Disorientingly convoluted prose.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, in fact, I would almost say I really needed to, as there are so few contemporary resources on the subject of early West African history and I was greatly looking forward to gaining a better understanding of the region's history. Unfortunately, I made it only about 80 pages into Gomez's work, which turned out to be quite a grueling endeavor.
This book should really be characterized as "Historiography" not a History, as Gomez primary agenda is not educated the reader but furnishing critiques of some sort of previously-established record of the region that Gomez is setting out to correct. This makes the text all but impenetrable for the reader that does not possess any particular pre-conceived notions about ancient West Africa, and is relying on Gomez's volume to gain an original understanding.
In hand with this, and much more problematically, Gomez gives no context to many of the names, people, scholars and events that suddenly pop up as references. I presume many of these names are authors of medieval texts that Gomez has come across in his research at libraries and archives, but why he assumes he can just name drop ancient Islamic scholars out of nowhere and the reader will already be familiar is totally baffling. This is made more unnecessarily difficult in that Gomez and his editors insist on referencing Gregorian and Islamic calendar dates for each time referenced. So a paragraph will start "Al-Bakri (d. 487/1094) possibly refers..." and the reader is quite naturally like, "Sorry, who? who is Al-Bakri? Where did he come from?" and then his happens at least every few pages.
On the other hand, Gomez and his editors will over-supply unnecessary data such as writing "Egypt (Misr)" --so they decide to help the reader with the Arabic name for Egypt, which is not needed, but then assume we already know by heart every scholar of the archives of the Saharan libraries.
The exact moment when I lost the will to continue was only on page 65, at the sentence "Saman would initiate the tradition of reroofing the Kama-Bolon (Kamabolon, Amambolon) every seven years..." and Gomez never even says where or what exactly the Kama-Bolon is! Presumably an important building somewhere, but how about a description? I was so out of sorts and so frustrated that I just gave up, sadly.
Really a shame as this subject matter desperately needs wider awareness in the public.
