Djinguereber Mosque is rebuilt out of mud every year, by hand, by the town that prays in it — the only reason a 14th-century earthen building still stands. Mansa Musa, the Mali emperor whose 1324 pilgrimage handed out so much gold that its value in Cairo stayed low for years, ordered it on his way home; the work is usually dated to 1327. What you walk through now is largely the enlargement begun in 1570 by the judge al-Aqib: twenty-five rows of squat earth pillars under a low roof, room for some two thousand worshippers. The walls are banco, earth kneaded with straw, and the wooden stakes bristling out of them — the toron — are permanent scaffolding, not ornament. Rain between July and September eats the surface away, so every October the masons' guild and half the city climb those stakes and re-coat the building, working baobab powder into the eastern and southern faces, the sides the storms arrive from.
Step inside and the heat drops. The hall is dim and sand-floored, the pillars close together. Timbuktu's scholarly fame belonged mostly to Sankoré up the road; this was the Friday mosque, the room where the entire city met. That nearly broke in 2012, when armed Islamists held Timbuktu for ten months, destroyed fourteen saints' mausoleums across the city and, on 1 July, two tombs at Djinguereber itself. The mausoleums were rebuilt by 2015, and in 2016 the International Criminal Court jailed one of the ringleaders — its first case for the destruction of cultural heritage. The mosque still fills at prayer, and was replastered on schedule in October 2025. Reaching it is the hard part now: northern Mali is blockaded and fought over, foreign governments advise against all travel, and the few who get here arrive by air or by boat up the Niger.