Larabanga Mosque

Larabanga Mosque in the village of Larabanga, near the Mole National Park in northern Ghana, is among the oldest and most architecturally distinctive mosques of West Africa. Local Gonja oral tradition dates the foundation of the mosque to 1421, attributing its construction to a wandering Islamic trader named Ayuba who was directed in a dream to build a mosque on the site, although serious documentary evidence is lacking and the standing structure has been rebuilt many times. The mosque is a small whitewashed mud-and-reeds building in the classic Sudano-Sahelian architectural tradition — the same construction tradition that produced the great mosques of Djenné in Mali and Agadez in Niger — with thick load-bearing earthen walls, projecting wooden palm-rib beams (toron) used both for ornament and as climbing supports for the seasonal re-plastering of the walls, and pyramidal towers at the corners. The mosque is much smaller than the famous mud mosques of the Niger Bend, accommodating perhaps fewer than a hundred worshippers, but it is the principal religious building of the Larabanga Muslim community and is venerated as one of the oldest continuously functioning mosques in West Africa. Beside the mosque is the so-called "Mystic Stone," around which local legend has accumulated. The site has been listed by the World Monuments Fund as one of the most endangered cultural heritage sites in Africa and has been the subject of multiple international restoration projects.