THE GOLDEN RHINOCEROS - FRANÇOIS-XAVIER FAUVELLE

Man, it has taken me a long time to read this. I must have wanted this since around the time I started FISTFUL OF SHELLS (to which this book is a sort of prequel, but one that in a different genre) and I’ve been slowly reading it while I finished maybe 3-4 other books. Part of it has to do with how much this book covers, from the 7th century, the first bookend being the introduction of Islam, to the 15th century, the second being the early Portuguese voyages. 800 years is a long-ass time for anything to cover. It would be a multiple season TV show (and a very trill one, given how much gold plays into it). Yet the book isn’t long, I was expecting to pick-up a zillion-paged monster and, instead, got 245 pages and illustrations, the best of which features a roc carrying away a few elephants and is the cover art for the only chapter that deals with Madagascar (and is, sadly, about how wrong many early surviving reports about Madagascar were as well as the well-known and bizarre story about how Mada got its name). The stylistic choice that allowed it to be so much shorter than expected while still taking me forever to read is predicated on total whiplash between chapters. Each chapter usually focuses on one artifact (like the Great Zimbabwe, or a giant throne base at Aksum) or one process (the production of eunuchs in Ethiopia or how a certain group would choose a leader) and build out from there. The chapters are short, typically less than 10 pages, and usually very interesting. The difficulty comes in the fact that the chapters themselves don’t connect in a narrative way with one another. True, they are all about Africa in the middle ages but Africa’s huge and 800 years is a long-ass time. Going from the Niger to the Limpopo so quickly puts a strain on my mental map and mental history of Africa. Frankly, I blame my education, not never did I get a real, overview history of Africa, I’ve had to build it piecemeal with books like this. This approach tho, is not unlike the book itself, which also seeks to build a comprehensive history out of piecemeal fragments. So much of what’s survived from this period is fragments or reports from non-natives or 2nd/3rd hand tales. Fauvelle does a good job explaining the current speculations and theories about this time. A sense of geography is vital to read this book, knowing the rivers and locations of the deserts (which act as a sort of vast sea, the original impetus for the Portuguese to sail around the coast was to avoid being forced to cross the Sahara for trade). It’s also amazing how much people are willing to do for gold. Slaves I understand more since you get an entire lifetime of labor, gold is more confusing to me since it doesn’t really do anything except be pretty. It’s also interesting that both the Muslim and Christian travelers/traders assumed there was a giant mountain of gold somewhere in the heart of Africa that was being kept secret from them. In reality, of course, gold production was incredibly diffuse and more more complicated than outsiders speculated, a single person averaged less than a gram and day when panning for gold. The book is basically that, a long argument for how medieval Africa actually functioned and an exploration of it’s complexity. Some quick asides: It’s sad there is no longer a genre of literature that is a combination travelogue/gossip/myths/speculation. This book uses accounts of travels from European, Chinese and Arabic men who, for a variety of reasons, traveled all over Africa and the known world, often for years/decades before they wrote down what they saw plus what other people had told them as well as some armchair anthropology and speculation. I find myself often day-dreaming about what their lives must have been like, to be in such a strange and unfamiliar milieu for so long. Also, there is an account of a Saharan tribe the chooses its leader by gathering the possible candidates at the mouth a sacred cave. Using ritual, they coax their god out of the cave. The deity looked like a large snake with a camel’s head. It would inspect the candidates then select one by poking it in the chest then quickly retreating into the cave. The person poked was supposed to quickly reach and pull out hairs from the God’s mane, each hair would represent one year of rule. This book is full of wonderful shit like that. Great pictures, great maps, I wish it had been more systematic and complete but perhaps I would not actually want to read the 900 page book that this method would produce. 751 golden rhinoceroses