Mali · Fine-Art-Adjacent Workshop Craft (vernacular earthen architecture and maintenance)
Crépissage (French, widely used locally); banco (the mud-plaster material); toron (the projecting palm-wood scaffolding beams); ferey (the cylindrical sun-baked mud brick used in the mosque's oldest sections)
The annual, citywide hand-replastering of the Great Mosque of Djenné, the world's largest mud-brick building, by the entire community of Djenné under the direction of the Barey-Ton (masons' guild), an ancient institution that transmits its specialized knowledge from generation to generation. Held each April before the rainy season and known as the crépissage, the event begins with a preparatory phase (biannu) in which young men collect fine silty clay from the riverbanks; this is mixed with water, rice husks or chaff, and, per some sources, shea butter or baobab powder, into banco plaster, which is left to cure and ferment in large pits for several days. On the day itself, teams of young men climb the mosque's walls using the projecting toron (bundled palm-wood beams) as scaffolding and handholds, while women and children ferry water and banco from the pits, and the entire building is replastered by hand in a single day, coordinated by 80 senior masons of the guild and accompanied by griot storytelling, music, and citywide celebration. The tradition, ongoing since at least the early 20th-century rebuilding of the mosque and rooted in techniques centuries older, has continued defiantly even as escalating militant activity in central Mali has come to directly threaten the town.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not independently inscribed as an intangible element; the Great Mosque of Djenné and the Old Towns of Djenné are jointly inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1988) under the tangible-heritage framework
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