Djenné
Djenné is a town of mud on an island of the Bani river in the inland delta of the Niger, and at its centre stands the largest mud building in the world: the Great Mosque, raised in 1907 on the site of one from the thirteenth century, its three towers and its walls bristling with the palm beams — the toron — that serve as scaffolding for the day each spring when the whole town, guilds of masons and lines of boys with baskets, replasters it in a single festival morning called the crépissage. In front of it, every Monday, one of West Africa's great markets fills the square; around it, the old town of two-storey houses with Moroccan and Toucouleur façades, Koranic schools where children copy verses onto wooden tablets, and lanes that flood in the rains, is a UNESCO site since 1988. Three kilometres away, under a mound in the fields, Djenné-Djeno was a city already in 250 BC, one of the oldest south of the Sahara; the ferry to the Mopti road crosses the Bani, and everything comes and goes by it.
The traveller who has cause to be there comes from Mopti across the ferry on a Sunday, to wake to the Monday market at the mosque's feet; walks the town with a guide from the office by the square — the façades, the schools, the masons' quarter, the roofs at sunset with the mosque going gold; watches, if the calendar allows, the crépissage, which is announced weeks ahead and is the town's greatest day; walks or rides out to Djenné-Djeno and its excavated mound; eats rice and fish by the port where the pirogues land; and sleeps in one of the mud guesthouses whose terraces look at the mosque, which non-Muslims may not enter and do not need to.
The Guide's honesty, gently: Mali's centre carries a hard decade and the winds reach far — chancelleries counsel against travel to the region, the roads from Mopti have been dangerous, and the Guide does not argue with them: this page, too, keeps a patient lamp, and it will be there when the ferry crosses for ordinary reasons again —; for those with cause to be there, the town runs on cash, French and Bambara greetings, the guides' office is the honest door, and photography of the mosque is welcome and of people is by leave; the mud town is a living place that eats its own walls every rainy season and is rebuilt every dry one — the traveller sees a thing kept alive by hand, which is why UNESCO worries about it and why it is worth the world's patience.