Djene

I was completely unprepared for the depth of culture and history that I have been exposed to in the last 24 hours. I feel ignorant of an entire section of the world. It's incredible, I’m just scooping bucketfuls of stories and tales and pouring them into my brain. I just hope that some of it survives the overload. Djene is famous for the mud mosque and its trade route to Timbuktu, the last frontier before the Sahara crossing through to Morocco and beyond. The entire town is mud, mud houses of mud bricks, mud mortar and mud plaster. Mud roads and mud tombs, mud schools teaching children the scripts of Koran on tablets coated in mud. Constantly reconstructed, you sit at night and listen to the call to prayer and prayer song, on the mud roof of the local hotel, it was a truly beautiful evening last night.

There is a market in Djene on Mondays, a market to rival any other market I have been in. This market has been happening for hundreds of years. Knee deep piles of chillies next to waist deep piles of dried fish. The entire piece of ground outside the mosque and most of the surrounding streets is just people. People selling, people buying, woman in bright yellow, green , blue. Head turbans of local Perl people, shouts and screams and noise. There are dogs, sheep, goats and donkeys. Gears for cars, stirrups for horses. Food and drinks, trinkets and cloth. Shirts with Ronaldinho print. Barrack Obama promotional memorabilia. Its complete sensory overload…its bloody fantastic. You edge your way through the higgeldy piggeldy of the wizened old woman selling bathfulls of tamarind seeds. Snacking on a few you check out the bag fulls of okra, walk past huge bags of rice and millet. Looking for stuff you want, learning about things you never even knew existed. At points in the heat of the day there are so many people you simply cannot get in and the crowd grinds to sand-in-the gearbox type pace. Boys on donkeys thread there way through, boys pulling cars and the occasional man on a motorbike, hooting constantly, Djene is a truly fantastic place!

We spent the morning with our guide who enthralled us with half-French half-English stories of the early explorers. Told us of Rene Caillier, who came here to learn Islam before reaching Timbuktu by boat, the first European to make it alive. Stories of Europeans who didn’t make it, some slaughtered by Toureg Bandits in the desert, some washed over the Nigerian Busa falls in their boats. We went to a library, where the nerd in me was astounded by 17th century scripts on Maths, astronomy, history. Passed down through the family, you can hold a book that was hand written before the printing press was made, before Van Riebeek found the cape and when the Bantu were still fighting it out for the land in South Africa. You just want to read them, but they are all in Arabic script, inaccessible to me.

This is our fist, “day off” in the 6 weeks we’ve been going. When I say “day off” we’re not traveling today so it’s a good time to do some planning, read up for the next leg and take in some sights and sounds. We’re in transit around Ivory Coast we weren’t even supposed to come here. But C-baz had read about it and so we fitted it in our way to Bamako, on route to Guinea. We’ve had 2 days in Mali, I feel like I’ve had a week of experiences already. We stumbled upon a festival and suddenly there were stilt dancers, purple-tasseled and white-masked shouting and drumming their 30 strong line through the crowd. Children screaming, people running, and then poof, they were gone… I was just looking at Indigo cloth at the time, but man it was cool.

So I've sat on a mud balcony, caught up on the blogs I lost somewhere, written my mails…I’m off to haggle for some stuff. Maybe try and find Nikki Stevens her jewelry order amidst the chaos.

Peace
-Chris-