Source: Earth Architecture

The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne

Thursday, November 15, 2007

The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne, a new film by Susan Vogel and presented by the Musée National du Mali, is the story of Komusa, master mason and heir to the secrets of Djenne architecture. He hopes his son will continue the family profession and maintain their world heritage city - but Djenne is connected to a global world now, and competing ideas about the future have arrived. Documentary footage and staged scenes tell an intimate story of family tensions, contemporary building practices, and the precarious future of the renowned mud architecture of Mali.

Treehugger writes of the film:

A “collective connection to earthen architecture is best seen in the film’s footage of the annual re-plastering of the town’s pride, the Great Mosque, which is the world’s largest earth building, in addition to being a distinguished UNESCO World Heritage site. The first earthen structure here on this site dates back to the 13th century and is re-plastered every year. The day-long, annual festival is truly a communal affair, with plenty of foreign tourists gawking on and filming the orderly chaos.”

photo of the Great Mosque of Djenne by Ferdinand Reus

The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenne
Co-Produced with Trevor Marchand and Samuel Sidibé.
Edited by Harry Kafka. Music by Issa Bagayogo. In Bamana, French, English with English subtitles. Color, 58 minutes. Distributed by FRIF.com. Available fall 2007.

I’ve been trying to find information and reports from Terra 2008 which was held in Mali from 1-5 February 2008. So far all I found was an ended discussion forum on BBC NEWS about ‘Should Africa do away with mud buildings‘ which I thought was a very negative question - as did most of the respondents. It was also a strange question to ask on the week that 300 delegates were meeting to discuss the preservation of earthen architecture.

I did find one delegate report at Aluka Blog . By the way you may be interested to explore that blog as there are some really interesting links on Mali, and Djenne in particular.

Here is the information from the Getty Foundation who are funding the conference:

10th International Conference on the Study and Conservation of Earthen Architecture“

Bamako, Mali
February 2008

	Djenné Mosque. Photo: Leslie Rainer.

The 10th International Conference on the Study and Conservation of Earthen Architecture will be held in February 2008 in Bamako, Mali, West Africa. The conference is organized by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Ministry of Culture of Mali with the collaboration of Africa 2009, CRATerre-ENSAG, ICOMOS South Africa, and the World Heritage Centre, under the aegis of ICOMOS and its International Scientific Committee on the Earthen Architectural Heritage. Three hundred international specialists in the fields of earthen architecture, conservation, archaeology, scientific research and site management are expected to attend.

	Songho village, Dogon country. Photo: Leslie Rainer.

This is the tenth conference to be organized by the earthen architecture community under the aegis of ICOMOS since 1972, and the first to be held in Africa. It provides a unique opportunity to discuss and observe firsthand conservation issues particular to sub-Saharan Africa, a region rich in earthen architecture. During this conference, specialists will present papers and posters that reflect the latest research and practices in the study and conservation of earthen architecture worldwide.

The languages in official use during the conference will be French and English. A four-day postconference tour to Tombouctou, Mopti, Bandiagara and Djenné will be organized for a maximum of one hundred participants. Funding opportunities for participants from developing countries to attend the conference will be available.

Source: http://homepage.mac.com/melissaenderle/mali/pages/museumsymbols.html

 Many people come to Mali with the intention of visiting the Dogon villages. Places of Peace and Power has a good article on the sacred sites of the Dogon with excellent photos.

The Dogon are an ethnic group located mainly in the districts of Bandiagara and Douentza in Mali, West Africa. This area is composed of three distinct topographical regions: the plain, the cliffs, and the plateau. Within these regions the Dogon population of about 300,000 is most heavily concentrated along a 200-kilometer (125 mile) stretch of escarpment called the Cliffs of Bandiagara. These sandstone cliffs run from southwest to northeast, roughly parallel to the Niger River, and attain heights up to 600 meters (2000 feet). The cliffs provide a spectacular physical setting for Dogon villages built on the sides of the escarpment. There are approximately 700 Dogon villages, most with fewer than 500 inhabitants.

The precise origins of the Dogon, like those of many other ancient cultures, are lost in the mists of time. The early histories are informed by oral traditions (that differ according to the Dogon clan being consulted) and archaeological excavation (much more of which needs to be conducted). Because of these inexact and incomplete sources, there are a number of different versions of the Dogon’s origin myths, as well as differing accounts of how they got from their ancestral homelands to the Bandiagara region. The people call themselves Dogon or Dogom, but in the older literature they are most often called Habe, a Fulbe word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘pagan.’ Certain theories suggest the tribe to be of ancient Egyptian descent. After living in the region of Libya, they are believed to have migrated to somewhere in the region of Burkina Faso, Guinea or Mauritania (different scholarly sources give different places for this period). Around 1490 AD, fleeing invaders and/or drought, they migrated to the Bandiagara cliffs of central Mali. Carbon-14 dating techniques used on excavated remains found in the cliffs indicate that there were inhabitants in the region before the arrival of the Dogon; these were the Toloy culture of the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC, and the Tellem culture of the 11th to 15th centuries AD.

Places of Peace and Power have a great article on Djenne, with some good pix.

Djenné, the oldest known city in sub-Saharan Africa is situated on the floodlands of the Niger and Bani rivers, 354 kilometers (220 miles) southwest of Timbuktu. Founded by merchants around 800 AD (near the site of an older city dating from 250BC), Djenné flourished as a meeting place for traders from the deserts of Sudan and the tropical forests of Guinea. Captured by the Songhai emperor Sonni ‘Ali in 1468, it developed into Mali’s most important trading center during the 16th century. The city thrived because of its direct connection by river with Timbuktu and from its situation at the head of trade routes leading to gold and salt mines. Between 1591 and 1780, Djenné was controlled by Moroccan kings and during these years its markets further expanded, featuring products from throughout the vast regions of North and Central Africa. In 1861 the city was conquered by the Tukulor emperor al-Hajj ‘Umar and was then occupied by the French in 1893. Thereafter, its commercial functions were taken over by the town of Mopti, which is situated at the confluence of the Niger and Bani rivers, 90 kilometers to the northeast. Djenné is now an agricultural trade center, of diminished importance, with several beautiful examples of Muslim architecture, including its Great Mosque.

Read the full article and look at the pix

Virtually every house in Zebala is built from mud brick. The bricks are then plastered over with a mud plaster to make the outside smooth. A corrugated tin roof is then put on top. All the houses are interlinked by passages and walk ways. It’s very difficult to decide where one family unit’s set of houses finish and another’s begin. There are few walls round groups of houses. Finding one’s way around is a real adventure and I got lost lots of times trying to find the little shop only yards from where I was living! Shops are not marked, they look like any other building, but usually you can tell them by the people going in and out. Inside, there are a few shelves with things like tinned tomato concentrate, little boxes of Chinese green tea (called gunpowder), twists of sugar, sachets of washing powder .. and .. amazingly .. boxes of chewing gum!People live outside their houses and use the house itself for storage and sleeping. The insides are very dark. There are often window openings with a shutter of corrugate, but these are more often left closed than open.

Outside the houses people sit on low stools and cook, or make things. All life happens in the small courtyards between houses. Often the cooking is done on an open fire with a pot hanging or standing on three stones. There are wells dotted around and there is a constant flow of people to these bringing water to compounds. Washing is laid on walls, on the ground and any other free space, and the dust is shaken off when it is dry.

Children wander around, many little ones with few clothes on. Older girls help their mothers with the cooking and other chores. The boys are free to play.

Africa Shrine blogs about Dogon Architecture. with an article from Merkus, E. An Introduction to The Pyschology oF Architecture.

The homes the Dogon people of Central Africa are an excellent example of how the original container is reproduced almost literal form. Although these people live quite simply in our terms, their culture is very complex and closely aligned with nature. To the Dogon, home is not a particular building, but a series of stages, which includes several buildings. The home is closely related to the development of the individual. For example a Dogon wife stays with her father until she has had her third child. She does however sleep with her husband during the night and returns to her father’s house during the day. It is a hierarchical system where the family is spread over several houses until they have achieved the status required to own their own home. Their homes are not owned by individuals as such, but are stages in one could say, psychic development and are shared as such.

A friend put some nice Mali photos on Flickr for me to use. Here’s a couple of Dogon architecture from Tata Timbo:

Last weekend we had a wedding just half a block away from my apartment. First I knew of it was the drums the night before. That was fun! They set up shop on the street corner … several large Djembé drums and lots of smaller ones … some that you hold under your arm and beat with a stick. The decibel level was incredible. The apartment seemed to reverberate. All the local kids were out and a big crowd developed. Then just as suddenly as it started, it stopped.

The following day I was drawn to our balcony by the sound of a huge number of mopeds (called motos) and motor bikes .. all revving up and sounding horns. It was the start of a cavalcade .. they paraded the streets in our area for about half an hour. After the motor bikes came the cars .. all sounding their horns and flashing lights. The roads around here are really bad. The rains have washed some of the red mud away and there are huge holes and bumps. You should have seen some of these posh cars trying to make their way around .. I felt really sorry for some of the ladies dressed in their finery being slung around the back seat of a mercedes!

Then the men congregated at one of the local mosques …for the wedding ceremony, without the bride!!! This is the formal part of the day. I think there are five mosques around here.

Later in the afternoon I heard drumming again from the street corner. They had put up a sheltered area and brought in lots of chairs. It was ladies afternoon ….wonderful colours, wonderful boubous in bright colours. It seemed at one point like most of the area had turned out. During this time various ceremonies are carried out by the women. The poor little bride sits under a veil in a courtyard, usually looking terribly scared. There are praise singers (griots) who sing the praises of those who pay them. The ones for this group sang really well. In fact there seemed to be two and one would sing with the other making encouraging comments. Sometime in the late afternoon everyone dispersed and the area settled down for the night.

Then the local night club began …..

P2090002, originally uploaded by Malilady.

From Earth Architecture

Virtual Mud

Heinz Ruther, professor of Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, has embarked on a project aimed both at preserving the sites, and also at making them accessible - in virtual form - to people across the continent who may not have the means to get there themselves. BBC | Africast [via]

From Earth Architecture

Terra 2008, the 10th International Conference on the Study and Conservation of Earthen Architectural Heritage, will take place in Bamako, Mali from February 1-5, 2008. This is the 10th conference organized by the earthen architecture community under the aegis of ICOMOS since 1972, and the first to be held in Africa. The conference is expected to draw up to 300 specialists in the fields of conservation, anthropology, archaeology, architecture and engineering, scientific research, site management, and sustainable development of earthen architectural heritage. Organized by The Getty Conservation Institute and the Ministry of Culture of Mali in collaboration with Africa 2009 | CRATerre | ICOMOS South Africa | ICCROM | World Heritage Centre under the aegis of ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Earthen Architectural Heritage

Download the conference announcement (pdf)

Zebala is a large village, about 50 kilometers from Koutiala. The groupings of family houses meld into each other through myriad corridors of mudbrick. It’s easy for the stranger to get lost in the labyrinth. Storehouses are built on small piles of brick with thatched roofs. Houses often have corrugate roofs with mud brick walls.

zebala village houses

Zebala is a large village about 50 kms from Koutiala in the Sikasso Region of Mali. The internetworked compounds spread out from a central area where celebrations like weddings are held. There is a small market area for the weekly market, and small boutiques are hidden on the edge of the interlocked compounds. All the buildings are made from mudbrick, often with corrugate roofs and window shutters. The main cash crop for the area is cotton, and there are huge’holding areas’ where the cotton is collected ready to be sold to the middle men. Large trucks rumble in and out of the village taking cotton to Koutiala for processing.

Zebala for me conjures up pictures of ‘real Mali’. A rural village in the south which is rich in culture and interest. I stayed in the village for 10 days over Christmas in 2000 and I have many good memories, some of which I have posted here in the Zebala series of postings.

Zebala, a village in the Sikasso Region, Mali, originally uploaded by Malilady.

This photo was taken on a Minyanka compound in a rural village. The building behind the girl is a sleeping room. A bamboo bed can be seen airing in the sun. This is done to reduce bedbugs.

The mosque of Bla, Sikasso Region, Mali, originally uploaded by Malilady.

This is one of the larger mud-brick mosques in Mali.

I took this picture of a group of houses (a compound) on the road to Guinea in 2000. I had not seen houses painted like these before. The paint is a kind of coloured mud. Notice also the style of the thatching on the roofs.

This is a wonderfully atmospheric picture by Photographer Rémi Bénal from National Geographic 

Mud-walled mosque in Djénné, Mali

“I used this man to give the mosque scale, to show its size. He was leaving the mosque and I asked him to stand still for two seconds. He was old, so I couldn’t insist too much. And I had to be fast because the light of the sky was fading.

“In a way, he represents 1,500 years of Islam, and like this tree, he’s rooted in the land, just like this mosque, which also comes from the land. It is the largest mud-brick building in world.”

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