Sudanese style mosques in northern Côte d'Ivoire
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Eight earthen mosques in the Sudanese style stand in the savannah of northern Côte d'Ivoire. The style arose between the 12th and 14th centuries in Djenné, then part of the Mali Empire, which grew rich on the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt. From the 14th and 15th centuries, amid infighting in the Mali Empire, merchants and Islamic scholars moved south, and towns such as Bondoukou and Kong became their centres.
The mosques are at Tengréla, Kouto, Sorobango, Samatiguila, Nambira, Kaouara and Kong, which has two. Radiocarbon dates and oral tradition place most of them in the 17th to 19th centuries; tradition says the small mosque of Kong was built in 1729 by Imam Barro, who brought its plans from Djenné. They are lower than the desert mosques, with stronger buttresses for the wetter climate, projecting timbers, buttresses crowned with pottery or ostrich eggs, and minarets shaped like truncated pyramids.
The Grand Mosque of Kong, first built in the mid-18th century, was destroyed during Samory Touré's wars against colonial rule and rebuilt in the early 20th century. Of several hundred such mosques in the country at the start of the 20th century, about 20 survive, and these eight are the best preserved. ICOMOS recommended deferring the nomination, but the mosques were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2021.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).