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In 1347, the western and Mediterranean parts of the Old World recorded the first outbreaks of a returning mortal disease that would make its presence felt over several centuries. Known today as the Second Plague Pandemic—a zoonosis due to the bacterium Yersinia pestis—it scythed between a third and half of the population without regard for wealth or status. It deeply transformed all facets of societies, ignited fears, violence, and pogroms, tested the flexibility of religions, hierarchies, and traditions, and excited ambitions. Although the plague is commonly described as a pandemic, historical knowledge about the initial Black Death and the many recurrent waves of the disease is largely restricted to Western Europe and the Mediterranean world, where the literate elite left an impressive documentary record that served as resource to the long-lasting and flourishing heuristic tradition of Plague Studies. If, as suggested by Monica Green, the concept of ‘pandemic’ is to be taken seriously, we must consider the many excluded parts of the Old World, and especially Africa, in our plague narratives. We must recognize that these societies that did not practise ‘the reduction of speech to graphic forms’—to use the expression coined by Jack Goody—also could have experienced the brutal mortality of the plague and its radical transformative power, while producing no organized and specific, long-lasting traces. By extension, we must also recognize that all literate societies that had in common the art of writing did not practise this art in the same way and may not have produced identical categories of documentary records. Cultural differences affect the nature of the documentary archive, as illustrated by literate practices in medieval Nubia and Ethiopia. The invisibility or limited visibility of the plague in the documentary record is, therefore, a challenge for historians and a disguised invitation to accept the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. This paper is my attempt to resist this temptation, to challenge the quasi-absence of interest in the plague problem in the historiography of Sub-Saharan Africa, and to lay out the foundation of a research strategy that will be multi-disciplinary and comparative. The plague problem is not a footnote to African history. If the plague impacted African societies as it did in documented parts of the Old World, we must have missed or misread fundamental processes of change it entailed. Would we understand and interpret the history of Western Europe or the Mediterranean as we do if we ignored that the plague had occurred? Here, I do not solve the plague conundrum in Sub-Saharan Africa; rather, I build on the persuasive arguments made by other contributors to this special issue about the presence of plague in different parts of Africa before the 19th century. My purpose is to propose multiple, critical, and cumulative—but far from exhaustive—pathways to reading and rereading the traditional and less traditional sources of African history in the light of the possibility of societal crises related to plague. Besides presenting fragments of evidence, this paper also serves as an introduction to three groundbreaking papers exploring the archaeological, documentary, and genomic sources of the disease in the African past.

This paper focuses on the study of burial practices, including biological anthropology and archaeothanatology, through archaeological excavations of two burial sites in the historical city of Mbanza Kongo, the former capital of the Kongo kingdom. Beyond some aspects related to funerary archaeology, the goal of this paper is to understand the chronology of excavated burials, the spatial distribution of graves and their architecture as well as burials methods. The main objective is also trying to understand how in the burials area, local worship practices alight themselves in a dogmatic and ideological environment influenced by Christianity. The paper aims to compare burials dynamism and practices between ancient’s christian and public cemeteries in Mbanza Kongo as well as those in the Northern provinces of the Kongo Kingdom. This medieval African society at the forefront of cultural blending, has experienced various forms of resilience including in the field of burials.

The distinctive coinage of the Swahili Coast (c. 800–1500) has for a long time been seen as a barbarized coinage on the edge of the Islamic world, a product of colonial settlements of Arabs and Persians. With new evidence becoming available, the towns have taken their place as flourishing African trading ports, homogenously developed from local villages. One of the most durable remains of archaeological material culture in these towns, the coins, has not received the same attention, despite their being one of the keys to further understanding the Swahili stone towns. By deconstructing the previous hunt for precedents, it is argued that the coins are a stand-out marker of the Swahili stone town culture and not simply poor copies of other Islamic Indian Ocean coinages. However, their role both on the Swahili Coast and the Indian Ocean world is still poorly understood; and in the search for a clearer idea of their purpose, this paper not only looks at them from a local perspective, but also looks at the wider implications for coin use in the Indian Ocean trade.

This paper compares two fields of analysis: on the one hand, hydrosociology, theorized by geographers and anthropologists, which conceptualizes the uses and landscapes of water as a reflection of the social organization of the group; on the other hand, hydraulic archaeology, developed by archaeologists and historians, which has demonstrated the permanence of ancient hydraulic structures in contemporary landscapes. The aim of this cross-disciplinary approach is to produce a social interpretation of the ancient irrigation systems fossilized in current agricultural plots, in order to produce a diachronic analysis of social organizations that have disappeared. The case study of this contribution deals with the medieval city of Sijilmasa (Morocco) and the Saharan oasis of Tafilalt that still surrounds the archaeological site today. This study of sub-contemporary oasis hydraulics has made it possible to historicize its development over the long term and to highlight a clear correlation between the successive implementations of different irrigation practices and the evolution of the socio-political organization of the Tafilalt population over the centuries. Corroborated by textual sources, this model could be applied in the future to other medieval Saharan oases for which no written or archaeological record remains and whose social organization is otherwise unknown.