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A review by buermann
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François-Xavier Fauvelle
5.0
This series of vignettes interweaves multiple narrative threads, most of which unfold into open questions because there is so much more to dig up. First is medieval Africa's place as a subject of world history from the records of literary sources that interacted on the continent -- native Egyptian and Ethiopian writers, the Hebrew, the Chinese, the Latin, but most of all and primarily the Arabic -- and what they can tell us about those African civilizations just beyond the reach of the written record. Second is Africa's role in a material history of an interconnected medieval world, long a source of ivory, gold, and slaves. The book, like the medieval documents it studies, is concerned particularly with the gold, which has the understandable effect at times of making the book feel a little more like a history of Islamicate commercial empires than a history of Africa. But much of the circulating gold of the medieval world came out of Africa, which naturally was a focus of interest among those then writing about Africa. Where the gold was mined and who mined it seem always just out of reach of the authors, a guarded mercantile secret, and still was many centuries later when European colonists of South Africa followed the prospecting works of those ancient miners to fuel its "mineral revolution," and remains a mystery today. Third is the historiography of the field itself, communicated through generous endnotes (this book might be considered something of a long introductory endnote to the middle third of Kevin Shillington's broader but rougher "History of Africa") and the occasional adventure in archaeology. If this book does not offer the outlines of a history of Africa it at least explains why it cannot. Fourth, and finally, is the French archaeologist's ruminating lamentations over how the scramble for Africa has scrambled African history.
It's the last that probably demands the most of our attention as public citizens, for the destruction of humanity's heritage is an ongoing process, fueled by international markets that serve the venality of the rich with the destruction of our collective past. Fauvelle's catalog of European explorers erasing whatever meaning their looted artifacts might have communicated is endless. The still-popular hypothesis that Europeans lead the scientific revolution out of an abundance of curiosity might be chastened by how every other chapter of this book involves some 'explorer' proving to be an enormously incurious clod. Fauvelle treats it a little like a past matter by celebrating contemporary examples of good archaeology, but the clod-hopping destruction has continued into the present, from George W. Bush's indifferent annihilation of human heritage in Iraq to the international brigades of the Islamic State continuing the work in Syria. On the other end of the supply chain wealthy imbeciles satisfy their vanity bidding top dollar on antiquities whose meaning was erased by the multiple levels of fraud that brought them to the market, never mind European and American imperial museums still trucking in stolen artifacts.
The lamentations' climax, if not their end, might be the title's thin gold foil rhinoceros. The missionary David Livingstone had a young guide, Fracois Lotrie, who settled in Limpopo, South Africa. Lotrie gifted a terra-cotta cup he'd taken from a sacred hill to his African friend, Mowena. In the early 1930s colonist Jerry Van Graan, a young history student, met the same Mowena on a hunting trip, and noticed the cup and seems to have understood its provenance. Returning to the Greefswald farm a little later Van Graan and his young friends found the hill, a 13th century ancestral graveyard of the Kings of Mapungubwe. His party disturbed the remains and raided their golden artifacts. The young man informed his former history professor, who informed the authorities, which moved to protect the site and reclaim the looted goods. The reconstructed statuette has single horn, unlike any African rhino, indicating the statuette was created in India or Indonesia, and while the fibers of its decayed wooden core might have indicated its origin, that information was destroyed in the acts of vandalism. Fauvelle cries, "The golden rhinoceros is nothing more than a recovered document, except that a stolen archaeological artifact will always remain lost... it will always be missing the associations of its original context."
It's the last that probably demands the most of our attention as public citizens, for the destruction of humanity's heritage is an ongoing process, fueled by international markets that serve the venality of the rich with the destruction of our collective past. Fauvelle's catalog of European explorers erasing whatever meaning their looted artifacts might have communicated is endless. The still-popular hypothesis that Europeans lead the scientific revolution out of an abundance of curiosity might be chastened by how every other chapter of this book involves some 'explorer' proving to be an enormously incurious clod. Fauvelle treats it a little like a past matter by celebrating contemporary examples of good archaeology, but the clod-hopping destruction has continued into the present, from George W. Bush's indifferent annihilation of human heritage in Iraq to the international brigades of the Islamic State continuing the work in Syria. On the other end of the supply chain wealthy imbeciles satisfy their vanity bidding top dollar on antiquities whose meaning was erased by the multiple levels of fraud that brought them to the market, never mind European and American imperial museums still trucking in stolen artifacts.
Spoiler
The lamentations' climax, if not their end, might be the title's thin gold foil rhinoceros. The missionary David Livingstone had a young guide, Fracois Lotrie, who settled in Limpopo, South Africa. Lotrie gifted a terra-cotta cup he'd taken from a sacred hill to his African friend, Mowena. In the early 1930s colonist Jerry Van Graan, a young history student, met the same Mowena on a hunting trip, and noticed the cup and seems to have understood its provenance. Returning to the Greefswald farm a little later Van Graan and his young friends found the hill, a 13th century ancestral graveyard of the Kings of Mapungubwe. His party disturbed the remains and raided their golden artifacts. The young man informed his former history professor, who informed the authorities, which moved to protect the site and reclaim the looted goods. The reconstructed statuette has single horn, unlike any African rhino, indicating the statuette was created in India or Indonesia, and while the fibers of its decayed wooden core might have indicated its origin, that information was destroyed in the acts of vandalism. Fauvelle cries, "The golden rhinoceros is nothing more than a recovered document, except that a stolen archaeological artifact will always remain lost... it will always be missing the associations of its original context."