The Peoples of the Middle Niger: The Island of Gold

This is the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar. "The Island of Gold" was the medieval Muslim and later European name for a fabled source of gold and other tropical riches. Although the floodplain of the Niger lies far from the gold fields, the mosaic of peoples along the Middle Niger created a wealth in grain, fish, and livestock that supported some of Africa's oldest cities, including Timbuktu. These ancient cities were founded without outside stimulation. Their inhabitants long resisted the coercive, centralized state that characterized the origins of earliest towns elsewhere. This book uses the latest archaeological and anthropological research to provide a bold overview of the inhabitants of the Middle Niger and an explanation for their social evolution. It shows the difficulties the peoples faced in adapting to an unpredictable climate and how their particular social organization determined the unusual nature of their responses to that change. Oral traditions are integrated into the story, providing vivid insights into the inhabitants' complex culture and belief systems.

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This book provides the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar.

Roderick James McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. As an undergraduate at Yale he excavated in Ghana, and his PhD research involved extensive work at Jenne-jeno. He has now worked for twenty years in Mali, and two years in Senegal. In 1990 he was Guggenheim Fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and in 1991 he was Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Dakar, Senegal. His previous publications include, with S. K. McIntosh, Prehistoric Investigations at Jenne, Mali (1980) and, edited with P. R. Schmidt, Plundering Africa's Past (1996).