![]() 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. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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