Western Africa is a region marginalised in the world’s geopolitics. Yet it was not always so. The coast stretching from the baobab-sprinkled scrubland by the Senegal River down to the creeks and forests of Sierra Leone saw exchanges between Africans and Europeans in the fifteenth century which formed a prototype for the relationships between European imperial emissaries and others that have defined so much subsequent world history.

The cultural world established in Western Africa at the time of these exchanges did not spring from nothing. Rather, it developed from antecedents which had shaped fifteenth-century societies on the Upper Guinean coast. By the 1440s, this was a region where already for several centuries there had been a tradition of accommodation to the presence of powerful and at times violent outsiders who represented the commercial and political interests of the empire of Mali.