A trading city on the inland delta of the Niger River in Mali, twin to nearby Djenné-Djenno, one of the oldest known cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Djenné grew rich linking the goldfields of the south to the salt and desert routes of the north, became a respected center of Islamic learning, and is best known today for its Great Mosque, the largest mud-brick building in the world, replastered each year by the whole community.
Once a year, before the rains, the people of Djenné gather at dawn with their hands full of wet earth. They climb the wooden stakes that bristle from the walls of their Great Mosque and press fresh plaster over the cracks the dry season has opened. Drummers play. Young men race to carry the mud. The building they are mending is the largest structure of sun-dried earth on the planet, and it does not survive on its own. It survives because the town remakes it every year, by hand, together. The mosque most visitors photograph was finished in 1907. Yet a few kilometers away lie the mounds of a far older city, settled over two millennia ago, long before any Arab trader or holy book reached this stretch of river. The earth here has been a city far longer than outsiders once believed possible.