Many rural societies in Africa adorn the outsides of houses with painted designs or with relief patterns worked into a soft clay surface. The job of decorating houses generally belongs to the women. Frafra women of northern Ghana decorate the walls of houses and other buildings with geometric patterns that communicate information about the social status of a building's owner. Ndebele women in Zimbabwe and the northeastern part of South Africa paint the mud walls of their houses with geometric patterns based on the shapes of windows, steps, and other building features and everyday objects. Traditionally, Africans have used natural clays as paints, but today brightly colored acrylic paints are popular. Towns and city-states may have buildings that are larger and more elaborate than those in rural settlements. These buildings serve the purposes of government, trade, or organized religion. In general, towns and city-states have developed where trade has brought people together or where conquest has merged neighboring ethnic groups. Consequently, these settlements were built for diverse groups of people rather than for family units. A good example of a diverse community is Whydah , a coastal city in the former Kingdom of Dahomey .
In the 17th and 18th centuries slave trade with the Americas turned this city into a major trading and commercial center. The presence of foreign traders greatly influenced the architecture in Whydah, where indigenous mud-brick buildings stand next to buildings in South American styles. These styles were transported from Brazil to Africa in the 19th century by returning slaves of African ancestry. As a result of trade across the Sahara, many towns developed along the southern edge of the desert, especially in Mali. Mosques, palaces, and houses met the needs of the inhabitants: Arab traders, rulers, and common people. Tombouktou in Mali is one of the best-known settlements in this area, but the city of Djénné was even more important. Djénné served as a center of Islamic learning and as a commercial center for the trade of gold, slaves, and salt. It boasts one of the oldest mosques in the region. The Great Mosque of Djénné was built in the 13th and 14th centuries to provide Islamic traders with a center for prayer. The Djénné mosque consists of a main structure of baked mud with vertical buttresses that rise to pinnacles; on the roof is a flat terrace lined with palm fronds and wooden or ceramic spouts that drain water from the terrace. The eastern facade of the structure has three hollow minarets rhythmically interspersed between 18 buttresses.
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