Book Review

Methods/Theory

The medieval "Negroland" of the title refers to a portion of West Africa lying south of the Sahara desert, west of Lake Chad, and north of the equatorial forest zone that adjoins parts of the Atlantic coast. This perhaps unexpected and certainly arbitrary province of the human experience came to constitute a fascicle of European historiography through a lengthy process of intellectual accumulation and imaginative fabrication. The author offers the work reviewed here as a case study in the "archaeology of knowledge . . . an attempt 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" (p. 30). The chronological scope of the study "covers a long period reaching from the Middle Ages, when European scholars, traders, and cartographers heard the earliest rumors concerning the fabulous Land of the Blacks, up to the first decades of the twentieth century" (p. 26). Looming prominently on this intellectual landscape were the famous medieval West African realms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai; in their shadow, gradually accumulating knowledge also spread out a complex array of numerous lesser places, polities, and communities, many imperfectly understood today. "Personally," Pekka Masonen explains, "I dislike the current tendency to lay stress in academic writing on 'brevity' and 'readability' at the expense of scholarship—especially when readability is a pretext for careless documentation and discourse" (pp. 57–58). While perfectly readable, this book is unusually generous in conception, ample in scope, and meticulously documented. The author intends "that this volume would consist of a miniature library, providing useful material for African students of history, which they could use in their own works" (p. 57). Many readers may, in fact, find this volume most useful as an encyclopedic reference work.

. . .