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Journal of World History 14.3 (2003) 408-410



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The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages. By Pekka Masonen. Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2000. 599 pp. € 30.27.

The great West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay figure prominently in introductory surveys of world history as early examples of indigenous African statecraft and achievement. In the era of decolonization, the symbolic importance of these ancient states was such that the nationalist movements of the Gold Coast and the French Sudan opted for their countries to gain independence as Ghana and Mali, respectively. But how had these storied empires become known to modern scholars? This question forms the central focus of Finnish historian Pekka Masonen's study of African historiography in Europe. Through meticulous scholarship, Masonen provides us with a glimpse of the four-hundred-year, serendipitous process by which a disparate group of scholars and adventurers established a fund of consensual facts that form the basis of our current understanding of the great Sudanic empires.

In his introduction, Masonen informs us that his study of historiography [End Page 408] can best be understood as an exercise in what Michel Foucault called "the archeology of knowledge."He describes his project as an effort to "reconstruct the way in which European knowledge of African history has evolved by pursuing its textual genealogy through the previous historical and geographical literature" (30). In pursuing this project, Masonen is concerned above all with how primary and secondary texts have been read and used by European historians to create historiographical myths that gradually could be refined into solid historical facts.

His method, he informs us, is to reconstruct an isnad, or "chain of authority" similar to those created by Medieval Muslim scholars to evaluate the reliability of various religious texts by tracing their origins back to the hadith of the Prophet or to the Quran itself. In Masonen's secularized version of isnad, historical statements can be considered reliable if they originated from a respected scholar and were repeated by subsequent scholars. Unfortunately, with respect to the Sudanic empires, the task of establishing a central chain of reliable authorities proved a challenging one.

The ancient Sudanic empires were not wholly unknown to contemporaryEuropeans,as evidencedbyWest African andSaharantoponyms sprinkled across Medieval maps. With the beginnings of Portuguese exploration of the African coast, firsthand knowledge accumulated but was not widely diffused among the European public. Only with the appearance in 1550 of Description of Africa, by the renegade Moor Leo Africanus, did something resembling a West African geography and historiography begin to find a wide audience among European readers. Although he criticizes the superficiality and multiple errors of Leo Africanus's account, Masonen sees it as clearly marking the beginning of the isnad, since it, more than any other source, evoked the themes and terms of discussion for the next two hundred and fifty years. It was Leo, for example, who first popularized the unfortunate notion that the peoples of the Western Sudan had been uncivilized brutes until they came in contact with the Islamic world, a notion that was to persist unchallenged in European literature until the latter part of the twentieth century.

Indeed it was not until the rise of Orientalist scholarship and European exploration of the western Sudan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Leo Africanus's version of Western Sudanic history was effectively called into question and revised. The most noteworthy protagonists of this stage of the process were the English scholar William Desborough Cooley (whose photo graces the frontispiece of [End Page 409] the book) and the German philologist-turned-explorer Heinrich Barth. Cooley exhaustively analyzed the various known Arabic sources and created a narrative remarkably free of prevailing racial and cultural prejudices, a narrative that focused on black Africans and their own past, not the actions of outside invaders. Barth carried forward and popularized Cooley's work while adding a wealth of information gathered during his travels through the Western Sudan in the 1850s. Barth...

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