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Unearthing indigenous knowledge
If savanna West Africa is a new corporate mining frontier in the 21st century, it’s because it is also home to the world’s longest-standing indigenous gold mining economy.
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Madina Thiam is a historian of the Sahel and West Africa, and an assistant professor at New York University.
If savanna West Africa is a new corporate mining frontier in the 21st century, it’s because it is also home to the world’s longest-standing indigenous gold mining economy.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, a number of West African Muslims migrated east, settling in Sudan and Mecca, to seek refuge from European colonization.
It has become customary to discuss Mali while simultaneously ignoring Mali.