Kingdoms of Africa

There is no better test of the claim that the Middle Ages were "dark" than to turn to the continent that the later story of the world worked hardest to erase from history altogether. For a long time, and not by accident, Africa below the Sahara was written out of the human record, imagined as a place without cities, without states, without a past worth the name, a blank on which others projected whatever justified what they wanted to do there. That picture was a lie, and this book will say so plainly, because the truth is not only fairer but far more interesting: across these very centuries, sub-Saharan Africa was home to wealthy, literate, monumental, and globally connected civilizations, and the effort to forget them is itself part of the suppression story this book keeps uncovering.

Begin with the empire that grew rich beyond reckoning on gold. The West African empire of Mali, at its height in the fourteenth century, controlled the goldfields that supplied a large share of all the gold in the medieval world, and when its ruler Mansa Musa made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, crossing Egypt with a caravan of thousands and a fortune in gold, he gave away and spent so much of it in Cairo that, by multiple contemporary accounts, he single-handedly depressed the price of gold across the region for years. He is, by some reckonings, the wealthiest individual who has ever lived. And Mali was not merely rich; it was learned. Its city of Timbuktu became a genuine university town, its Sankore mosque and its scholars drawing students from across the Muslim world, its private libraries holding tens of thousands of manuscripts on law, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics, many of which survive to this day and are still being catalogued, a written intellectual heritage from the heart of a continent the world was taught had no writing.

And Mali was one among many. Down the East African coast, a chain of Swahili city-states, Kilwa and Mombasa and Zanzibar and more, grew wealthy trading African gold, ivory, and timber for the porcelain and silk of China, so connected to the wider world that a Chinese fleet under the admiral Zheng He visited in the early fifteenth century and carried a live giraffe back to the astonished court of the emperor. In the interior of southern Africa rose Great Zimbabwe, a city of mortarless stone whose great curved walls, built without a drop of cement, still stand; when Europeans later found its ruins, so unshakeable was their prejudice that they insisted, against all evidence, that Africans could not have built it and invented Phoenicians or lost white races to explain it away, a falsehood that took a shamefully long time to die. In West Africa the kingdom of Benin cast bronze sculptures of a refinement that stunned the Europeans who eventually looted them, and ringed its capital with earthworks that were among the largest man-made structures on the planet. In the Ethiopian highlands, Christian kings carved entire churches downward out of the solid living rock at Lalibela, eleven of them, still in use today. And it was in Ethiopia, on the very margin the West had forgotten, that the Book of Enoch we met two chapters ago, cast out of the Western canon, quietly survived complete, waiting a thousand years to be read again. The pattern holds with almost eerie consistency: knowledge and achievement that one part of the world discards or refuses to see, another part preserves. The stream, dammed in one place, flows in another.