David Mattingly’s book comes at a time of increasing scholarly interest in ancient North Africa. A product of over four decades of fieldwork, the book questions much of the ‘colonial’ approach to the history of this region. Its area of interest extends spatially over the immensity of the Maghribian and Saharan territories, and its temporal scope stretches from the North African Iron Age to late antiquity.
Mattingly aims to offer ‘a revised framework for the study and improved understanding of Africa in the Roman Empire’ (p. 5). He develops a ‘discrepant’ approach that goes beyond the polarities of North/South and colonizer/colonized. He focuses on the countryside, innovatively venturing beyond the desert fringes where there is not much, if any, epigraphic evidence or exceptionally preserved monuments or works of art.
Mattingly highlights the centrality of North Africa in the ancient world, in which Africa and Rome co-participated in commerce, culture and politics. The social and cultural history of North Africa is better understood not in terms of its relationship to one imperial power. Mattingly has shown how the Roman Empire was characterized by a unidirectional cultural flow involving peoples (including Africans) whose material cultures and lifestyles were less conventionally Roman, but who feature in the story of the impacts of Roman imperial incorporation (p. 52). He demonstrates North Africans’ fundamental role in advancing Africa in the Roman Empire.
The Introduction (pp. 1–48) is well developed, and the author provides a detailed exposition of the Mediterranean geography of North Africa in Part 1. In Part 2, he refers to encounters of North Africans with Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, and eventually the Roman colonization of North Africa and of communities such as the Numidiae, the Mauri, the Gaetuli and the Garamantes. Mattingly also offers enlightening surveys of the military community (Part 3), and of urban and rural communities and identities (Parts 4 and 5). In connection with pre-Roman and post-Roman African economies, and African farming, he warns of the dangers of overlooking the extent and complexity of pre-Roman cultivation in Africa and the implications this has for ‘our understanding of the process of increased sedentarisation under Rome’ (Parts 5 and 6), not to mention the momentous change in Africa from Roman to Arabian hegemony.
In antiquity, large areas of North Africa were transformed by their contacts with the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and, later, Arabs. Nevertheless, a colonialist discourse would have us believe that North Africa was there only to serve as a transmission ground between northern Europe and the Mediterranean world, without considering North Africa as part of the Classical heritage. Mattingly challenges the ‘transformation’ (i.e. ‘Romanization’) thesis (p. 52). His approach goes beyond a focus on monumental architecture, prioritizing the local ways in which material culture was developed. This method proceeds as a step-by-step critique of the written sources, identifying and disentangling the colonial discourse that underlies the way in which material has hitherto been presented and understood.
In addition, Mattingly illustrates the various ways in which African people expressed both association with and disassociation from the Roman Empire. Broad groups in Roman provincial society, especially the army or town dwellers, actively sought to differentiate themselves rather than striving for ostensibly ‘uniform’ cultural norms. Challenging notions of the stagnancy, spiritlessness and passivity of African cultures (pp. 560–71), Mattingly describes the details of these enduring African cultures and the traditions and cultural dialogues that took place among them, and even highlights cultural exchanges between continental Africans and the populations of the Canary Islands.
Mattingly provides a nuanced view of African cultures between the sea and the Sahara desert, illustrating that the Romans did not ‘make Africans Roman’. Africans, as Mattingly shows, were participants in cultural practices whose terms and media were varied and diverse. He illustrates how both Africans and Romans constructed their distinctly unique identities, wherein the presence of ‘the other’ played a significant role for both groups – something often overlooked in common discourse. Crucially, Mattingly perceives the responses of Africans to Roman and other cultures as mechanisms for preserving their distinct identities rather than as a manifestation of conformism.
Generally, Mattingly has demonstrated the futility of approaching North Africa exclusively through the lens of traditional thought about the Classics – a tradition that is deeply invested in Western civilization and its concomitant knowledge systems and cultural infrastructure – as ‘the norm’. His book, despite its sheer size (over 700 pages) and perhaps what might come across as a somewhat innovative use of speculation about problematic evidence, is a welcome contribution to the history of Ancient North Africa, African Classics, colonial and postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and African cultural study and multiculturalism.
