The Golden Rhinoceros

Histories of the African Middle Ages

By: François-Xavier Fauvelle, Troy Tice - translator

Narrated by: Michael Page

Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

A leading historian reconstructs the forgotten history of medieval Africa.

From the birth of Islam in the seventh century to the voyages of European exploration in the 15th, Africa was at the center of a vibrant exchange of goods and ideas. It was an African golden age in which places like Ghana, Nubia, and Zimbabwe became the crossroads of civilizations, and where African royals, thinkers, and artists played celebrated roles in the globalized world of the Middle Ages. The Golden Rhinoceros brings this unsung era marvelously to life, taking listeners from the Sahara and the Nile River Valley to the Ethiopian highlands and Southern Africa.

Drawing on fragmented written sources as well as his many years of experience as an archaeologist, François-Xavier Fauvelle painstakingly reconstructs an African past that is too often denied its place in history - but no longer. He looks at ruined cities found in the mangrove, exquisite pieces of art, rare artifacts like the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, ancient maps, and accounts left by geographers and travelers - remarkable discoveries that shed critical light on political and architectural achievements, trade, religious beliefs, diplomatic episodes, and individual lives.

©2018 Princeton University Press: original French edition copyright 2013 by Alma éditeur, Paris (P)2020 Tantor

Excellent

I really enjoyed this! It is a fascinating area of study.

So often academics propose an hypothesis and then twist or cherry-pick facts in order to create a 'pretty' narrative. This author does not do that. Rather, he lays out what we know, what we don't know, and what possible explanations there are for the information we have available. It's a very welcome approach, and if you're interested in this topic, it's an excellent place to start.

However, it would be useful to provide a PDF download of maps depicting the various regions and cities that are described, a glossary of words used that aren't in the common vernacular, as well as a list of names of people mentioned. A lot of topics are covered, and it would make it so much easier to keep everything straight in my head if I had a reference guide. A bibliography would also be incredibly useful in directing me towards further reading on this topic.

Excellent scholarly intro to a medieval Africa

This book has been unfairly panned by listeners perhaps interested in a more general intro to medieval African history. Rather, it is a methodologically intriguing book about the inconclusive nature of evidence and artifacts as a reflection of a world region that lacks documents so common in “Western” or the history of the “North.” If that makes sense to you, this is a fascinating book! It paints the broad strokes of connections within Africa as well as tantalizing stories about links to Asia, Europe, and possibly America.

Especially Enjoyable to a Historian

As a historian, a I enjoyed this more than those seeking a straight narrative may have. What the author does is to provide sketches and analysis based on the very limited material available from the sources, be they maps, commentary (mostly from outsiders), or artifacts. Thus, the reader see what an actual historian does--draw interpretations from the data. Since we don't have a full picture or Africa during the "middle ages," the author looks in a fascinating way, from the inside out. We get not only (albethey limited) views of Africa in this period, we are taught to better understand these limits and how history gets "done." This is an insider history that tells us at least as much about what we don't know as what we do, which makes it fascinating to a student of history.

A Major Disappointment!

To call this a history book is to denigrate history.
This is simply a collection of unconnected snippets of particular moments in time, with no connection between any of the snippets. There is no context presented whatsoever. The author (I use that term very loosely) jumps from Senegal to Ethiopia to Morocco to Zimbabwe with absolutely no effort to create any sort of large picture out of these uninteresting pieces. There are no intros nor explanations as to how what we are about to hear or have just heard fits with the other uninteresting pieces. There is no thread connecting any of these little tidbits (mostly about 10 minutes or so each) whatsoever. After almost every one of them I came away thinking that I could not care less about what I had just heard. It was just one piece of drivel after another. Shame on François-Xavier Fauvelle for pawning this off as "Histories of the African Middle Ages."