Mali: Hard life in Great Mosque's shadow

STANDING in his backyard, smoking, Abba Maiga is seething that his 150-year-old mud-brick house has been declared a cultural treasure.

• The Grand Mosque of Djenne in Mali. Picture: AP

As a result, he is not allowed to update it - no tiled floors, no screen doors and no shower.

"Who wants to live in a house with a mud floor," said the retired riverboat captain.

With its cone-like crenellations and palm-wood guttering, the faade seems out of time and helps illustrate why this ancient city in Mali's east is a World Heritage site. But the guidelines established by Unesco, the cultural arm of the United Nations, which compiles the heritage list, demand it remains substantially unaltered.

"When a town is put on the heritage list, it means nothing should change," Maiga said. "But we want development, more space, new appliances - things that are more modern. We are angry about all that."

It is a cultural clash echoed at World Heritage sites across Africa and around the world. While it may be good for tourism, residents complain of being frozen in time like museum pieces so visitors can gawk.

"The issue in Djenn is about people getting comfort, using the right materials without compromising the architectural values," said Lazare Eloundou Assomo, Unesco's man in Africa.

Assomo ticked off a list of sites facing similar tension, including the island of St-Louis in neighbouring Senegal, the island of Lamu in Kenya, all of the island of Mozambique, or Asian and European cities such as Lyon in France.

It is Djenn's Great Mosque, though, that put the town on the map. It is the largest mud-brick structure in the world, an imposing sandcastle looming over the main square. Its Sudanese architectural style is native to the Sahel.

A trio of unique minarets - square, tapering towers topped by pointed pillars and crowned by an ostrich egg - dominate the faade. Palm-tree boards poked into the mosque in rows like toothpicks create a permanent scaffold which allows residents to replaster the mud, an annual February ritual involving the whole town.

Djenn is the less famous but better preserved sister city to Timbuktu. Both reached their zenith in the 16th century, sitting at the crossroads of Sahara trade routes for gold, ivory and slaves.

The town was also a gateway for the spread of Islam, with its king, a 13th century convert, levelling his palace to build the mosque.

It was near collapse when the Agha Khan Foundation arrived to start a $900,000 restoration project. The annual replastering had more than doubled the width of the walls and added a yard of mud to the roof.It was too heavy, even with the forest of pillars inside to support the high ceiling - one for each of the 99 names of God.

In 2006, the initial restoration survey ignited a riot. Protesters sacked the mosque, attacked city buildings and wrecked cars. The riots were rooted in resentment among the 12,000 townsfolk - many living in squalor - of the benefits the imam and a few local families reaped from tourism.

The frustration lingers, with locals often glowering at visitors, refusing to pose for pictures and demanding cash.

With the mosque restoration nearing completion, the town is focusing on other critical problems — raw sewage and the restoration of the nearly 2,000 houses.

A project to pipe water into the city failed to extend to drains, so raw sewage foul the unpaved streets. Rubbish tips scar the riverbank, and black bin bags have even made their way into mud bricks, jutting out of walls.

Mahamame Bamoye Traor, the leader of the powerful masons' guild, surveys Abba Maiga's mud house, listing what he would change if World Heritage rules allowed. He said: "If you want to help someone, you have to help him in a way that he wants; to force him to live in a certain way is not right," he said, before lying on the mud floor of a windowless 6ft x3ft room "This is not a room," he said. "It might as well be a grave."

But N'Diaye Bah, Mali's tourism minister, warned: "If you destroy the heritage people come to see, if you destroy 2,000 years of history, then the town loses its soul."