Natterings From Nepantla

The 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.

In English-language histories of Africa, there is Basil Davidson and then there is everyone else. Davidson's Lost Cities of Africa opened my eyes to the fact that there is actual recorded history in sub-Saharan Africa predating European contact. Unfortunately, Davidson died in 2010 and his main published works are considerably older than that (my copy of Lost Cities of Africa dates to the 1960s).

"Everyone else" includes a vast number of books which either give pre-colonial Africa only two or three chapters, and a few more which are more comprehensive but even more spectacularly out of date. So I was very excited to stumble across When We Ruled, which is both restricted to pre-colonial times and printed recently (2011 for this edition). As a bonus, it's by actual descendants of the African diaspora. Hooray, #ownvoices!

The catch is that it's... not very good.

For a start, it approaches history the way that turned me off of the subject in every history class I took before college: as a pile of facts, rather than a series of connected events. The presentation of facts is framed with an appeal to authority, where any authority will do-- actual archaeology, primary historical sources, secondary sources, tertiary sources from hundreds of miles away, experts of dubious provenance, newspaper opinion columns, random musings from European travellers looking at ruins that predated them by centuries.

It also tends to take a very art-museum perspective, with lots of oohing and ahhing over fancy ancient artworks and ruins, and rather less interest in the why and how or the cultural context they come from.

It also turns out to have a great deal of material that is extraneous to my needs, although not for the usual reasons. Much time at the beginning is devoted to convincing an apparently skeptical readership that African civilizations were, in fact, primarily built by and comprised of people that modern society would categorize as black. Ancient Egypt gets a chunk of the book out of all proportion to its territory, and then the last few chapters of the book collapse completely into woo as the author tries to find evidence to support African origins for various western Asian civilizations.

It does, however, contain some of the information that I am looking for (provided I can verify any of it), and it provides copious footnotes. And it has one huge point over any of Davidson's books: any time it focuses on a new area, it provides an actual map.

So, a few notes:

• Ann Nzinga's campaign against the Portuguese, 1623-1629. On becoming Ngola (technically, "king") of Ndongo, she made regional alliances to fight them and liberated the neighboring state of Matamba.
• "In 1438 [Abdullah Burja] was crowned Sarki of Kano ... Within a few years, he became the most powerful sarkuna in the Hausa Confederation. His general led military campaigns for seven years in the regions to the south. The campaigns attempted to open the trade route to Gwanja on the edge of the forest belt."
• "In 1576 Amina became the undisputed ruler of Zazzau. ... She had walled forts built as area garrisons to consolidate the territory conquered after each campaign. Some of these forts still stand today. Amina subdued the whole area between Zazzau and the Niger and Benue rivers, absorbing the Nupe and Kwararafa states."
• Siege of Old Dongola (in Nubia) in 652 by the Arabs. "The Makurians put up a determined resistance under King Qalidurut and fought the Arabs to a stalemate." leading to a new peace treaty (Baqt) specifying mutual tribute.