When Fantasy Meets Africa

The roaring success of the recent Black Panther film is another sign that fantasy worlds are changing. The fictional African country of Wakanda as portrayed in Marvel comic books has been isolated and stagnant, a common problem with "Othering" of non-white cultures. The plot of the film addresses its isolationist past and in doing so, blazes a trail for other fantasy universes in how they portray African-like nations.

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[h=3]Marvel Deals With its "Other"[/h]Othering is a process in which other cultures are viewed through a biased lens of exoticism and isolationism. These cultures are not integrated into the world but are rather static, often amalgamating a region's various cultures into one homogeneous mass. The culture may be portrayed as never having advanced beyond what defines it as exotic.

Any world creation will likely be influence by the beliefs of the time, and many fantasy worlds -- Marvel's superhero universe included -- paint different cultures with broad strokes for white audiences as a form of shorthand. This is how we got Wakanda as a technologically-advanced culture that never fully engaged with the horrors of war that have rocked the world at large. As Nate Jones puts it:

It refuses to trade with other nations, though as one line in the movie makes clear, Wakandans are still able to consume American memes. As we see in a Western television broadcast in the movie, Wakanda is able to get away with this by masquerading as an impoverished third-world country, and since the country’s leadership refuses to take international aid, the rest of the world doesn’t ask too many questions.

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The plot of Black Panther addresses this isolationism -- a byproduct of "othering" Wakanda as a a fictional nation in Africa -- head on, and makes it clear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe plans to integrate Wakanda into its narrative like any other nation. It's a bold choice that will likely change the static nature of Wakanda forever. Role-playing games face a similar dilemma.
[h=3]RPGs and Africa[/h]There hasn't been a great track record in nuanced representation of African nations in tabletop role-playing games. G.A. Barber uses Rifts Africa by Palladium as an example:

...with a decided lack of POC in the art, and the entire continent serves as a place for non-Africans to adventure in. There are 67 interior pictures in Rifts Africa, of which 54 depict non-Africans or landscape, and 13 depict Africans. The first picture with Africans in it has them acting as porters for a white game hunter. Four of the pictures (just under 25% of the pictures depicting Africans) depict Africans as monsters. None of the pictures show Africans using modern or futuristic technology or weapons, none of them are of Africans fighting monsters or “looking cool”. In a single book, ostensibly about Africa, only 19% of the pictures show Africans (omission), and the few depictions of them make it clear they are there as set dressing and nothing more (stereotypes and limited roles).

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Dungeons & Dragons has slowly, steadily, been addressing this issue. Fifth Edition has made efforts to be more inclusive, and that reflects in the diversity of character art. The lead image for the human race in the Player's Handbook is of a black woman. And yet, D&D still struggles with its broad strokes representation of African nations, as the controversy over the depiction of Chult demonstrates in Tomb of Annihilation:

Its point of inspiration is a campaign setting that, for years, has been written off as tone-deaf. The new adventure draws on D&D co-creator Gary Gygax’s adventure Tomb of Horrors and combines that with source material detailing Chult, a jungle peninsula first conceived of in a 1992 novel called The Ring of Winter, in which an adventurer travels to Chult’s dinosaur-filled wilderness seeking the eponymous artifact...The canonical Chultan peninsula finally congealed in a 1993 campaign setting as a dinosaur-infested jungle where heat wiped out even the strongest adventurers and insects carried fatal diseases. Reptilian races and undead skeletons dominate the land and humans live in tribal clusters and clans. Its major city, Mezro, “rivals some of the most ‘civilized’ population centers in Faerun,” the setting reads. Slavery is mentioned about 40 times. In D&D’s 3rd edition, it’s written that Chultan priest-kings worship “strange deities” in the city of Mezro. In D&D’s 4th edition, Chult is located on what’s called the “Savage Coast.” It’s said there that the city of Port Nyanzaru is controlled by foreign traders who often must defend against pirates. Mezro has collapsed. It just sank into the abyss. What remains is this: “Human civilization is virtually nonexistent here, though an Amnian colony and a port sponsored by Baldur’s Gate cling to the northern coasts, and a few tribes—some noble savages, others depraved cannibals—roam the interior.”

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Tomb of Annihilation works hard to create a more comprehensive African culture in Chult, but it may suffer from not enough nuance:

While many players I talked to enjoyed how the history and political structures of Chult were expanded in Tomb of Annihilation (and enjoyed the adventure’s plot generally), they were still unimpressed by its execution. Its setting is an amalgamation of African cultures, a trope frequent in 20th century media that flattens the dimensionality of human experiences on the continent, which contains hundreds of ethnic groups. There are nods to West African voodoo, Southern African click-based Khoisan languages, East African attire (like Kenyan kofia hats) and the jungle climate of Central Africa. Its fantasy setting dissolves “Africa” into an all-in-one cultural stew that comes off as a little detached, sources I interviewed said.

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Is it possible to depict a more nuanced fantasy Africa? Nyambe: African Adventures for 3.5 D&D, by Christopher Dolunt, offers some hope:

My motivation for creating Nyambe was simple. Africa was a major part of the Earth that has little or no representation in fantasy literature, let alone RPGs. When it does appear, it usually follows the pulp fiction model: steaming jungles, bloodthirsty cannibals, and dark gods long forgotten by the civilized races. Of course, historical Africa was nothing like that, so my goal for Nyambe was to create a fantasy version of Africa based on the actual history and mythology of Africa, rather than previous fantasy depictions. So, I went about taking snippets of history or myth, and twisting them, adding fantasy elements or changing specifics to make them fit into an OGL world.

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[h=3]Now What?[/h]Wizards of the Coast made considerable strides in increasing D&D's diverse representation and transitioning Chult from conquered land to fantasy nation, but there's still work to do. As more people of color play D&D, the game will need to change to accommodate its players' diverse views. With Black Panther leading the way, here's hoping future game designers will take note.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[Hussar]

My grandfather never had slaves, never exploited blacks, worked hard, saved lives, and made the world a better place.

So, you owe my grandfather money, then.

Funnily enough, that's true of my grandfather as well. He was an Air Force officer in the Canadian Forces.

Something no non-white non-male could be at the time.

Even people who can claim to have worked hard, saved lives and made the world a better place, still probably benefited from racism.

 

[terraleon]

Thanks for this article.

Existing Sub-Saharan African-inspired cultures in the D&D Multiverse:

There is Garund, from Paizo.

And Southlands, from Kobold Press. I'm close with the authors, I know they put in a lot of research.

 

[terraleon]

The sub-Saharan kingdom of Kush rose about the same time as the Greek Dark Ages- @1000 BCE- hardly “late”.

Kush isn't really sub-Saharan. It's between Ethiopia (or what is usually called "Sheba" in that time period) and Egypt. It's kind of Sahara-parallel.

 

[Sunseeker]

My grandfather never had slaves, never exploited blacks, worked hard, saved lives, and made the world a better place.

So, you owe my grandfather money, then.

Wooooooosh!
My point ----------------------->
Your head.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Kush isn't really sub-Saharan. It's between Ethiopia (or what is usually called "Sheba" in that time period) and Egypt. It's kind of Sahara-parallel.

Just looking at the map, Kush was located sort of where Sudan is now- a bit south of Egypt. A good portion of its northern region was partly in the Sahara. Much of its southern region was below the Sahara. Do a search for “ancient sub-Saharan” cultures, and it pops up as one of the first.

So I’ll stick with my response.

I’ll also mention that the kingdom of Punt (@2500BCE) could be considered here but for the fact we don’t know exactly where it was. They traded with the Egyptians, but the Egyptians didn’t do us the favor of saying where they were located. Such has led to scholars putting it all over the map, including the Arabian Peninsula.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

The sub-Saharan kingdom of Kush rose about the same time as the Greek Dark Ages- @1000 BCE- hardly “late”.

Funny, I've never heard the Kingdom of Kush mentioned in Social Studies, World civilization class. There was Sumer, there was Babylon, there were the Egyptians and their pyramids, there was Persia, the Ancient Greeks, China, Alexander's Empire, there was the Roman Republic, The Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance in Europe, there was Galileo and his observations of mountains on the Moon. The Chinese invented gunpowder. Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic and discovered two new continents, Magellan sailed around the World. James Cook discovered Australia, and Antarctica. The Spaniards and he Portuguese conquered Central and South America. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain The American Revolution led to the establishment of the Worlds most successful Democratic Republic, so I wonder why the Kingdom of Kush was not mentioned in all of this, was it an oversight? What were the great accomplishments of that kingdom which were of note in a World History class?

There was a reason why Africa was called "the Dark Continent" and that had nothing to do with skin color. Africa was "explored" by Europeans. The native Africans didn't have good maps of their continent, the Europeans had to draw maps from their explorations to fill in the blank areas. Africa is where the human race began, it is the oldest continually inhabited continent by humans on the planet Earth, yet we were still exploring parts of it and filling in blank areas on our map in the 19th century. "Doctor Livingston I presume!" Are you saying that all of this is wrong?

Egypt was a great civilization, it build impressive monuments such as the Pyramids, they built temples with columns, they had mathematicians, and they studied the stars so they could predict when the Nile would flood. But the Egyptians were North Africans. Hannibal was also a North African, that gave the Romans a lot of trouble. Alexandria, in Egypt was a great center of learning and the home of many philosophers an mathematicians, but most of Africa's civilizations that I heard about were from North Africa. Why do you suppose the Kingdom of Kush was not covered in this World civilizations class? Was it a conspiracy?

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Othering is a problem, but Wakanda is the opposite of othering.

As a matter of pure history, African culture collapsed in the West's middle ages, in part owing to desertification as the Sahara entered into a expansion phase and swallowed the once fertile farmland that supported the African empires. The result was a hodge-podge of decaying petty kingdoms that never engaged in anything like the miracle of the Northern European renaissance and never produced a large body of literature and exactly zero science. The sub-Saharan African cultures had themselves never advanced much past early iron age culture, and so were locked in a cultural paradigm roughly 3000 years behind the cultures of Europe and the Middle and Far East. Besides which, isolated by distance and the Sahara desert, these cultures never truly interacted with any of the big three advanced cultural centers, and were largely known only through limited contact with coastal trading cultures (often through Arabic intermediaries). As such, the reality of the world was that Africa was largely unknown in Europe, Persia, India, and China and was equally exotic to all of them. No real African nation was interacting with any of them to any great degree, much less actually exchanging ideas with those cultures in literature, engineering and the sciences. The same could not be said of those cultures themselves, even when they in fact seemed exotic and strange to each other. Note for example how European culture serves much the same role in Japanese anime as Eastern culture serves in Western media. Rome and Han China could be said to be peers, but after the fall of the culturally Phoenician Carthage (itself originally a colonial power) on the extreme northern coast, that could never again be said of any African nation.

Wakanda isn't an attempt to highlight the exotic or unfamiliar nature of Africa. Wakanda is an attempt to make Africa more familiar and less exotic by making it more European in nature. Wakanda is an African nation made less problematic by giving it institutions that would be completely familiar to any European. Wakanda is creating a fictional African peer of the traditional Western nations with technological, scientific, social, and artistic achievements equivalent too or greater than European achievements. Wakanda is in many ways the Africa that Europeans wish existed and exist within European fantasies about Africa. It's not othering at all. It's the yearning for an African peer that would make relating to Africa less uncomfortable. It's isolationist precisely because only isolation could explain the complete lack of historical impact such a nation would otherwise have on history. The reality is, no such nation exists.

All the complaints about portrayals of Africa made in the original essay reflect the discomfort of relating to Africa as it actually is and has been, and the general preference people have for a fictional Africa with European governmental norms, European technology, and European prosperity. It would be much easier if the reality of Africa was Eddie Murphy's 'Zamunda' in 'Coming to America', or Maldonia as portrayed in 'The Princess and the Frog' and African nations were basically wealthy European style monarchies differing only by the skin color of the aristocracy and the fact the king had some animal skin draped over his shoulder.

And we've had threads before where people condemned Nyambe as racist. I don't think there is a way to win this game.

I couldn't have said it better myself, the truth is inconvenient for us westerners who are hand wringing over European colonialism.

 

[Imaro]

Funny, I've never heard the Kingdom of Kush mentioned in Social Studies, World civilization class. There was Sumer, there was Babylon, there were the Egyptians and their pyramids, there was Persia, the Ancient Greeks, China, Alexander's Empire, there was the Roman Republic, The Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance in Europe, there was Galileo and his observations of mountains on the Moon. The Chinese invented gunpowder. Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic and discovered two new continents, Magellan sailed around the World. James Cook discovered Australia, and Antarctica. The Spaniards and he Portuguese conquered Central and South America. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain The American Revolution led to the establishment of the Worlds most successful Democratic Republic, so I wonder why the Kingdom of Kush was not mentioned in all of this, was it an oversight? What were the great accomplishments of that kingdom which were of note in a World History class?

There was a reason why Africa was called "the Dark Continent" and that had nothing to do with skin color. Africa was "explored" by Europeans. The native Africans didn't have good maps of their continent, the Europeans had to draw maps from their explorations to fill in the blank areas. Africa is where the human race began, it is the oldest continually inhabited continent by humans on the planet Earth, yet we were still exploring parts of it and filling in blank areas on our map in the 19th century. "Doctor Livingston I presume!" Are you saying that all of this is wrong?

Egypt was a great civilization, it build impressive monuments such as the Pyramids, they built temples with columns, they had mathematicians, and they studied the stars so they could predict when the Nile would flood. But the Egyptians were North Africans. Hannibal was also a North African, that gave the Romans a lot of trouble. Alexandria, in Egypt was a great center of learning and the home of many philosophers an mathematicians, but most of Africa's civilizations that I heard about were from North Africa. Why do you suppose the Kingdom of Kush was not covered in this World civilizations class? Was it a conspiracy?

You not having knowledge of something does not in fact equate to said knowledge not being accurate... just saying, there seems to be quite a few "African history experts" popping up in this thread with suspect assumptions and facts.

Oh and to answer your question about why it wasn't covered in World civilizations class... I would say for similar reasons that the contributions of blacks, hispanics and other minorities in America are rarely if ever taught in Amercan History classes...

 

[Celebrim]

Funny, I've never heard the Kingdom of Kush mentioned in Social Studies, World civilization class.

You might have under the term Nubia. Kush, like Punt, is an unfortunate bit player in the sweep of history. As an underdog, you can root for from the sidelines, and for a while it ruled over Egypt when Egypt started to enter into its final senility. But it got beat down hard by the Assyrians and the Romans, and eventually, cut off from the rest of the world by being a landlocked country and with its neighbors declining in importance it sort of faded away leaving only a legacy of temporary military glory, a few small pyramids, and a lot might have beens. By the time the Islamic colonists/conquerers swept over North Africa it was gone, it's native language already extinct.

If the language could be cracked, it might enter into the history textbooks. But history isn't really the study of the past: it's the study of books. With no primary texts we know how to read, there isn't much anything to put in a history textbook that isn't pure speculation.

In any fantasy version of Africa, I think it would be important to explore those might have beens. A fantasy version of Africa that was just a bit wetter might well have told a very different story. There is no need to adhere to the same sweep of tragedy, and I'm sure most reviewers would rather have a triumphant Africa than one that seems to lose every roll of the dice.

 

[Gradine]

I'm afraid so. I'm finding I can't continue this discussion without really telling you what I think. In as gentle of terms as I can muster, you live in a world of boxes, labels, and stereotypes which you cast around freely and impose on people with arguments from averages and statistics and other crazy nonsense. The thing you most remind me of is shouting with the son of the local head of the KKK over whether average IQ's proved blacks were inferior. I find your whole worldview just as detestable and it has pretty much the same basis.

You say, "I at least can't wrap my head around how stating that black people still find incredible power in the story of Roots in spite of its sordid history can be, in any way, racist."

Well, you might could wrap your head around that more easily if you actually had contemplated what you actually said and what I said in response. Banal generalities like your strawman aren't the problem. I already made it clear that I have no problem with people finding incredible power in the story of roots in spite of its sordid history, so pretending that is what you said is just a really crappy thing to do.

What you actually said was, "I do know many black people who still see within Roots their stories...essentially, black stories told by black artists, and still powerful for that very reason."

You are probably sadly right, but it disgusts me that the test of a story's importance seems not to be truth or quality, but rather the color of the person who told it. You'll happily apply a double standard there and not be the slightest ashamed about it. That's the problem I have here. I don't mind that a story spoke to them. I do mind that the only reason it spoke to them is the color of the author.

Your way will never bring healing, only division. It breeds hatred and contempt and irrationality.



I can't even imagine how you think that.

We have a very different theory on what it means to be human and what it means to be moral. You accused me of not knowing what "identity" means. I think you are quite wrong. We have a fundamental disagreement on its importance. Let's remove all ambiguity from the term. In your world view, a person's identity is the collective groups that they belong to - that is the thing that makes them the same as other people (at least by your agreed upon classification scheme). In Latin, you are talking about identitas. Your view of morality is that we should treat people according to the collective group that they belong to according to your preferred classification scheme (race, gender, sexuality, etc). Ironically, you call this 'not being racist'. My view could not be further away from yours. In my world view, a person's identity is the thing that makes them uniquely themselves - what in the Latin we would call the ipseitas. In my world view, the person's individual ipseitas is vastly more important than their identitas. Only from knowing the ipseitas do we truly know them and treat them as individuals rather than as labels on a box or numbers in a bin. If all we know is their identitas, we might know something about them, but usually not nearly as much as we would think because every identitas is tainted by stereotypes and biases. Only if we see past that can we know the individual. In my world view, the way we treat each other morally is to treat them according to what they deserve as individuals, preferably with the same respect that we would like to be treated with as individuals. We don't lump them into classes and then think we've got enough to go by. We call that in my world prejudice. We call it that, because that is what it is.

<Insert played-out Luke Skywalker quote here>

I was going to be quite done with this, because between the part where you suddenly shifted topics to Alex Haley's plagiarism (I'm not going to bother responding to anything more about this, because I've answered your objections regarding "racism" quite clearly in posts not directly quoting you up-thread, you can go read them on your own) and then accusing me of shifting the goal posts, and then dismissing decades (if not centuries) of research and data clearly detailing historical and still quite current inequities as... what was the term you used... ah, there it is, "crazy nonsense", I no longer have any reason to believe in your sincerity to continue this discussion with actual intellectual honesty. But then, you were willing to extend that same courtesy to me when I clearly hadn't deserved it, and besides, there's so, so, so much wrong with everything I've quoted above, about me, about the people with whom I share an ideology, about your own ideology quite frankly, that I'm going to take one more crack at it. Don't get me wrong, I harbor no illusions I'll be able to dispel your own, but there's some definite mischaracterizations that need to be corrected, and hopefully they'll be illuminating to somebody.

First and foremost, you seen to be laboring under the illusion that you live in a world, or that your worldview is at least promoting, a world without boxes. This is a lie, whether you believe it yourself or not. The "perfect world" you seem to describe is very much a world of boxes. Or to be more accurate, box. See, your worldview possesses one single box. And while you like to pretend that all of humanity is welcome in the box, every bit of empirical reality reveals that that too, is a lie. Because the box was built by you. You define its limits and its borders. And you don't seem to realize how truly exclusionary that box is. And it allows you to declare that everybody outside that box is part of the problem. It smacks of that "color-blindness" nonsense from the 90's, which was supposed to be "anti-racism" but was only able to conceive of "racism" as "talking about race, like at all", and so only extended the courtesy of "color-blindness" to people who conformed to the norm. Which is white. And it allows conversations like "people of color nearly-universally face statistically worse outcomes in our society by nearly every measure that matters and here is the mountains of data and evidence to support that" to be easily dismissed as "crazy nonsense".

And because you don't realize that you've built yourself a box that is exclusionary and isolationist you can't imagine there being a different way of being a box. Because your central thesis seems to rest on two utterly false premises: (a) that every human experience is universal, and (b) that it is impossible to understand or empathize with somebody if you cannot personally share their experiences.

But here's the thing. Yes, the world I live in is full of boxes. Hundredes of thousands of millions of boxes. An infinite supply of boxes. But these are not the static, isolated boxes that you live in. They move and interact and merge and split in an infinite array of conflict and celebration and compassion and empathy and learning. Yes, it's chaotic. And yes, it can lead to conflict, and yes, that conflict can even lead to negative outcomes. The current post-wave balkanization of feminism, for instance, has left the movement with little in the way of a cohesive, central ideology, and that has made it easier for enemies of feminism to mis-characterize and demonize it. But these conflicts have a way of creating new ideas and moving... well, movements forward, as they have always done dating at least as far back as the debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

Because while you may treat everyone with respect and as individuals regardless of their identities, and while that is admirable, that is not the way the world currently works or has ever worked. Individual prejudices and systemic inequities still exist, in ample quantities, basically worldwide, and we do not solve them by sticking our heads in the sand pretending that they don't. And we definitely don't solve them by castigating anybody with the audacity to actually speak up out about them.

And here's the thing; despite living in all of our different boxes, we are still able to come together, to celebrate our differences, to understand one another, to empathize with one another, and to share in knowledge and learning and move our conversations forward. Even if we can't necessarily share in the experiences of others. Our very existence proves your central premises wrong.

There's nothing left to really say. I've got a Story Hour recap I've fallen behind on and session planning I've fallen way behind on, and I don't see how there is any way I could more clearly elucidate the points I'm trying to make. Maybe someone else will do a better job of it. Or at least a different job. Which would in itself be worthwhile.