François-Xavier Fauvelle’s research, which took him from South Africa to Morocco via Ethiopia, highlights the lessons of a history that can no longer be denied or ignored.
He points up the challenges of fragmentary documentation, which requires the use of archaeological digs and ancient writings, oral traditions and contemporary uses of the past, while deconstructing the representations inherited from the centuries of the slave trade and then colonialism.
The result is the richness of a history marked by a singular diversity of economies, languages, religious beliefs and political formations.
Reinscribed in its interactions with outside worlds, this history renews our understanding of ancient African worlds and enables us to rethink global phenomena, such as those of the Middle Ages, from an African perspective.
