“The Golden Rhinoceros” by François-Xavier Fauvelle, a history of Africa in the Middle Ages, faces a potentially prohibitive problem: throughout much of the continent, there was no systemic written record, and much archeological evidence is disputed or disrupted.

Under such circumstances, it is difficult to create a coherent historical narrative. One strategy is to deal with a less than ideal sourcing is to fill in holes with educated guesses and narrative conjecture. Another present multiple alternatives. When there are unfilled holes, some historians may turn poetry or philosophy to round out important ideas when the primary documents fall short.

“The Golden Rhinoceros” solves the problem by avoiding overarching narrative all together. The book is written in a series of brief chapters, perhaps no more than twenty pages at the longest. Each considers some surviving document, artifact or construction, from around the continent. There is a rough chronological order, but no particular geographic logic. Most of it falls within Muslim Africa, largely North Africa and the Sahel, as that is where most of the written records came from; the center of the continent is largely absent. West, Southern and East Africa all have a few chapters. The chapters are without footnotes, but contain brief bibliographies at the end that discuss what scholarship and primary sources were consulted. If the subject of another chapter is mentioned, Fauvelle puts in a note to it, but there is no clustering of chapters around given subjects and no particular reason to read the chapters in order. The book does focus largely on trade and could, generously, be described as an economic history, but many chapters deal with social, legal, religious or biographical topics.

This disjointed format has a few effects. One is that it the book is incredibly readable, each chapter conveying a tidy anecdote, laying out the evidence and making a brief historical argument. The bibliographies at the end are far easier to reference than endnotes, but less precise than footnotes; more interested in documenting the scope and state of scholarship instead of pinpointing every single fact to a page number. The effect is, in some way, a sort of Wunderkammer — a collection of wide ranging artifacts arranged in such a way that they are easy to take in and enjoy.

As a whole, however, the individual chapters begin to form a sort of cohesive impression, a sort of Chinese ink wash that conveys an idea in the gestures, not the details. It is emergent narrative, not linear, but it is effective all the same, perhaps even more so for not having a cohesive central thesis it is attempting to convince the reader of. There is no center to Fauvelle’s medieval African world and no periphery, just glimpse of a few mountains emerging from the blank scroll, remnants of an ancient range.