Ismaila Traoré was head of the barey ton, the hereditary masons' guild of Djenné, and in 1906–07 he directed the rebuilding of the town's Great Mosque — the largest earthen building in the world and, for most of the century since, the image by which West African architecture has been known abroad. The guild he led is a working institution rather than a memory: its members still replaster the mosque each year at the crépissage, a communal festival that is also its structural maintenance. Traoré's authorship matters because the alternative account, advanced by the French journalist Félix Dubois after his 1910 visit, credited the design to the colonial administration. Later scholarship, notably Jean-Louis Bourgeois, holds the design to be substantially Djenné's own.
