The Battle of Kirina
May. 13th, 2020 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellThe plan to bring a medieval African historical miniatures scenario to Enfilade! foundered when job-switching took priority and then adjusting to my new schedule took longer than I expected. Then there was the phase of feeling guilty about it, but thinking there wasn't enough time to get it done.
Then Enfilade! got cancelled along with every other convention this spring, so maybe I have time after all.
After beating back the urge to go for the most obscure options possible, I've settled on the Battle of Kirina (Sumanguru, trying to rebuild the empire of Ghana, vs. Sundiata Keita, forming the nucleus of what would eventually be the empire of Mali).
Next problem: finding details. The extent of the information I could find on the Web or in the books I've collected has been to recap the version in Mali's national epic, which is more concerned with the details of how Sundiata stopped Sumanguru's alleged evil sorcery than with useful details like troop counts.
It was time to contact a librarian. Not a problem even in these times, because Oregon has Answerland, providing answers from reference librarians by e-mail to any state resident who submits a question.
The librarians didn't have a whole lot of new sources to suggest, but they did find me this map, which implies that the book it comes from has other detailed information about the battle. So the next steps are to order myself a copy of Soundjata la gloire du Mali, which I've done... and learn French.
I've been anticipating this, actually. I'd noticed a lot of French citations in Basil Davidson's books about pre-colonial Africa, so I already suspected that at some point the path to a fully researched scenario was going to lead through academic French.
So the next step is picking some language software to learn with. I'm trying the 3-day free trial of Rosetta Stone, which I'll probably stick with. I'll probably get one of the subscriptions for unlimited languages, in case I feel the need to recover some more Japanese.
Then Enfilade! got cancelled along with every other convention this spring, so maybe I have time after all.
After beating back the urge to go for the most obscure options possible, I've settled on the Battle of Kirina (Sumanguru, trying to rebuild the empire of Ghana, vs. Sundiata Keita, forming the nucleus of what would eventually be the empire of Mali).
Next problem: finding details. The extent of the information I could find on the Web or in the books I've collected has been to recap the version in Mali's national epic, which is more concerned with the details of how Sundiata stopped Sumanguru's alleged evil sorcery than with useful details like troop counts.
It was time to contact a librarian. Not a problem even in these times, because Oregon has Answerland, providing answers from reference librarians by e-mail to any state resident who submits a question.
The librarians didn't have a whole lot of new sources to suggest, but they did find me this map, which implies that the book it comes from has other detailed information about the battle. So the next steps are to order myself a copy of Soundjata la gloire du Mali, which I've done... and learn French.
I've been anticipating this, actually. I'd noticed a lot of French citations in Basil Davidson's books about pre-colonial Africa, so I already suspected that at some point the path to a fully researched scenario was going to lead through academic French.
So the next step is picking some language software to learn with. I'm trying the 3-day free trial of Rosetta Stone, which I'll probably stick with. I'll probably get one of the subscriptions for unlimited languages, in case I feel the need to recover some more Japanese.
