Who ruled Djenné?

Djenné is a town in the inland Niger delta of central Mali, built on a floodplain between the Niger and Bani rivers that turns it into an island every flood season. Close by lies Djenné-Djenno, among the oldest towns yet known in sub-Saharan Africa. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century Djenné was, with Timbuktu, a hub of the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt and a centre of Islamic learning, and its mud-brick Great Mosque is the largest adobe building in the world.

About 2.5 kilometres south-east of the present town lies Djenné-Djenno, "old Djenné". Susan and Roderick McIntosh, digging there in 1977 and 1981, showed that it was first settled around 200 BCE, and that by somewhere between 300 and 850 CE it had grown into a large walled town. Estimates suggest that the town and its surroundings may have held between 10,000 and 26,000 people around 800 CE. Oral traditions give the settlement a legendary founder from Yemen and a long line of early chiefs.

The present town was settled after about 1000 CE, according to preliminary digs. Djenné-Djenno itself declined after 1100 and was abandoned by 1400, perhaps because of disease or war, while the new town survived as a regional market. Local tradition says Djenné was founded in the seventh century and derives its name from the Arabic word for paradise, but such accounts mix up the old and new towns.

The town's first mosque is said to have been built when a ruler named Koi Kunboro converted to Islam and turned his palace into a place of prayer; suggested dates range from 1200 to 1330. Relations with the Mali Empire were uneasy. One seventeenth-century chronicle, the Tarikh al-Sudan, claims the Malians attacked Djenné ninety-nine times without taking it, while another, the Tarikh al-fattash, portrays its chief as the Malian emperor's humble vassal. Historians think it was probably a sometimes-tributary city-state that clashed with Mali over trade.

In 1471, soon after seizing Timbuktu, the Songhai ruler Sonni Ali captured Djenné after a siege of about six months, using his river fleet to blockade the flooded town. Under the Songhai Empire it became one of the busiest markets of the middle Niger, with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants. Gold from the Akan fields to the south passed north through Djenné and Timbuktu, and salt from Taghaza came south. By the early sixteenth century, however, Portuguese ships collecting gold on the Atlantic coast were drawing trade away from the desert routes.

A Moroccan army defeated the Songhai in 1591 at the Battle of Tondibi; in 1599 the Moroccans beat off a Malian attempt to take Djenné. The town remained prosperous; the chronicler al-Sadi, writing in 1655, described it as among the chief markets of the Muslim world. But Moroccan control had faded by 1630, and in the insecurity that followed Djenné changed hands repeatedly. It belonged to the Ségou Empire from 1670 to 1818, to the Massina state of the Fulani leader Seku Amadu from 1818 to 1861, and then to the Toucouleur Empire of Umar Tall. Seku Amadu let the old mosque fall into ruin and built a plainer one of his own.

The French explorer René Caillié, travelling in disguise, reached the town in 1828 and described its sun-dried brick houses and earthen wall. French forces under Louis Archinard occupied Djenné in April 1893. The colonial authorities made Mopti the regional capital, and Djenné's importance waned.

The present Great Mosque was built in 1906–1907 on the site of the old one, by the town's guild of masons under Ismaila Traoré, using forced labour. How far its three tall towers reflect French influence has been argued over: the journalist Félix Dubois thought the design was French and disliked it, while the writer Jean-Louis Bourgeois judged it essentially African. Its earthen walls are replastered every year, yet heavy rain still brought down one of its towers in 2009.

The town and the archaeological sites of Djenné-Djenno, Hambarkétolo, Kaniana and Tonomba were inscribed together by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1988, and the site has been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2016. Today a small town in Mali, whose commune had 32,944 inhabitants in 2009, it lives mainly from farming, fishing and livestock, and its Quranic schools still attract students from beyond the region.