Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

why, beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century, did Europeans, led principally by the Portuguese, begin to mount a determined push for trade opportunities and political relations with what had previously been regarded as impossibly remote and inaccessible regions of Africa? What drove them to overcome their long-standing fears and superstitions to do so? Obscure though it may be to contemporary readers, little-known Djenné constitutes an important piece of this story. Early centers of urbanization like this one—city-states, in effect—became swept up in a process of empire formation in a part of Africa that would soon become as outward looking as Portugal or Spain, only long before the oceanic explorations of the Iberians. In fact, the most famous of these Sudanic empires, Mali, which succeeded Ghana in the thirteenth century, and gave the present-day country its name, was ruled at the turn of the fourteenth century by an emperor named Abu Bakr II, whose personal obsession was reaching the western limits of the Atlantic Ocean by boat. This was more than a century and a half before Columbus set out for the New World from Andalusia.