PROUD TRADITIONS

The West African country of Mali is off the beaten track for most travellers. A vast beautiful landlocked country famous for its music and hospitality, it also shelters rich and ancient architectural heritage that is particularly characterised by mosques, which are intricate multi-storey buildings, made of earth.

This heritage has remained unchanged for centuries and is found across the whole of the Niger Delta region of Africa, and is characterised by the adobe style that uses mud as its main component. But this style is not about ‘mud houses’. It is an elegant, delicate and innovative form of physical architecture and design that works in symbiosis with the environment, climate and resources available. It is a style that works.
This puts many Malians with one half of the world’s population, (approximately three billion people on six continents) who live and work in buildings constructed of earth. The adobe style is still very much alive today in Mali and is seen throughout all realms of Malian life including domestic, religious, private and public, and mud is still a source of pride amongst individuals and at community level. There are whole towns and villages built in this style, and they use mud bricks where new buildings are built in line with tradition, rather than turning to other more modern styles or material like cement.

There are countless villages throughout Mali that use mud in innovative and elegant designs for homes and mosques. Moreover, there are specific towns in the country that are famed for this architectural style including Timbuktu town and its mosque, and Djenne town and its mosque. To best illustrate this variety and unique beauty, the photographer Lydia Martin journeyed into towns, villages and settlements where she notes that  the mud used is more like clay, found across the country, which is then mixed with straw, sand or rice husks, and often cow manure, for strength and increased bonding capability. Normally this mixture is cut into bricks and dried in the sun before they are used in construction. A final layer applied onto mud brick walls produce a smooth protective finish similar to traditional plastering of walls in modern construction.

Another interesting observation was that the architectural detailing of the mosques differ from domestic buildings or buildings used by the public. The mosque is the heart of any town or village, the centre for devotion, learning, meeting and recreating tradition. In the mosques, timber poles run throughout the whole structure to provide a strong framework. Rather than being hidden from the exterior, the pole ends poke through and are embraced into the practical and aesthetic character of the mosque structure. These ends are used to lean ladders during structural work, and are found to be highly decorated in an architectural tradition that is still very alive today. The buildings are being protected and the practises that enable this protection to continue are at the forefront of arts and culture policies.