A musical memory journey to West Africa

By Tim Woods:

It’s that warm tropical air with its overpowering scent of damp earthiness. It’s the magnificent birds and their multicoloured costumes, all reds and blues and greens. It’s the sweet relief of that first beer on a sticky evening, sipped from a sweaty bottle with the label sliding off. It’s the music that never seems to stop, whether you’re in a bar, on the beach or on the streets. These things, and so many others, are what I miss about West Africa – now more than ever. 

If the worst that happens to me during this wretched pandemic is an exaggerated case of wanderlust, then I’ll have been exceptionally fortunate. At the same time, I don’t think I’m alone in selfishly shoving larger issues aside and simply longing to escape the flat, the city, the country; in dreaming of other places; in wishing to be elsewhere. 

Last spring, as we all found ourselves adjusting to the unpleasant new reality, my yearning for the region I once called home grew stronger than ever. And so I began to travel virtually to the places I know in West Africa. While it’s not possible to recreate that heat, or redecorate Berlin’s garden birds in snazzier outfits, there are ways to take yourself there. I dug out old photos and sifted through them. I re-read well-thumbed guidebooks, picking out the places where I’d stayed and eaten. And I listened to the music, one of the best ways there is to curb the worst symptoms of travel sickness. 

West Africa has a hugely diverse musical culture, but perhaps the best-known style in Europe is the gentle, harp-like sound of the kora. And there are few kora players better than Sona Jobarteh. Her mastery of the instrument is not just admirable, it is also ground-breaking: she is the first female professional player, breaking into a livelihood that for centuries was solely for men. Born in Britain, but with proud Gambian roots, she comes from a griot family, who pass artistic traditions down through the generations. To truly appreciate the skill involved, it’s worth watching one of her concerts and admiring the speed at which she moves across the kora’s twenty-one strings. 

On a baking day last summer, I sat in the garden, listening once again to her music, hoping to be taken somewhere exotic. This time, I went to Bamako – one advantage of virtual travelling is that it’s easy to skip from Gambia to Mali in the blink of an eye – and specifically the San Toro restaurant, an oasis of calm in the chaos of that relentless city. One evening there, during a work trip to Mali, I ate falafel and drank peppermint tea from a clay cup while enjoying the sound of the kora. To my untrained ear, no songs ever seemed to start or finish, but instead the music drifted wherever the resident artist felt like going. I was even honoured with an exclusive performance: as the only customer, he was playing just to me. It felt a little indulgent, but he didn’t seem at all put out. When I left two hours later, he simply carried on. I’m not even sure he noticed me going.

Music has an unrivalled ability to take us somewhere else, often being strongly associated with certain points in our lives. It’s not just West Africa; I cannot listen to the Seekers without recalling family holidays spent driving around a rain-sodden Lake District, while any Britpop song will instantly take me to the clubs of Sheffield and my student days. It’s a welcome bonus to loving music, providing instant happy reminders of another place or time. 

Only since our ability to travel has been so severely restricted have I begun to use it actively, though. Only now, being indefinitely grounded in Berlin, do I feel a need to play this trick on myself. And, for the first time, I am starting to wonder if travelling will ever be as straightforward as it once was. I fear it may have been irreversibly damaged, whether due to the still ongoing Covid-19, or whatever virus nature has in store for us next; or maybe due to the now unavoidable climate crisis placing further, necessary, limits to our wanderings. 

It could, more simply and personally, be because that carefree period of my life is now over. I last visited West Africa on a work trip to Senegal in 2018, and back then I never once thought it would be three years and counting before I was back. My time spent living in Ghana is now nearly a decade ago, and those determined plans to return are getting hazier with each passing year. Fortunately I can go back easily enough, with a little help from the music; I just hope that I won’t need to use that trick forever.

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on Twitter here.

The Largest Mud Building in the World...

Photo: Mud Mosque, Mali – Mike Manson

By Mike Manson:

I arrived in Djenne as the Sahara light faded. Twilight was quick and grey, the air heavy with desert dust. The mosque, said to be the largest mud building in the world, sits alongside what was now an empty market square. Squat towers and a minaret were outlined against the grey sky. The pale light flattened the features. I was excited by the obvious energy of this powerful building. 

Djenne

Dotted along the milky Niger from Mopti to Kabara - the tiny river port that serves the legendary Timbuktu – are several intriguing village mud mosques. These structures are classic examples of Sudano-Sahelian architecture, an eco-friendly style of building characterised by the use of mud bricks and wooden support beams that jut out of the walls.

The most splendid mosque of all is in Djenne. The building stands like a castle on a rise overlooking the town’s market square. Djenne, an ancient flat-roofed adobe town, is built in a loop of the lethargic river Bani, a tributary of the Niger.

After a night in a straw-roofed adobe hut I was eager to explore. I got up shortly before dawn to avoid the heat. The market traders were already setting up their pitches of vegetables, second-hand clothes and piles of pungent dried river fish. 

Since 2007, when a fashion photographer disrespectfully held a photo shoot in the mosque, non-Muslims have been barred from officially entering this holy structure. However, as I walked around the building admiring the construction I was quietly approached by a guide who, for a small contribution, offered to slip me in through a side door.

The ochre coloured walls of the mosque are buttressed and pierced by spiky wooden struts. The roof is supported by ninety gargantuan pillars making the prayer hall akin to an indoor maze. There are no windows. Shafts of dusty light shine from the roof through small ventilation holes which are covered with ceramic caps in the rainy season. Adjacent to the main building is a large courtyard surrounded by six metre high mud walls. 

Photo: Djenne Mosque, the largest mud building in the world – Mike Manson

Although the present structure is only 100 years old, it sits on the site of earlier mosques dating back to 1280.

Sun dried mud is one of the oldest known building materials. Adobe building (the name is Spanish for mud brick) requires few tools relying on material as local as you can get. The shape of a brick is universal - the width is half the length, so it can be used side-on to add additional strength. The tools of the trade may be simple but the skills required constructing adobe buildings are complex. In Djenne, the adobe masons train for an apprenticeship that can last for as long as ten years. The apprentices are also taught secret spells that protect the buildings.  

There are a number of possible approaches to the construction largely governed by what is available locally. The simplest technique is to build-up gradually layers of clay to form walls. To obtain the optimum combination for strength, the raw earth is moistened with water and artfully mixed with straw, dung, animal hair, small pebbles and any other suitable materials to hand. Some adobe buildings will have a supporting wooden frame, others are constructed with an unreinforced raw mud mix. A water-tight roof is essential to prevent the building from being washed away. The roof will consist of roughly hewn timber logs covered in clay. Flat roofs will have wood, pottery or tin drainage spouts. If grass or reed is available a pitched thatched roof is an option. 

In villages I saw bricks drying beside the mud pits from which they had been excavated. Mud bricks, shaped by hand or formed in wooden moulds, are left to dry in the sun. Unfired, the bricks are then laid and cemented with wet mud. To offer additional protection the wall may be covered with a mud based plaster. Before construction begins a text from the Koran will be read.

Photo: Unfired mud bricks are left to dry in the sun – Mike Manson

Aside from the use of local materials, the benefits of adobe structures are that the interior is warm in winter and cool in summer. The buildings naturally breathe; in recent cases where waterproof cement has been applied to the exterior this moisture can be trapped, which adds to problems of damp.   

There are, of course, limitations. Walls necessarily have to be thick and doors and windows small; ornamentation is basic. The biggest threat to adobe buildings is rain. Unlike fired bricks, which are hardened and hold their shape even when damp, mud bricks quickly return to their original form when exposed to rain. Over the years, if not properly maintained, unfired bricks melt back from whence they came, leaving merely a hillock on the landscape.  

In Djennne there is an annual festival when the town comes together to repair the mosque. Mud is mixed by foot and handed to agile youngsters who climb the projecting struts and pat on a new protective layer.

The oldest building in Ghana

Other fine examples of Sudano-Sahelian mosques are to be found in the North West of Ghana. Several years later I visited Larabanga, whose mosque is a surrogate Mecca for Ghanaian muslims.

Photo: The whitewashed Larabanga Mosque, Ghana – Mike Manson

I paid my respects and a handful of cedi to a sleepy mullah resting in the shade of a tree. Excitable youths escorted me down a lane. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the serene whitewashed mosque, sheltered by a huge tree, is said to be the oldest building in the country. It once stood alone in the sandy sub Saharan scrub, set in its own low walled enclosure for outside worship. Flat roofed huts have grown up around, so now it is in a back street. 

The uneven organic form of the building - low, squat and punctuated by irregular triangular buttresses - is captivating. Scraped from the earth, supported by rare and precious timbers the mosque is built on a simple wooden frame. The ends of the supporting, uncut, beams extend beyond the walls providing useful props when the mosque is repaired after the rainy season. Two pyramidal towers, a mihrab which faces Mecca and a minaret, are capped with plastic orbs. Traditionally these finials, as in Djenne, would have been ostrich eggs. 

The surrounding streets were dirty with animal dung and plastic rubbish but the yard is clean, swept gracefully by a woman with a long handled nylon broom. The Larabanga mosque is entered through a low, 5 ft high doorway. As your eyes adjust to the dim light, the impression is not of a room but of a series of interconnected passageways. Because of this only few worshippers are able to directly see the iman. Uneven steps at the back of the building lead up to a stumpy minaret and a gently cambered flat roof to allow drainage. 

Although there has probably been a mosque on this site since the thirteenth century - the age of the present structure is open to debate. Certainly the Larabanga mosque has recently been extensively restored by the World Monument Fund after the mihrab and minaret were on the verge of collapse after a severe storm.

Over the years most of the mud mosques in Ghana have been replaced by more substantial brick buildings; in 2018 just eight of these Western Sudanese style mosques remain.

In these eco conscious times these organic buildings are about as environmentally friendly as you can get. The building materials - mud, water wood and dung - are local and biodegradable. They leave hardly a footprint on the landscape.

***

Mike Manson is a writer and historian who lives in Bristol, England. His most recent book Down in Demerara (Tangent Books) is set in Guyana.