In their own words, early European merchants, travellers and explorers describe what they saw when they visited Africa 500 years ago. One of them, a truly flabbergasted Major Dubois, a French scholar, wrote about the Malian city of Djenne in these words: "What is this town... with its wide, straight roads, its houses of two storeys built in a style that instantly arrests the eye? I am completely bewildered. Where did this gathering of unknown life come from? What is this civilisation, sufficiently assured to possess a manner and style of its own?" This extract is from When We Ruled, the new bo...
