The Djinguereber Mosque is the Friday mosque of Timbuktu, in northern Mali, an earth building ordered by Mansa Musa on his return from the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1327, its walls bristling with timber stakes because half the city climbs them each year to re-plaster it by hand, the oldest of the three mosques of the city. The mosque is banco, mud mixed with straw and pressed on by hand, so that up close the walls are a worked surface rather than a rendered one, with straw ends showing and the marks of the hands, and the stepped pyramidal minaret of the fourteenth century lifts clear of the low sand streets from almost anywhere in the old town; it is often credited to Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, an Andalusian poet Mansa Musa brought home from Mecca and reportedly paid 12,000 mithqals of gold dust. Inside, 25 rows of close-set earth pillars hold up a roof of timber and mud in a hall that stays cool at the hottest hour, when the visitor comes in off the desert and works deep between the pillars away from the door, and three open courts floored with bare sand separate the prayer halls, so that nothing done in them makes a sound.
The stakes, the toron, are scaffolding as much as decoration: each October, once the rains of July to September have scarred the banco, the masons' guild and hundreds of townspeople climb the poles and re-coat the whole mosque with fresh mud in a festival, and for weeks afterwards the walls are smooth and pale. The roof beams now come from abroad, since Mali can no longer supply the timber and wood for repairs is shipped up from the forests of Ghana. The mosque survived the occupation of the city by jihadists in 2012, which destroyed the saints' tombs around it, and the city's manuscripts were smuggled out in the same years. Djinguereber is a mosque built of the desert's own mud, and the city rebuilds it every year with its hands.