As I endeavor to get my feet wet in African culture and history, one recurring theme keeps (metaphorically) stepping forward and glaring at me – understanding African history from an African perspective. Put in other words and quoting from my third Ethiopia history post, “tell the stories the people you’re talking about want told.”  This is of course easier said than done and I don’t mean to claim any sort of mastery over the concept but few things worth doing are easy.

As a Euro-originated culture, we like to focus on the grand movements of history. We pay homage to the leaders of nations and their wars. We think of “important” history as a linear string of causal events. We teach our children first and foremost the dates when things happened and who the major players were. Interpreting history – learning wisdom from it – is secondary to the facts and perhaps considered a more advanced skill. One reason (among several) that African history can be so hard to get a hold of is that we in the West (North?) are looking for information the native peoples weren’t as excited about and completely ignoring the history they tell each other all the time – folktales. From the African perspective, we have it all backward. The stories themselves as cultural touchstones and the lessons they teach are what is important; the facts and people less so.  Imagine our confusion if modern African scholars showed up here in the U.S. looking to study us but rather than opening textbooks the way we would prepare for, they hit up TVTropes!

Thus while I do still plan on doing some little report post on the history of the Congo, I feel like it’s maybe more appropriate to show some Congolese folktales instead and how they can be bits of gameable culture for us to draw on. Since these folktales are so often oral traditions and not always easy to track down in English, we need to feel comfortable relying on our own “unofficial sources” for information. (Remember what I said about Africa and decentralization?) Today’s story is from Melvin Burgess – someone who went to the Congo a couple years back and put up a blog recounting stories he heard. I will abridge the story below and encourage you to read the long account here.

A man and his wife own three dogs – two large strong dogs and one small weak one. The man went to pick some special fruit for his pregnant wife and ended up accidentally harvesting from a village of witches. The witches capture the couple and are going to eat them. In his desperation, the man calls out for their dogs to come save them.  The dogs hear from their home village, break out of their chains and come running to help. The two big strong dogs are obviously a threat and are held up by the witches while the little weak one sneaks through and bites the witch chef’s toe, allowing the couple to run away in the ensuing fight. The big dogs kill most of the witches, but it’s again the little dog who saves the day by finding the last hiding witch. From that day on, everyone in the couple’s village could get all the fruit they needed.

Let’s find some games in here. First, there’s the perspective of the dogs. I could have sworn there was a “Dog: the RPG” game somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find was It’s a Dog’s Life and John Wick’s Cat RPG (the latter courtesy of Filamena Young).  Brave animals on a mission to save their people? Done! Second, the perspective of the hidden witch. Witches in Congolese folklore are rather tragic figures and not entirely voluntary. (The same website has several posts about witch folklore that, fair warning, are heartbreaking) How about My Life With Master as young witches trying to break free and return to normal life? It’s not a game for everyone necessarily but it will get you out of the  implied eastern European setting. In splitting up the various characters of the story among a group and expanding the setting a little, you could get a good In A Wicked Age game going as well. It has a lot of the mythic feel that makes for good folktale roleplaying.

In Part I, we talked a little about the far-ancient  times of Ethiopia – Kush, Kerma and D’mt. Let’s jump forward now to the beginning of the Common Era.

I Don’t Wanna Aksum! You Go Aksum!

Around 100 C.E., a kingdom arose out of the city of Aksum (or Axum) which is fairly close to the ancient D’mt. The relationship between Aksum and D’mt is unknown. Aksum may also have subsumed or brought down the similarly formidable Meroë (Kush) state in what is currently Sudan. Whatever its origins, Aksum grew to be a nation that played in the same league as Rome, Persia, India and China.

Aksum gained power not by having a large spread of land like its peers, but by controlling the all-important waterways at the south end of the Red Sea. It engaged in some military land conquest to the west, but focused more of those efforts into the southern part of Arabia (Yemen). It usually left local leaders in power and simply demanded tribute instead. Aksum sold exotic goods such as ivory, spices, and gems as well as utility materials like salt and animals hide which, combined with the tributes, made it a commercial empire first and foremost.

Aksum’s urban structure and cosmopolitan ambiance would be at least somewhat familiar to us now were we to go back in time and visit. In the center of the city was a collection of elite housing constructed according to a standard plan; staircases from smaller wings of each large abode led up to a central elevated pavilion. Immediately surrounding the elite housing were common houses of mud and stone. In each direction there was a graveyard, with the southern location being the resting place of royalty. The nothern location also contained the various temples and churches. The elite houses surrounded a central plaza which could have served as a marketplace. No civil administration buildings have been discovered yet or are mentioned by ancient writers whose texts we have, but a number of thrones and intricately carved pillars dot the city. The streets in the center are laid out in a grid and are decorated with small statues. The further you stray from the center, the more haphazard the layout becomes.

During its 600 years of power Aksum would adopt some Greek gods, convert to Christianity and offer shelter to Mohammed. It welcomed Roman, Indian and Arab traders. The Chinese might have known it as Huang-Chi; again, insufficient evidence is available to say with certainty. In the 700s, Persia forcibly took over its holdings in southern Arabia and thus devoid of its major commercial advantage, Aksum simply shrunk back into obscurity. An electronic copy of a book specifically about the history and culture of Aksum can be found by clicking here.

A city this big and wealthy is just begging for some heist action. A ship loaded for India with salt and spices has its cargo seized. The thieves are suspected to come from one of the smaller states chafing under Aksum’s rule, maybe Qataban or Meroë. The king offers freedom to a group of imprisoned political rebels if they can locate the whereabouts of the goods and all of a sudden you’re playing Leverage. From the merchant’s perspective, GUMSHOE might work as well. For a different feel completely, the first Christian king Ezana is about to be coronated in about 320 C.E. when a wild party lets loose led by some local version of the Egyptian Hathor or the Yoruba Shango. Get out your copy of the old Bacchanal (not the one with the cards – it’s a bit too art Greco), reskin a few things and shake what your Maker gave you!

We’re going to do a short series of Historical Reference posts this month. They are intended to be essentially elevator pitches for games in Afrocentric settings.  Before going further, though, we should set some ground rule understandings.

Take “Historical” with a grain of salt or twenty. D&D is not a historically accurate representation of medieval Europe and neither will our elevator pitches here be strongly historically accurate. Until ‘very recently’ in the timescale of human existence, “history” tends to come to us through a small number of channels. These channels, being human in origin, can’t help but come from a certain perspective (some would say bias).  Thus “history” tends to be skewed in favor of some and against others.  Furthermore, history is full of really uncomfortable and inhumane things. While we do need to look at those things full in the face when managing our real world, we don’t need to bring them into our fictional worlds. We want to make a space in our games where everyone can feel safe and have fun escaping from that real world for a while. Doing so usually means leaving behind some ‘historical accuracy.’ (Yes, games like Steal Away Jordan or Dog Eat Dog are intended to address social justice issues. Those will be the exception rather than the rule.)

Another understanding is that “Ethiopia” is kind of a dodgy term. What we consider Ethiopia by current political boundaries is not what ancient writers may have deemed “Ethiopia.” For the purpose of this post, we’re considering “Ethiopia” to be the region of land surrounding the Red Sea and south of Egypt – what we would think of today as Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and some of Somalia. Disclaimers out of the way, let’s pitch some games!

Kingdom of D’mt

The Egyptians called the region we’re addressing today Punt, which is sometimes rendered Pwenet or Pwene depending on who’s translating. Within the land of Punt were several nations, most notably Kush (ancient Nubia) and Kerma. Kerma is currently the oldest known human civilization, going back to at least 2200 B.C. and maybe as far back as 3,000 B.C. Kerma had walled cities, archers and elaborate funeral ritual, the equal of classical Egypt or Mesopotamia. It was eventually conquered and subsumed into Egypt. Kush arrived on the scene somewhat later, but fared better. Kush is known to have been ruled mostly by women (called Kandakes, the base for our name Candace) when independent and by men on the many occasions when Egypt would conquer it. Kush’s military may have been primarily female and the nation may also have employed a sort of loose communism, though there is not enough evidence to state either way on those ideas definitively at the moment.  Kush even managed to conquer Egypt at one point and install its own line of Pharaohs in a manner similar to the Mongol Great Yuan Dynasty of China.

‘Ta Netjeru’, meaning  ”land of (the) god,” is another name for Punt. The name has at least two roots. First, the region produced large quanitites of gold, incense, wood and ivory to be used in religious ceremony. Second, unlike Egypt, much of Punt (and the African continent in general) has an ancient tradition of monotheism mixed with ancestor worship and spirits of nature.  There is a creator god who is somehow ultimately responsible for making everything and then some number of various lesser beings serve that god. Exactly who this god is, his name, and what the servants are called vary wildly from culture to culture. It’s all very decentralized.

D’mt was a small kingdom in Punt along the coast of what we now call Eritrea just north of the Bab-al-Mendeb (strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden). It is not to be confused with the medieval kingdom of Damot, which is probably a revival of the old name. D’mt seems to have been founded around 1000 B.C. and is gone by 400 B.C. with no good explanation as to what happened and the names of only four of its kings. That shrouded past makes D’mt an excellent place to put a game. We can safely assume D’mt was as advanced as Kush or Kerma, but the lack of current excavations frees us from canonical history and invites speculation as to its demise.

Considering D’mt’s proximity to polytheistic Egypt and Sabaea (modern Yemen), this time and place looks absolutely ripe for a Mythender game. D’mt is being attacked by Egypt via Kush to the north. There is a corrupting influence among the spirits and Egypt is taking advantage of that corruption to spread its borders. Players assume the role of empowered mortals (priests, medicine-masters, etc) to defeat the corrupted Egyptian “deities” but must be careful lest they too fall to corruption. Resist the urge to make the game an evangelizing mission to teach the Egyptians “the right god(s)” – religious evangelism as we know it is not a pursuit that these cultures would have engaged in.  It’s a political struggle couched in mythic terms.  Players looking for local mythological references on which to base their characters might look to Holawaka or the Blemmyes. EthopianFolklore.com has a few dozen folktales as well that players might use as hooks. The hyena in particular is an important figure.

Folks have really been getting into the spirit of RPG Blogging for Black History Month.  I wanted to do a quick roundup of interesting links, knowing that there will be plenty more coming!

• Milton Davis pointed me to an interesting piece he wrote on pre-colonial Sudan.
• Sarah Darkmagic covered interesting personalities like Zora Neale Hurston and Edna Adan Ismai
• Jeremy Morgan did a Fate Core version of Ryven’s SotC Ibn Battuta writeup.
• Jeremy also did a write up for Ashanti religion. This is definitely ripe for use in a game world.
• Daniel Solis talked about a Mansa Musa board game that I’d like to try.
• Charles Saunders does a write up of the Ki-Khanga anthology. This anthology ties into an RPG currently in playtest mode.
• On February 16th I will be part of the Indie+ panel “Escaping the Legacy” (Google Hangouts at 7 PM EST), which is about breaking roleplaying games away from the typical Eurocentric model. The rest of the panel is full of awesome people like Emily Care Boss, Meguey Baker, Richard Rogers (moderator), and Stacey Dellorfano.  Come check it out, and if you can’t I’m sure it will be recorded.
• Last, I wanted to tell you about Wagadu: Home of Sword and Soul.  This a tight knit community of fans and creators of Sword & Soul.  I’ve been hanging there and the people are really awesome. It’s a nice change from many RPG forums where I’ve felt a little off, especially as a PoC.  All are welcome, not only PoC, so sign up and tell them we sent you!

Anything interesting that I’ve missed?  If so, let me know in the comments.