Djenné developed on the inland Niger Delta as a center of trade, scholarship, and Islam. Oral traditions associate its first great mosque with a ruler often called Koi or Kunburu, who converted to Islam and turned his palace into a place of worship, perhaps in the thirteenth century. The town linked Saharan caravan routes with the agricultural and gold-producing regions farther south. Merchants, clerics, and students moved through its markets, and the mosque became a focal point within a dense city built largely from sun-dried earth.

The early mosque changed repeatedly as Djenné passed through powerful states. The city was incorporated into the Songhai Empire in the late fifteenth century and came under Moroccan control after the 1591 invasion that broke Songhai power. In the early nineteenth century, the Fulani religious leader Seku Amadu conquered Djenné and established the Massina Empire. Disapproving of aspects of the older mosque, he allowed it to deteriorate and promoted another mosque nearby. Later political changes, including Toucouleur rule and French colonial conquest in 1893, again reordered the town’s institutions.

The present Great Mosque was constructed in 1906–07 on or near the site of the earlier sanctuary. French colonial officials supported the project, but local masons and residents built it using the region’s established earthen technology. Its walls consist of mud-based material reinforced with timber beams. Projecting wooden poles, called toron, provide both permanent scaffolding and a strong visual rhythm. Three monumental towers rise over the market square, while the roof and interior are supported by massive earthen piers. The result is often described as Sudano-Sahelian architecture, though that label encompasses many local traditions rather than a single style.

Preserving the mosque is a recurring communal event rather than a one-time technical intervention. Seasonal rain erodes the exterior, so residents participate in an annual replastering festival. Teams prepare mud, carry it through the streets, and renew the walls under the direction of skilled masons. The work transmits knowledge, reinforces neighborhood ties, and demonstrates why an earthen monument cannot be separated from the community that maintains it. Modern materials have sometimes been introduced for practical reasons, generating debate over authenticity, drainage, and structural safety.

UNESCO included the mosque within the Old Towns of Djenné World Heritage Site in 1988. Political instability, urban development, flooding, and reduced maintenance have since threatened the wider historic fabric. Yet the building remains an active place of Friday prayer and a civic landmark, not merely an architectural exhibit. Its history records conversion, imperial conquest, colonial rebuilding, and local continuity. Most importantly, the mosque survives because generations of Djenné residents repeatedly remake its surface. The annual labor is itself a historic practice, binding the present community to the many earlier townspeople who shaped the sanctuary from earth.

The building has also become a symbol in arguments about African architectural history. Colonial photographs and foreign commentary sometimes treated its earthen construction as primitive or temporary, despite the sophisticated engineering and continuous renewal it requires. Its scale and endurance challenge those assumptions. The mosque is monumental precisely because local building knowledge joins architecture to seasonal cycles, shared obligation, and the authority of master masons.