Field Notebook: Along the Middle Niger
1Day 1, Jenné-jeno. A low mound of earth near the town of Djenné. Archaeologists who dug here starting in 1977 found that people lived on this spot from about 250 BCE until about 1400 CE. By about 800 CE it was a town of mud-brick houses, and archaeologists estimate that thousands of people lived here. In layers dated well before 800 they found iron tools made nearby and copper ornaments, though no copper is mined anywhere close to this part of the river.
2Day 2, Djenné. The Great Mosque is the largest mud-brick building I have ever seen. The building standing today was rebuilt in 1907 on the site of a much older mosque. Rain wears mud walls away, so each year, before the rainy season, people of the town climb the walls together and spread on fresh mud. Bozo fishing families, Fulani herders and Mande farmers and traders live here today, as their ancestors did.
3Day 3, by boat to Timbuktu. Reviewing background notes. Ghana, which its Soninke people called Wagadu, was the first great trading kingdom; its kings grew rich by taxing gold and salt, and it weakened in the 1100s. Mali rose in the 1200s and took over the trade and the gold fields. Some Arab writers told a story that gold miners and salt traders never met: each side left its goods on the ground and walked away while the other side decided. Most historians think this story shows how little outsiders knew about where the gold came from.
4Day 5, Timbuktu. Mansa Musa of Mali crossed the Sahara on the hajj to Mecca in 1324. He came home with Muslim scholars and, by tradition, an architect from Muslim Spain named al-Sahili. The Djinguereber Mosque was begun here about 1327; it has been repaired and partly rebuilt many times since. Families showed me old handwritten books on law, medicine and astronomy. In the market, men unloaded slabs of salt that camel caravans still carry from the Taoudenni mines, hundreds of miles north in the Sahara.
5Day 8, Gao. Gao was the capital of Songhai, which took Timbuktu in 1468. The Tomb of Askia, a tall mud-brick pyramid bristling with wooden beams, was built in 1495 for Askia Muhammad, who made Songhai larger and supported Islamic scholars. In a small display I saw cowrie shells, once used as money here. Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali in 1352, wrote that its people used cowries, which came from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean. In 1591 an army from Morocco, armed with guns, defeated Songhai.