1 Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN, 1988), 19Google Scholar.

2 For example, Barthes, R., ‘Le discours de l'histoire’, Information sur les Sciences Sociales, 6:4 (1967), 65–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barthes, R., ‘L'effet de réel’, Communications, 11 (1968), 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prost, A., Douze leçons sur l'histoire (Paris, 1996)Google Scholar.

3 Sudanic empires did not instantly become the showcase for West African medieval history during the formative period of the discipline (the beginning of the nineteenth century). Masonen, P., The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages (Helsinki, 2000)Google Scholar, 245–318.

4 The epistolary exchange on Islamic governmentality that took place between the Māliki scholar al-Maġīlī and the sultan of Songhay Askia Muḥammad in 1498 is the first extant internal piece of writing of some length and historical significance. See Hunwick, J., Sharî’a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghîlî to the Questions of Askia al-Hâjj Muhammad (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. Arabic had been written in the region for a long time. The oldest Arabic inscription in Tadmakka dates to the year 1011 CE; see de Moraes Farias, P. F., ‘Essouk Arabic non-funerary inscriptions, new (previously unpublished) series’, in Nixon, S. (ed.), Essouk-Tadmekka: An Early Islamic Trans-Saharan Market Town (Leiden, 2017), 299–303Google Scholar.

5 Cuoq, J., Recueil des sources arabes concernant l'Afrique occidentale du VIIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar; Levtzion, N. and Hopkins, J. F. P. (eds.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge, 2000 and 2011 [1981])Google Scholar.

6 I consider here the medieval period as a particular ‘regime of globality’ in which West Africa participated fully. See my discussion of the concept in the conclusion to the present article. One example of this global economic interconnection is the presence of Chinese ceramic in several sites of sub-Saharan and East Africa; see Boucheron, P., Fauvelle, F.-X., and Loiseau, J., ‘Rythmes du monde au Moyen Âge’, in Cattedu, I. and Noizet, H. (eds.), Quoi de neuf au Moyen Age? (Paris, 2016), 150–66Google Scholar.

7 For examples of a method establishing a dialogue between different types of sources by taking their specificities and regimes of truth into account, see de Moraes Farias, P. F., Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-Tuāreg History (Oxford, 2003), lxxx-xcvGoogle Scholar.

8 See for example the list of the sultans of Kala, Binduku, and Sibiriduku in the Middle Niger at the time of the Songhay Empire in al-Saʿdī, Tārīḫ al-Sūdān, ed. O. Houdas (Paris, 1898), 9–11.

9 de Moraes Farias, P. F., ‘Intellectual innovation and reinvention of the Sahel: the seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles’, in Jeppie, S. and Diagne, S. B. (eds.), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town, 2008), 105Google Scholar.

10 M. Nobili, Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge, 2020); see also Mathee, S. and Nobili, M., ‘Towards a new study of the so-called Tārīkh al-fattāsh’, History in Africa, 42 (2015), 37–73Google Scholar; Nobili, M., ‘New reinventions of the Sahel: reflections on the taʾrīḫ genre in the Timbuktu historiographical production, seventeenth to twentieth centuries’, in Green, T. and Rossi, B. (eds.), Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past: Essays in Honour of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias (Leiden, 2018), 201–19Google Scholar.

11 Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus [2000], 267–70.

12 Ibid. 268.

13 Martinez-Gros, G., ‘L'empire et son espace: conclusion’, Hypothèses, 11 (2008), 275–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My translation.

14 Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus [2000], 265, 290–1; F.-X. Fauvelle, Le rhinocéros d'or: Histoires du Moyen Âge africain (Paris, 2013), 96. Regarding empires as incarnations of a world order, A. Negri and M. Hardt detail features that resonate with what we know of medieval Sudanic states: ‘Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force being in the service of right and peace. . . . The first task of Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the consensuses that support its own power.’ See Hardt, M. and Negri, A., Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 15Google Scholar.

15 Hall, B., ‘Arguing sovereignty in Songhay’, Afriques, 4 (2013)Google Scholar, https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.1121.

16 Levtzion, N., Ancient Ghana and Mali (New York, 1973), 108Google Scholar. The Sunjata epic also favors a close bond with Ghāna, ruled by a group of the Mande people, but it has to be noted that the extant versions are contemporaneous and there is no way of knowing how this relationship was presented in local narratives during medieval times.

17 H. Collet, ‘The sultanate of Mali (14th–15th century): historiographies of a Sudanic state from medieval Islam until today’, (unpublished PhD dissertation, Pantheon Sorbonne University, 2017), 198–204.

18 Ibid. 205.

19 al-Saʿdī, Tārīḫ al-Sūdān, 74–7, 93–4, 98.

20 Hall, ‘Arguing sovereignty’.

21 In his famous Miʿrāǧ al-suʿūd written in 1615, the great scholar Ahmad Baba (d. 1627) gives a list of the peoples and their political territory that are known to be anciently Islamized in the Western Sudan. Māli and Songhay are mentioned, but not Ghāna, which probably existed only as a literary relic at the time. See Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge, 2011), 53.

22 Masonen, Negroland Revisited, 319–420.

23 ‘It is remarkable, that while Islám in the two larger westerly kingdoms which flourished previously to that of Songhay, — I mean Ghána, or Ghánata, and Melle, — had evidently emanated from the north.’ Barth, H., Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, Volume IV (London, 1858), 411–12Google Scholar.

24 Binger, L.-G., Essai sur la langue bambara (Paris, 1886), 3Google Scholar; Basset, R., Mélanges d'histoire et de littérature Orientale: Essai sur l'histoire et la langue de Tonbouktou et des royaumes Songhaï et Melli, Volume II (Louvain, 1888), 17Google Scholar.

25 Es-Sa'di, Tarikh es-Soudan, trans. O. Houdas (Paris, 1900), 18. The Arabic text was edited and published two years earlier in 1898.

26 Moraes Farias, ‘Intellectual innovation’, 95–108.

27 F. Shaw, ‘The Soudanese states’, ch. 8 in A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (London, 1905), 78–82.

28 J.-L. Triaud, ‘Haut-Sénégal-Niger, un modèle “positiviste”? De la coutume à l'histoire: Maurice Delafosse et l'invention de l'histoire africaine’, in J.-L. Amselle and E. Sibeud (eds.), Maurice Delafosse entre orientalisme et ethnographie: L'Itinéraire d'un africaniste (1870–1926) (Paris, 1998), 210–32, esp. the section entitled ‘Of kingdoms and empires’, 218–20.

29 Triaud, ‘Haut-Sénégal-Niger’, 218. My translation.

30 Ibid. 220. He sees it as a military monarchy comprised of several kingdoms and without social or ethnic unity.

31 P. Garcia, ‘Historiographie méthodique’, in C. Delacroix, F. Dosse, P. Garcia, and N. Offenstadt (eds.), Historiographies, concepts et débats, Volume I (Paris, 2010), 443–52.

32 Triaud, ‘Haut-Sénégal-Niger’, 215.

33 On the problematic edition of 1913, see Mathee and Nobili, ‘So-called Tārīkh al-fattāsh’, 37–73.

34 Houdas, O. and Delafosse, M. (trans.), Tarikh el-fettach ou Chronique du chercheur (Paris, 1913), 55, 75Google Scholar.

35 Vidal, J., ‘Au sujet de l'emplacement de Mali, capitale de l'ancien Empire Mandingue’, Bulletin du Comité d’Études Historiques et Scientifique de l'AOF, 2 (1923), 251–68Google Scholar; Delafosse, M., ‘Le Gâna et le Mali et l'emplacement de leurs capitales’, Bulletin du Comité d’Études Historiques et Scientifique de l'AOF, 7 (1924), 479–542Google Scholar. For studies on the particular historiographical adventure of the imperial capital of the Māli Empire, see Fauvelle, F.-X., ‘Niani redux: en finir avec l'identification du site de Niani (Guinée-Conakry) à la capitale du royaume du Mali’, P@lethnologie, 4 (2012), 237–54Google Scholar; H. Collet, ‘L'introuvable capitale du Mali: la question de la capitale dans l'historiographie du royaume médiéval du Mali’, Afriques, 4 (2013), https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.1098.

36 Regarding the ‘question of Ghana’, see J.-L. Triaud, ‘Le nom de Ghana: mémoire en exil, mémoire importée, mémoire appropriée’, in J.-P. Chrétien and J.-L. Triaud (eds.), Histoire d'Afrique: Les enjeux de mémoire (Paris, 1999), 235–80; and Masonen, Negroland Revisited, 284–306.

37 Masonen, Negroland Revisited, 525–34.

38 First a lengthy article, it was published in 1930 in the form of a short monograph; see Monteil, C., ‘Les empires du Mali: études d'histoire et de sociologie soudanaise’, Bulletin du Comité d'Études Historiques et Scientifiques de l'AOF, 12:3–4 (1929), 291–447Google Scholar; Monteil, C., Les empires du Mali (Paris, 1930)Google Scholar; and Monteil, C., ‘L’œuvre des étrangers dans l'empire soudanais du Mali’, Revue des Études Islamiques, 2 (1929), 227–35Google Scholar.

39 Monteil, ‘L’œuvre des étrangers’, 227–8. My translation.

40 Ibid. 234. My translation.

41 Of course, the argument for the need of a civilizing foreigner directly served the French colonial endeavor. Monteil states explicitly that, in that regard, the French were continuators. Ibid. 235.

42 The first issue of the review Présence Africaine, launched in 1947 by Alioune Diop (1910–80), is a good example of that shift.

43 See Diop, C. A., L'Afrique noire précoloniale (Paris, 1960), 97Google Scholar.

44 Niane, D. T., Le Soudan occidental au temps des grands empires (Paris, 1975), 26Google Scholar. My translation.

45 Niane, D. T., Soundjata ou L’épopée mandingue (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar. It was challenged by a Malian version in the 1980s, see J. Jansen, ‘The next generation: young griots’ quest for authority’, in Green and Rossi, West African Past, 239–58. Since then, several other versions of the Sunjata epic have surfaced. David Conrad recently published one from Fadama, Guinea; see D. Conrad (ed.), Sunjata: A New Prose Version (Indianapolis, IN, 2016).

46 Brizuela-Garcia, E., ‘The history of Africanization and the Africanization of history’, History in Africa, 38 (2006), 35–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Regarding the search for the capitals and the excavations at Niani, thought to be Māli's imperial capital, in 1965, 1968, and 1973, see Fauvelle, ‘Niani redux’, and Collet, ‘L'introuvable capitale du Māli’.

48 Examples include R. Mauny, ‘Le Soudan occidental à l’époque des grands empires’, in H. Deschamps (ed.), Histoire générale de l'Afrique noire, Volume 2 (Paris, 1970), 185–202; Niane, Le Soudan occidental; Conrad, D., Empires of Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali and Songhay (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Simonis, F., L'Afrique soudanaise au Moyen Âge: Le temps des grands empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhaï) (Marseille, 2010)Google Scholar.

49 According to Niane: ‘We don't have written information on the manner in which the vast empire [i.e. Mali] was governed. Mali did not leave archives, official acts being proclaimed orally. . . . Heralds, here the griots, constituted at that epoch a veritable chancery.’ Niane, Recherches sur l'empire du Mali au Moyen Age (Paris, 1975), 56.

50 Recent works have emphasized the main role of traditionists as mediators of their epoch and their capacity to repurpose orature to reflect their own historical context. On the question of orature's different regimes of historicity, especially the ‘encyclopedic phase’ that produced many dated events and the creative tension between written and oral history, see Jansen, ‘Next generation’.

51 Balandier, G., ‘Le concept d'empire dans l'histoire de l'Afrique noire’, in Duverger, M. (ed.), Le concept d'empire (Paris, 1980), 443–59Google Scholar.

52 Ibid. 443–4.

53 To support his idea of ‘empire inachevé’, he points out two limits. First, a failure to produce archives prevented the institutionalization of imperial power and its severance from a lineage-rooted system. Second, the means of agrarian production remained limited (no plough, wheel, animal traction, or mechanical means of irrigation) and prevented the accumulation of surplus that could lead to technical progress in specialized crafts and more radical social stratification. Ibid. 445–51.

54 Or ‘by their expanse’, from the French par l'extension.

55 Ibid. 452–3.

56 Ibid. 459.

57 Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus [2011], vii.

58 On this question, see B. Hirsch, ‘Éditorial: pour une nouvelle histoire des mondes africains avant le XIXe siècle’, Afriques, (https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/550), 2010; and Reid, R., ‘Past and presentism: the “precolonial” and the foreshortening of African history’, The Journal of African History, 52:2 (2011), 135–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Prominent West African historians such as Sekene Mody Cissoko, Alpha Gado Boureima, Boubacar Barry, and Mamadou Diouf contributed notably to develop the postmedieval history of the region.

59 Austen, R. A. (ed.), In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature, and Performance (Bloomington, IN, 1999)Google Scholar.

60 Jansen, J., ‘The representation of status in Mande: did the Mali Empire still exist in the nineteenth century?’, History in Africa, 23 (1996), 97–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 McIntosh suggests that centralized political power could arise from heterarchy, ‘a complex organization in which the relations between elements are unranked vertically but may be highly stratified horizontally’; see McIntosh, R., The Peoples of the Middle Niger (Cambridge, 1998), 304Google Scholar.

62 Jansen, ‘Next generation’, 239–58; Mann, G., From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (Cambridge, 2015), 238–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Regarding the history of the declaration of Kurukan Fuga and the Hunters’ Oath (Donsolu Kalikan), known as the Mande Charter, see Jolly, É., ‘L’épopée en context: variantes et usages politiques de deux récit épiques (Mali/Guinée)’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 65:4 (2010), 885–912CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amselle, J.-L., ‘L'Afrique a-t-elle “inventé” les droits de l'homme?’, Syllabus Review, 2:3 (2011), 446–63Google Scholar; and Mann, Empires to NGOs, 238–42.

64 Mann, Empires to NGOs, 239–40.

65 Jansen, ‘Next generation’, 309. When making room for the African past in the greater history of human rights was needed, a Sudanic empire provided it. Such a claim is of course to be understood in the remit of the group enunciating it and in a competitive nationalist context. On how competition and narrative friction led to creative tensions regarding the Sunjata epic, see Simonis, F., ‘Le griot, l'historien, le chasseur et l'UNESCO’, Revue ultramarines, 28 (2015), 14–30Google Scholar.

66 The Māli Empire is described as a federation in e.g., Simonis, F., ‘L'Empire du Mali d'hier à aujourd'hui’, Cahier d'histoire: Revue d'histoire critique, 128 (2015), 5Google Scholar. It could be argued that medieval sources, with a biased Islamic conception of power, show the opposite, emphasizing the importance of the etiquette of the court, the place of the ruler at the center of the state, and a fairly centralized state.

67 Mann, Empires to NGOs, 241.

68 Masonen, Negroland Revisited; P. F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Inscription from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles and Songhay-Tuareg History (Oxford, 2003); J. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Saʿdi's Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān down to 1613 and other Contemporary Documents (Leiden, 2003).

69 Fauvelle, F.-X., The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton, 2018)Google Scholar, first published in French as Le rhinocéros d'or; Nixon, Essouk-Tadmekka; Gallais, A., De mil, d'or et d'esclave: Le Sahel précolonial (Lausanne, 2011), 74–90Google Scholar. Some years before, other historians had already focused on other regions of medieval West Africa like the Senegambia; see A. Bâ, Le Takrur: Des origines à la conquête par le Mali, VIe-XIIIe siècles (Nouakchott, Mauritania, 2002 [1984]); and J. Boulègue, Le grand Jolof (Paris, 1987).

70 Burbank, J. and Cooper, F., Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 10Google Scholar. This particular point was one of the criticisms of the book, see for instance Ghosh, D., ‘Another set of imperial turns?’, American Historical Review, 117:3 (2012), 773CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 This historiographical trend focuses largely on European colonial empires.

72 A French example is the 2015 dossier directed by the Africanist Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch for Cahiers d'histoire: Revue d'histoire critique. In the introduction, Coquery-Vidrovitch points out the necessity to deal with ‘African empires’ rather than empires in Africa, the latter having led to a focus mainly on European colonial empires in Africa; see C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Introduction’, in C. Coquery-Vidrovitch (ed.), special issue ‘Les empires africains, des origines au XXe siècle’, Cahiers d'histoire: Revue d'histoire critique, 128 (2015), 13.

73 Gomez, M. A., African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton, 2018), 7Google Scholar.

74 See especially the contributions to ‘Review roundtable: Gomez, Michael, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa’, American Historical Review 124:2 (2019), 581–94Google Scholar. Gomez agreed to take part in a review roundtable with Ghislaine Lydon, Ousmane Kane, Shamil Jeppie, and Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias. His answer followed the four reviews. The five papers together give a fair overview of the book's strengths and weaknesses, and they will not be repeated here.

75 ‘Early West African history has come to represent a sort of time before time, when Africa was powerful and free of imperial imposition. Indeed, the notion of a West African “golden age” has been critical to many antislavery, anticolonial, and antiracism campaigns, in response to a western hegemonic insistence on an Africa both backward and devoid. Within such a context, histories of early and medieval West African societies tend to emphasize the urban-based, large-scale polity, majestic in scope and lavish in lifestyle, rolling out in linear and successive fashion, beginning with Ghana, then Mali, followed by Songhay.’ Gomez, African Dominion, 20.

76 Ibid.

77 Takezawa, S. and Cissé, M., ‘Discovery of the earliest royal palace in Gao and its implications for the history of West Africa’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 208:4 (2012), 813–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gomez does not cite this article.

78 ‘It has disappeared, to the point that the people of this land don't know its origin.’ M. Bello, Infāq al-maysūr fī tārīḫ bilād al-Takrūr, ed. C. E. J. Whitting (London, 1951), 3. On the question of Takrūr, see al-Naqar, U., ‘Takrūr: the history of a name’, The Journal of African History, 10:3 (1969), 365–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 On the Kaabu federation, see Green, T., The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012), 46–52Google Scholar. On the Gonja kingdom, see I. Wilks, N. Levtzion, and B. Haight (eds.), Chronicles from Gonja: A Tradition of West African Muslim Historiography (Cambridge, 1986). See also H. Collet, ‘Les souvenirs du Mâli: les Mâli anciens comme horizon mémoriel en Afrique de l'Ouest (XVIIe–XIXe siècle)’, in F.-X. Fauvelle and C. Gutron (eds.), Afrique: Passés antérieurs (Paris, forthcoming).

80 This was underlined by S. Jeppie, ‘Review roundtable: Michael Gomez, African Dominion’, 588.

81 Gomez, African Dominion, 62.

82 Ibid. 63.

83 Jan Jansen's work is particularly precious in this matter, see Jansen, ‘Representation of status’; Jansen, J., ‘Polities and political discourse: was Mande already a segmentary society in the Middle Ages?’, History in Africa, 23 (1996), 121–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jansen, J., ‘The political and military organization of the Northern Upper Niger, c. 1650–c. 1850’, Journal of West African History, 1:1 (2015), 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jansen, J., ‘When marrying a Muslim: the social code of political elites in the Western Sudan, c. 1600–c. 1850’, The Journal of African History, 57:1 (2016), 24–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jansen, ‘Next generation’, 239–58. This is somewhat similar to the seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles reinventing the Sahelian past to serve a political project.

84 Gomez, African Dominion, 142.

85 See for example B. Hirsch and Y. Potin, ‘Le continent détourné: frontières et mobilité des mondes africains’, in P. Boucheron (ed.), Histoire du monde au XVe siècle (Paris, 2017 [2009]), 154–91; and Boucheron, Fauvelle, and Loiseau, ‘Rythmes du monde au Moyen Âge’.

86 Saad, E., Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; and more recently Jeppie, S. and Diagne, S. B. (eds.), The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town, 2008)Google Scholar.

87 G. Holder, ‘Djenné, “la ville aux 313 saints”: convocation des savoirs, “lutte des classements” et production d'une ville sainte au Mali’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 208:4 (2012), 741–65.

88 Boucheron, Fauvelle, and Loiseau, ‘Rythmes du monde au Moyen Âge’, 150–66; see also the introduction to Fauvelle, Golden Rhinoceros.

89 A recent publication places it with the states of the modern period, which takes place between the medieval and the contemporary periods according to the French quadripartition of history. See R. Dewière, ‘Les sultanats du Songhay et du Borno’, in F.-X. Fauvelle and I. Surun (eds.), Atlas historique de l'Afrique (Paris, 2019), 32–3.

90 Nobili, Sultan, Caliph and the Renewer of the Faith, 192, 222.

91 K. MacDonald et al., ‘Sorotomo: a forgotten Malian capital?’, Archaeology International, 13 (2011), 52–64; S. Takezawa and M. Cissé (eds.), Sur les traces des grands empires: Recherches archéologiques au Mali (Paris, 2016).

92 Madeline, F., ‘L'empire et son espace: héritages, organisations et pratiques’, Hypothèses, 11 (2008), 223CrossRefGoogle Scholar.