Kyriakos, I apologize for not emailing you sooner, but I have been busy this week teaching two classes. I have some magazines from the late 1800s depicting villages in Central Africa, which would roughly include Mali. The villages depicting in the woodcuts all had circular buildings with conical roofs, and were surrounded by a wooden palisade of relatively slender logs sharpened at the top, The buildings themselves had a thatched roof that extended a bit over the eaves to produce additional shade for the side of structure.