Monday afternoon in Djenné
What impresses most in Djenné, beyond the mud mosque, is the number of Quranic schools.
The Quranic schools in Djenné are everywhere. Some say there are forty, and I believe that’s a cautious estimate. On Monday afternoon, market day and a school holiday, slow chants rise from every corner. Young voices recite verses from wooden tablets, inscribed by their teacher with passages from the Quran. They sit in the sparse shade of trees or in front of doors made of mud mixed with straw, while their older companions study in the cool rooms of the madrasas.
Outside, in April, the temperature easily surpasses 40°C.
The air is still, yet dust rises regardless; the rainy season is a distant prospect—much like the meaning of the intricate symbols elegantly inscribed on their wooden boards. These young Malians endlessly repeat their verses, returning my curious gaze.
Ernest, my guide, originally from Burkina Faso and a devoted animist,
shakes his head. “They’ll be as complicated as their parents,” he declares. In his halting Italian, “complicated” means incomprehensible, unsociable, marginalized—a surprising notion, given the grand mosque that still physically and spiritually dominates the city.
But Djenné is not all of Mali.
And Ernest is not among the most open-minded of his countrymen; anything outside of animism is foreign to him. Imagine, then, his puzzlement over the Quranic schools of Djenné.
