It is customary to say that history is written by the victors. In Sub-Saharan Africa, this saying could apply to the medieval period, which preceded European imperialism on the continent. The account of this period stretching from the eleventh to the seventeenth century is still largely based on fragmentary and often partisan observations by the first colonisers. Yet simply refuting the notion of an isolated continent through counter-examples is not enough, for historical research now possesses new tools that can document these connections.
While this vision of an “autarkic” medieval Africa is henceforth contradicted by various studies, little research has been conducted on the exact nature of these intercontinental connections. The GlobAfrica programme was launched in 2015 to elucidate the functioning and scope of these past exchanges. Over the course of four years, this interdisciplinary project financed by the French National Research Agency (ANR) brought together fifty researchers from highly different backgrounds including historians, archaeologists, paleobotanists, geneticists, linguists, art historians, geographers, specialists in molecular paleopathology, ethnobotanists, economists, etc.1
