Golden Trade of the Moors: West African Kingdoms in the Fourteenth Century

"Bovill’s book is about the trans-Saharan trade, between the Mediterranean and West Africa. It focuses specifically on the dynamics and dimensions of the trade in gold, also in human beings, and it sketches out the relationships between North Africa and West Africa. It’s wonderfully written in a lucid fashion. It can really be read both at the popular level as well as the scholarly level. The work that it does—I don’t know if this was consciously or unconsciously—is to argue, effectively, for an understanding of North Africa and West Africa as conjoined regions. That is to say that you really can’t understand what’s happening in North Africa without understanding what’s happening in West Africa and conversely. That’s the implication—the book came out in the late 1950s, so that’s all they are, implications and inferences. I would say that it isn’t until much later, around the turn of the 20th century into the 21st century, that we get to a point where we really begin to write in a way that articulates North and West Africa. It’s not in distinction. What I’m saying is that Bovill lays the foundation, a groundwork, for that articulation. Implicit in his work is that these two regions are connected in ways that suggests a level of intimacy that belies a more colonial division—if you will—between the two regions. We have this convention of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. And, in some contexts, that makes sense. In other contexts it really does violence to the realities of these regions, in that they were connected in vital ways. Another way of saying this is that the economies of North Africa were directly connected to West Africa and conversely. Similarly, the populations were connected. There was tremendous movement from north to south, from south to north and, obviously, plenty of cultural exchanges as well. It does a better job with Ghana and Mali."