In 1906, the town arranged for the original
mosque to be rebuilt and at the same time for a school to be constructed on the site of Seku Amadu's
mosque, the rebuilding was completed in 1907 using forced labour under the direction of Ismaila Traoré, head of
Djenné's guild of masons.
[1] From photographs taken at the time,
[1] it appears the position of at least some of the outer walls follows those of the original mosque but it is unclear as to whether the columns supporting the roof kept to the previous arrangement. What was almost certainly novel in the rebuilt
mosque was the symmetric arrangement of three large towers in the
qibla wall. There has been a debate as to what extent the design of the rebuilt
mosque was subject to French influence.
[1] Although, it is unlikely that French engineers worked on the building at all.
[10]
Dubois revisited
Djenné in 1910 and was shocked by the reconstructed mosque. 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.
[11] 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."
[12] Ismaila Traoré head of Djenne's guild of masons and renowned throughout the
Sahel, was the architect for the reconstruction of the Djenne Mosque.
[13]
French ethnologist
Michel Leiris, in his account of travelling 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 reconstructed building that they refused to clean it, only doing so when threatened with prison.