The history of the Great Mosque of Djenne is apparently a bit controversial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9#Present_mosque https://e

The history of the Great Mosque of Djenne is apparently a bit controversial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9#Present_mosque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9#Pr... >Dubois revisited Djenné in 1910 and was shocked by the new building. He believed that the French colonial administration were responsible for the design and wrote that it looked like a cross between a hedgehog and a church organ. He thought that the cones made the building resemble a baroque temple dedicated to the god of suppositories. By contrast, Jean-Louis Bourgeois has argued that the French had little influence except perhaps for the internal arches and that the design is "basically African." >French ethnologist Michel Leiris, in his account of traveling through Mali in 1931, states that the new mosque is indeed the work of Europeans. He also says that local people were so unhappy with the new building that they refused to clean it, only doing so when threatened with prison. >Jean-Louis Bourgeois however, recorded that the rebuilt mosque was constructed by Djenné's traditional local guild of masons, traditionally responsible for the building and maintenance of the town's original mosque and of Djenné's other buildings, using traditional techniques and with minimal French involvement.