African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa

"It covers an absolutely vast period. The bulk of it is from the late 12th century through to the 16th century. It covers the periods before and after that at the beginning and the end of the book, but that’s where the real meat of it is. It’s effectively de-centering traditional narratives of what global history might look like by refocusing us on this area of the middle Niger River. It tells the story largely of the Mali Empire followed by the Songhai Empire. I have to say it is quite an opaque book to read. He doesn’t have the easiest writing style, but the material he presents is immensely appealing. It overturns the ways that we think about things geographically. It leaves one astounded to discover that history could have been written for so long with such an unawareness of the sophistication of political thinking and political action in these areas. He presents the Mali Empire first of all. It’s vast, absolutely huge, incredibly ambitious and really sophisticated in the ways in which it manages power. I think scholarly assumptions hitherto have been that it was very decentralised, in the sense that the reality of power was perhaps rather shallow. What Gomez shows is actually a much much more sophisticated way of thinking about the relationship between the local, the regional and the supra-regional, or the centre. It becomes Islamic, yes. He concentrates on a late 13th-/early 14th-century ruler called Mansa Musa, who organizes a huge set-piece pilgrimage to Mecca, stopping off in Cairo. The pilgrimage obviously has a religious motivation but, at the same time, as Gomez presents it, it was a huge political statement to make the entire Islamic world aware that the Mali Empire was this great expanding empire, controlling nodes of commerce, stretching not only eastwards, but also with ambitions westwards across the Atlantic. It had powerful connections to North Africa, but the focus of its power was West Africa. It stretches really widely. They’re trading all kinds of things, but perhaps the thing Gomez is most interested in, for a range of reasons, is the slave trade, or rather the slave trades. What’s really interesting is the way that he presents just how diverse the meaning of slavery might have been in this period. That then relates to a series of really interesting points about gender, about the relationship between slaves and political power, and about race and ethnicity as well. Yes, he really does. To take race and ethnicity separately from gender, he shows the ways in which race and ethnicity become operative as concepts. But at the same time, he shows that what that concept is is perhaps very different from what we might assume. It’s all based on detailed analysis of a range of primary sources. What becomes quite clear in the 14th-century thinking about race is that they are as much interested in cultural traits and in religious and moral modes as they are in physical traits. They are defining these concepts as much in terms of those sorts of cultural and religious affiliations. Part of the challenge of the book is that the range of sources is actually quite limited. There’s not a huge amount of source material, although there’s loads more than many would assume. But what he does is pull together very effectively external written accounts, written by figures like Ibn Battuta, travelogues in a sense; internal written sources; written versions of oral sources, like epics about the origin myths of the Malian dynasty; and then archaeological sources, as well. He’s also very honest about the spots where we just don’t know that much. There’s a really interesting section on fiscal systems—I never thought fiscality would be so interesting!—but he’s got very little evidence to be going on, so much of it is quite speculative. But he’s good at admitting the distinction between the two. There’s another book that’s just come out about Medieval Africa by Francois-Xavier Fauvelle called The Golden Rhinoceros , which is really really fun, but, I think, historiographically, Gomez’s is a slightly more significant book in that he’s using a wider range of sources and because of that there isn’t the same kind of exoticizing implications in the choice of sources."