Djenne

The slideshow above begins with the drive from Segou to Djenne on the afternoon of Monday, Feb. 8, 2010. It concludes with the trip by ferry across the Niger River and back to the main Mopti-Bamako road, where I would catch the bus back to Segou.

My expectations of the city of Djenne rested solely on the reputation of its architecture. But it was a city of people first and last. That may sound simplistic, obvious, not terribly insightful, but being a tourist quickly became less than, what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a participant, not a member of an audience, especially, somehow, from the world's superpower. In Segou I was making friends, establishing reasons for being there, creating expectations and enjoying the realities of what and who I was getting to know. In Djenne, I didn't have time to develop a reason to be there beyond being a tourist. So, that confessed, what I saw of people's lives seemed to be a more compressed version of what I saw in both Bamako and Segou, precisely because Djenne seems to be vibrant to outsiders only because they come as tourists - to gather and take away their observations without needing to be involved. The story of the virgin who was walled up to assuage the wrath of the spirits who preferred up til then for the mosque to not remain standing - that resonated the conflict of conquest versus ...