The Christmas tree is up once more- it is made out of recycled tin cans and decorated with solar lights that twinkle at night. My Christmas decoration sessions are following a well loved tradition by now: I listen to the Messiah; sip a glass of white wine and later have lunch with Birgit who spreads out a delicious selection of Dutch Herring delicacies brought from Amsterdam.
I have been asked to write an article about Djenné for an on-line travel magazine called TRVL- it is only available for people who have I-Pads. The article is called
Mud and Magic and is coming out next week for the Christmas issue. But here below is a preview! And if you want to see pictures of the Crepissage; then go to blogs of 5 and 7 April 2007.
Mud and Magic
It is four
o’ clock in the morning. Normally the
moezzin’s first call to prayer would be drifting across gently to me from the
Great Mosque as I lay in my bed snoozing, but today is different: I am standing
next to the mosque, and so is everyone else in Djenné: dawn is still an hour
away. The air is filled with excitement as the oldest and most venerable of the
Djenné masons slaps the first handful of mud onto the façade of the mosque,
while he utters the required prayers and blessings, as well as the secret incantations
only known to the Djenné Barey Ton
(the guild of the masons) in order to ensure a successful day. The end of this
short ceremony unleashes a 6-hour mud explosion. A great roar rises from the
crowd as they throw themselves into a joyous orgy of mud. The young men of each
neighbourhood compete with each other who can be the first to claim victory:
each neighbourhood has been given a certain section of the mosque to plaster
with mud. Soon they will be crawling up the façade on ladders to perch perilously on the wooden
batons that protrude from the walls for this very reason, giving an impression
of great birds of prey from the distance. By ten am the Great Mosque of Djenné
will lay newly mud-plastered in the morning sun, still a little wet behind its
ears while the entire mud splattered work force will have decamped to the river
for a giant communal swim. But now let’s
follow the Yobokaina boys: here they come running 100 strong with mud baskets
on their heads with direction the North Tower!
Although I
have lived in Djenné for years I have never been inside this stupendous mud
edifice- the largest adobe structure in the world. Therefore imagine my
excitement yesterday when my friend Yelpha the marabout told me that the day of the ‘Crepissage’ is the only day of the year when women are allowed to
enter the mosque! “ Yes, of course you can take part. The women carry water
from the river to mix in with the mud’, he explained‘. So of course I decided
to make use of this rare opportunity, and this morning I had come prepared with
a bucket. But now I am somewhat taken
aback when I realize that in this case ‘women’ means the young maidens of Djenné! Nevermind. Here goes!
I, a thrice married middle- aged Toubab
(white person) decide to try and blend in seamlessly with the throng of giggling
teenage girls as we run together to the
river to collect water in our buckets which we carry back on our heads to throw
onto the mud mounds which lay piled up around the mosque and on the inside
court yard, while some people jump onto the mounds and stamp and squish around, a little like the treading of grapes
at an old- fashioned vineyard: dirtier but just as much fun!
Having made
use of this unlikely ruse I gain access and watch the proceedings from the vast
roof of the Great Mosque which is held up by a hundred great mud pillars.
Here on the
roof there is plenty of activity too as everyone is running up and down the mud
staircases with baskets of mud on their heads, calling out to their friends: “Won Da Goy! ‘ (that is good work!) and
the response: Won da Baara Ji! (God will give us recompense!)
This glorious edifice was first built in the
middle of the fourteenth century by Koy Konboro, the first ruler in Djenné who embraced
Islam. That was the zenith of the Malian Empire and the century in which the
two great mosques of Timbuktu were also built, the Djingereber and the Santoro.
However, the Mosque of Djenné suffered destruction in 1834 when Sekou Amadou, a religious reformer and iconoclast found the
splendour of its three majestic minarets with their intricate crenulations
offensive and therefore built a simple mosque around the corner, more suitable
for the pared-down faith he advocated. In 1907 the mosque was rebuilt on the
ruins of the old mosque, a copy of the older one. It is said that the then Imam
of Djenné offered the ambitious French
colonial administrator William Pointy that he would raise him to the highest colonial office in French West Africa if he agreed to help
rebuild the mosque. He did help in the
reconstruction and the Imam kept his part of the bargain: Pointy did in fact
become Governor of Afrique Occidentale
Francais. But how could the Imam of Djenné have wielded any power over decision making in the French
Colonial Administration? Because he too, like my friend Yelpha was a Grand Marabout, i.e. an Islamic scholar
with understanding of maraboutage,
the special form of Magic for which Djenné is famed all over Mali and beyond
its borders.
But,
paradoxically, the magic used this morning in the incantations of the Masons
for the crepissage of this great mosque,
the Islamic epicentre of Djenné, was of a different kind, one even older that
Islam itself. The spells of the Masons are called
‘ Bey Bibi’ and that means ancient African knowledge, a
knowledge that goes back to the animist practices of the founding of Djenne in
the 9th century AD, when the young maiden Tapama Djenepo was
sacrificed in order to ensure that the buildings of Djenné would not fall.
‘ The
masons have their reunion and prepare their fetishes and sacrifices before the crepissage’explains Yelpha quite
unfazed. ‘That ensures that there will
be no accidents and even if someone were to fall from their precarious
positions on the façade during the work they will not come to any harm.”
I am rather
curious that Yelpha, Grand Marabout de
Djenné, and therefore an Islamic scholar is able to accept with such
natural grace that the masons’ practises are so openly animist. Yelpha, as a marabout, practises the magic called ‘Bey-Koray’, and the difference seems to lay in the fact that
Yelpha’s magic is connected to writing, and to the verses of the Koran, while
the Bey-Bibi of the Masons, who are
often illiterate, is a verbal form of magic. Both types of magic use animal
sacrifice and prepare talismans in order to reach their desired goals, however.
These
ancient arts and forms of ‘knowledge’ have always existed quite harmoniously
side by side in Djenné. Although Islam is
a strong defining characteristic of the town, it is not the unbending Islam of
the recent Jihadist occupiers of the northern part of Mali who wreaked havoc
and destruction on the mausoleums of the saints of Timbuktu since their
Salafist creed does not allow the veneration of saints- a practise also wide
spread in Djenné which has many shrines to local saints. The Islam of Djenné is
a gentle creed, infused by strains of Sufi mysticism as well as the echoes and
whispers of ancient Africa.
The day
after the ‘Crepissage’ all is back to
normal again as if yesterday’s momentous events had never taken place. I decide
to take a walk through Djenné which has returned once more to its sleepy pace
with the donkey and horse carts ambling slowly down the main streets overtaken
by a steady flow of little Chinese ‘Jakarta’ mopeds, owned by anyone who is
modestly affluent.
I turn off
the main throughway into the narrow old streets of Djenné and I am at once hit
by a familiar sensation: I feel as if I am walking through an illustrated children’s
Bible. Everything reminds me of a
picture book of the Holy Land that I loved as a child: little shepherd
boys are guiding their flocks of sheep
to the outskirts of town for pasture; the notables of Djenné, elegant in their
long embroidered ‘bou-bous’ and
prayer caps sit on their animal skins,
spread out on the tintin, the raised
mud platforms outside their traditional two storey Djenné houses, chatting
endlessly, drinking Malian sweet tea
from small glasses and fingering their
prayer beads while watching the
passers-by with inscrutable expressions. The confusing system of alley ways
that criss cross the old neighbourhoods of Yobokaina, Sankore, Konofia and
Dioboro are teaming with life: donkeys bray; women are returning from the market
with the day’s culinary purchases in baskets on their heads; I hear the clink-clink from metal beating as I
wave to Amadou in his blacksmith’s forge where an apprentice’s bellows are feeding the fire.
Next door to the smithy is the house of Amadou’s
wife Baji, the potter lady who made all the ceramic wash basins in my hotel- ‘I Ni Tile Baji! I call to her
(literally: you and the midday-i.e. how are you this fine noon Baji? To which
she replies: ‘Sophie! Toro si te! A ni
Fama! I am well Sophie! It has been
a long time! The potters are always women in Djenné and in Songhay culture. And
the potters are always married to the blacksmiths.
The following
day I decide to visit Yelpha the marabout
in his Koran School early in the morning. It is housed on the ground floor a
traditional beautiful two storey Djenné building which looks as ancient as time
itself, but is only build in 1978 by Yelpha’s late father who was the Imam of
Djenné. Outside there is a myriad of
little shoes- one cannot enter the sandy floor of the Koran School without
first removing one’s foot wear. In the semi darkness inside sit about twenty
little talibés, literally students, all
with their wooden boards on which they have written down in Arabic the verse of
the Koran which was given them the day before to learn by heart. One by one
they recite the phrases to Yelpha who listens, sitting cross legged in front of
them fingering a black leather whip, which he wields now and then in a light -
hearted way, giving a pretend lash to any talibé
who has not mastered his phrases correctly. It may well be that elsewhere there
is real punishment meted out, but the Yelpha I know is a gentle man who would
not harm anyone.
The talibés do not understand what they
read. It is only after several years of study, when they are able to recite
great portions of the Koran by heart that they are slowly allowed to understand
the meaning of what they read.
‘But why,
Yelpha?’ I ask in my toubab way,
coming from a world of free and instant access to knowledge: ‘Because knowledge
has to be earned and should only be given to those that deserve it’ replies
Yelpha.
The Koran
school is a marabout’s day time
occupation. There is another, more lucrative and also more secretive occupation
which takes place at night, in meetings one to one with individuals who are on
personal quests. They will consult a marabout
for his powers of Koray-bibi- the
magic which always has a tenuous link to the Koran. A ‘client’
will visit the marabout at night and
explain his problem. ‘What do they mostly want from you, Yelpha?’ I ask. ‘Oh
there are lots of different reasons’ relies Yelpha rather evasively. ‘Oh,
please tell me! You don’t have to give me any names! ’ And Yelpha relents and
tells me something of his night time visitors’ quests. I find out what I already had suspected: the desires and pre-occupations of the
denizens of Djenné are the same as those the world over: a woman is infertile;
a man is impotent; a woman wants a love potion to make her beloved fall in love
with her; a man wants riches and promotion in his field of work; a student
wants success at an exam etc. ‘Does anyone ever want you to do anything bad-
like get rid of someone?’I cannot help asking.
‘No, for
that sort of thing they don’t come to me,’ replies Yelpha rather worryingly, implying
that there are indeed those that do offer such services, although he is not
willing to confirm it.
Yelpha’s
‘good magic’ involves first listening to the problem; then devising a solution
which is more often than not based on numerology: i. e. if it is a question of
making someone love you, than he needs the names of the two intended lovers.
The combined letters of the names give a figure. This number is used in
combination with a verse from a Surat in the Koran which talks about love, a
complicated system is now devised within a square. A sacrifice is almost always
needed: depending on the importance and difficulty of the problem a chicken, a
ram or even a bull may need to be sacrificed, then the magic formula will be
written in the blood from this animal onto a wooden board of the same type as
used by the talibés. Finally the writing will be washed off with water, and the
liquid so obtained will have become a magic potion that can either be drunk or applied
as a lotion on the body. There is plenty
of commerce in such magic potions which are sent from Djenné stored in plastic
jerry cans to buyers in Bamako by the bus which leaves Djenné twice weekly.
Yelpha and
I walk the short distance from his Koran school to the library when he finishes
his morning’s teaching. Yelpha works at the Djenné Manuscript Library as one of
the two archivists whose job it is to receive, list and store the ancient
Arabic manuscripts of Djenné’s old
families who increasingly decide to entrust their collections to this municipal
library which is housed in a handsome traditional two storey
Djenné building just to the north of the mosque, opposite the Entrance of the Nobles. Not surprisingly for
this city of magic more than fifty percent of the manuscripts housed in the
library deal with, and is listed under the heading of ‘esoterics’: the learned way to say ‘magic’.
During our
short walk Yelpha tells me he is about to marry again. This will be his third
wife. ‘She is still at school though, so I will wait until the end of term’ he
explains. I quietly wonder why he would like her to finish school when her
future role will be restricted to sitting in the courtyard of her house preparing the
meals and raising her children. ‘But you are too old for her, Yelpha!’ (he is
49) I exclaim rather disapprovingly.’Does she want to marry you?’ and Yelpha
looks at me as if he does not quite understand the question. ‘But of course she
wants to marry me’ he replies with a cast- iron belief in his powers as a love
magnet. ‘My father was the Imam of Djenné! Her family will be honoured!’ I
laugh out loud at this my unlikely but nevertheless real friend who shows me so
much of the attitudes of this fascinating and sometimes infuriating town.
Djenné is
ancient. Hardly anything has changed over the centuries. The beliefs and customs of this city remain
virtually the same as they were nine centuries ago when the city first yielded
to Islam.
‘Oh,
Yelpha, you live in the thirteenth century!’ I say to Yelpha. And he laughs. I
think he is quite pleased to be regarded as a relic from the past.
