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Book Review
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.
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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. |
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In his introduction, Masonen informs us that his study of historiography 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. |
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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. |
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