Given the enduring depth of both public ignorance and primitive stereotypes about Africa’s present and past, readers might be even more surprised to learn that by the late medieval and early modern eras, even literacy, especially in the Sahel and on its fringes, was not so different from medieval Europe.¶ The continent had any number of states that boasted their own formal institutions and processes of learning and scholarship. Make no mistake. There would be a real divergence between Europe and Africa, but for the most part it still lay in the future, and it would ride on the backs of the
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