusual in Africa) and have pointed and sometimes crenellated roofs, but my favourite buildings here were the village courthouses. Each village has it's own courthouse with unique carvings on the support pillars.

These pillars are about 3 feet high, and would be spaces about 5 ft apart, so that the floor spaces are broken up by them. The roof sits on these pillars, making headroom only 3ft inside, yet these thatched roofs can reach up 15 feet in layers of thatch bundles sometimes 15 layers deep. I enquired as to why so many layers, and why such lack of headroom inside and enjoyed the response. The roof gets a new layer of thatch for each successive village chief. This makes it easy to roughly date the village by the number of layers times the average chief's reign. The matter of limited headroom was very pragmatic, it means that the accuser and accused have to sit bent doubled while their case is argued in front of the chief, and there is no room for fighting! The other interesting aspect of these rooms are the carvings decorating the pillars, often of the Dogon cross that represents the link from sky through to the earth via man. Snakes and lizards were also common, and all these form the mainstay on the traditional ceremonial masks.

So, get over to West Africa for some vibrant and colourful life with a rich culture and some stunning architecture. And the beer is good!

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