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.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.


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

Africa didn’t “collapse” until colonization.

And it certainly had its share of acedemic development, nor were all sub-Saharan cultures “3000 years behind Europe”, if such a statement even has any meaning.

African cultures had wealthy trade ports, great libraries, and everything else that Europe and Asia had. It just also had cultures that remained (and some few that remain) in a tech level that worked for them, seeing no need for “advancement”.

And then it was colonized by militarily superior forces, stripped of agency, robbed of resources and knowledge, and eventually sold out to predatory international debt masked as “aide”.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

When I first heard the term, it was the term for a particularly vicious sort of plagiarism, where an artist plagiarized the work of another artist and because that artist was a minority the artist doing the copying felt neither the need to site the original artist or to pay him for his work.

I'm fairly comfortable in stating that there is little or no disagreement that that is wrong, and that such actions today would meet universal condemnation and denouncing them would create little controversy.

But I'm also fairly comfortable in stating that that original concept has been misunderstood or ironically appropriated for a concept that depends not on some absolute and easily agreeable notion of what constitutes theft, but on a very vague concept that depends basically on people's feelings. And the problem with that, is that in reality minorities actually aren't all identical and two people in the same minority group can have very different feelings about whether a treatment of their culture was appropriate and respectful. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as collective ownership of culture and no such thing as a spokesperson for that culture that can authorize the release of ideas from the culture, this leaves you in a situation where no matter how accommodating to other viewpoints you try to be, there can always be someone who said you did it wrong.

Not really. Cultural appropriation is when a person outside a culture, usually from a group who benefits either directly or indirectly from that culture’s marginalization, uses that culture’s hallmarks as a costume, or takes them and uses them as if they invented them themselves, and either way it often involves a blatant lack of respect for the context of that cultural element, such as white girls wearing bindi and dreadlocks without any connection to the cultures in which those things are a hell of a lot more than merely fashion.

 

[Imaro]

Not really. Cultural appropriation is when a person outside a culture, usually from a group who benefits either directly or indirectly from that culture’s marginalization, uses that culture’s hallmarks as a costume, or takes them and uses them as if they invented them themselves, and either way it often involves a blatant lack of respect for the context of that cultural element, such as white girls wearing bindi and dreadlocks without any connection to the cultures in which those things are a hell of a lot more than merely fashion.

I just want to thank you for actually understanding what cultural appropriation is. I've seen numerous posters in this very thread claim this or that will be labeled as cultural appropriation when in fact it wouldn't and hasn't been.

 

[Celebrim]

It just also had cultures that remained (and some few that remain) in a tech level that worked for them, seeing no need for “advancement”.

Oh how quaint; someone advancing the myth of the "noble savage". Virtually in all the rest of the world, including the Americas, we see signs of technological progress. But in Africa you believe that they stayed in poverty and disease, not because of disease or desertification or because of linguistic barriers or even because of the lack of high calorie to the acre crops and easily domesticated livestock or any other number of factors that tended to cause stagnation. Instead, you believe that they choose to stay in poverty using primitive technology because that's what made them happy.

And it certainly had its share of academic development...African cultures had wealthy trade ports, great libraries, and everything else that Europe had.

Well, only if you treat 'Africa' as some sort of homogenous whole can you make that statement. In fact, 'African' cultures that had wealthy trade ports and great libraries are confined to a narrow geography and slivers of time, and with one or two exceptions were colonial cultures and not 'African' cultures. If we actually list this stuff, you'll start with Egypt. Now Egypt is amazing. It is so ancient that it managed to have three Dark Ages and three Golden ages while the rest of the world was still learning how to write. But Egypt can't be used to stand for all of 'Africa', and quite notably there has been very little attempt in this thread to show that Egypt has not received detailed, respectful, and 'realistic' treatment in fantasy (because such an attempt would inspire guffaws). Likewise, Carthage was a great city - the peer of Rome and with comparable achievements in the same period. But Carthage and the other similar cities where colonial cities themselves, settled by Phoenicians that had to a certain extent (to use highly anachronistic language) "gone native". Again, no one in this thread is really upset with the lack of representation of Carthage in fantasy gaming. Presenting Carthage in your fantasy game is easy and can be done without controversy. Similar, the great Library of Alexandria and all the learning that took place there was a wonder of the ancient world, and the center of learning in the Mediterranean. But it was also culturally Greek. And sure, the Greeks had inherited much of their learning from Egypt originally, but by the time of Alexandria they'd outgrown Egypt. Similar, there were great libraries across the northern swath of Africa during the period of Islamic colonization, that flourished in the wake of the introduction of Arabic script and the learning brought from the various corners of the Islamic empire. The truth is though, that would tend to get folded into 'Arabian Nights' fantasy representations. The very lack of mention of that in the thread suggests how little we mean by 'Africa' when we think 'North African Islamic Empire during the Islamic Golden Age'. And Ethiopia and the surrounding areas on the horn of Africa developed a flourishing native literary tradition using native script and developing a culture unique to that area, that I would be happy to trace in detail. For now I'll just point out that what makes it unique is that alone Africa, Ethiopia was engaging in cultural appropriation rather than having culture imposed on them by external forces. But all of this in its utter paucity doesn't prove your equivocation. It just proves how desperate you are to equate Africa with Europe, rather than deal with the reality of Africa itself in all of its challenging difficulty.

Africa didn’t “collapse” until colonization.

Which colonization? The arrival of the Mesopotamian people in the lower Nile river valley? The arrival of the Phoenicians along the North African coast? The arrival of the Arab Armies during the age of Islamic imperial expansion? Or the arrival of the Northern Europeans rather late in the game to find those cultures "in a tech level that worked for them"?

 

[Imaro]

Oh how quaint; someone advancing the myth of the "noble savage". Virtually in all the rest of the world, including the Americas, we see signs of technological progress. But in Africa you believe that they stayed in poverty and disease, not because of disease or desertification or because of linguistic barriers or even because of the lack of high calorie to the acre crops and easily domesticated livestock or any other number of factors that tended to cause stagnation. Instead, you believe that they choose to stay in poverty using primitive technology because that's what made them happy.



Well, only if you treat 'Africa' as some sort of homogenous whole can you make that statement. In fact, 'African' cultures that had wealthy trade ports and great libraries are confined to a narrow geography and slivers of time, and with one or two exceptions were colonial cultures and not 'African' cultures. If we actually list this stuff, you'll start with Egypt. Now Egypt is amazing. It is so ancient that it managed to have three Dark Ages and three Golden ages while the rest of the world was still learning how to write. But Egypt can't be used to stand for all of 'Africa', and quite notably there has been very little attempt in this thread to show that Egypt has not received detailed, respectful, and 'realistic' treatment in fantasy (because such an attempt would inspire guffaws). Likewise, Carthage was a great city - the peer of Rome and with comparable achievements in the same period. But Carthage and the other similar cities where colonial cities themselves, settled by Phoenicians that had to a certain extent (to use highly anachronistic language) "gone native". Again, no one in this thread is really upset with the lack of representation of Carthage in fantasy gaming. Presenting Carthage in your fantasy game is easy and can be done without controversy. Similar, the great Library of Alexandria and all the learning that took place there was a wonder of the ancient world, and the center of learning in the Mediterranean. But it was also culturally Greek. And sure, the Greeks had inherited much of their learning from Egypt originally, but by the time of Alexandria they'd outgrown Egypt. Similar, there were great libraries across the northern swath of Africa during the period of Islamic colonization, that flourished in the wake of the introduction of Arabic script and the learning brought from the various corners of the Islamic empire. The truth is though, that would tend to get folded into 'Arabian Nights' fantasy representations. The very lack of mention of that in the thread suggests how little we mean by 'Africa' when we think 'North African Islamic Empire during the Islamic Golden Age'. And Ethiopia and the surrounding areas on the horn of Africa developed a flourishing native literary tradition using native script and developing a culture unique to that area, that I would be happy to trace in detail. For now I'll just point out that what makes it unique is that alone Africa, Ethiopia was engaging in cultural appropriation rather than having culture imposed on them by external forces. But all of this in its utter paucity doesn't prove your equivocation. It just proves how desperate you are to equate Africa with Europe, rather than deal with the reality of Africa itself in all of its challenging difficulty.



Which colonization? The arrival of the Mesopotamian people in the lower Nile river valley? The arrival of the Phoenicians along the North African coast? The arrival of the Arab Armies during the age of Islamic imperial expansion? Or the arrival of the Northern Europeans rather late in the game to find those cultures "in a tech level that worked for them"?

So if you're clearly aware Africa isn't a homogeneous whole... why do you keep making sweeping statements about Africa in general? Especially since you profess such deep knowledge of Africa...

 

[Celebrim]

Not really. Cultural appropriation is when a person outside a culture, usually from a group who benefits either directly or indirectly from that culture’s marginalization, uses that culture’s hallmarks as a costume, or takes them and uses them as if they invented them themselves, and either way it often involves a blatant lack of respect for the context of that cultural element, such as white girls wearing bindi and dreadlocks without any connection to the cultures in which those things are a hell of a lot more than merely fashion.

Yes, I know what you think cultural appropriation is. I just also know you don't realize just how racist and problematic what you just stated actually is. However, solving that problem fortunately doesn't have to happen in order to discuss Africa's representation in gaming, unless you are going to argue that only someone from Africa can do that, in which case we should just close the thread.

 

[Celebrim]

So if you're clearly aware Africa isn't a homogeneous whole... why do you keep making sweeping statements about Africa in general? Especially since you profess such deep knowledge of Africa...

For the same reason that people use terms like 'Africa' and 'Europe' as sweeping generalities; it's convenient.

So backing up, when people use the word 'Africa' they don't mean 'Egypt' unless it is convenient to include Egypt. The word 'Africa' generally first means in the hearer skin color. That's not my fault. I don't like it, but that's how it works. It works that way in part because we've erroneously created classes like 'African American', leading to silliness like journalists referring to dark skinned people in Africa as 'African Americans'. When we say, "African American", we don't mean an immigrant from Africa who wrecked his car in high school by crashing into a Kudo; we sadly mean someone with dark skin. I don't like it, but there it is.

You should see the confusion that happens when a naive fair skinned immigrant from Africa calls himself an "African American", or you should talk to my colleague from Rwanda about the belly laugh he gets from people 200 years removed from the continent and utterly removed from its real culture and languages calling themselves "African Americans". But anyway, that's a tangent.

Consider even the title of this thread "When Fantasy Meets Africa". It's pretty clear that the author doesn't mean "Egypt". Egypt gets the pastiche treatment all the time, more often even than the Norse. He largely means the problematic part of Africa, and particularly the sub-Saharan part, because that's what he discusses and that's what Wakanda is meant to represent in a less uncomfortable manner. That's the part that really challenges and discomforts the modern reader and which is seldom represented, much less represented well, in fantasy gaming.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So if you're clearly aware Africa isn't a homogeneous whole... why do you keep making sweeping statements about Africa in general? Especially since you profess such deep knowledge of Africa...

Lol Acts like they have deep historical knowledge, only seems to know about classical history.

I’m not surprised at all, frankly.

The fact is, Africa had all that Europe or Asia had. Apparently, ancient and medieval Somalia doesn’t exist though?

Eh, if I wanted to deal with dishonest “reversal” and other such rhetorical stratagems, I’d argue on Twitter.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

I think that it fairly arrogant to sit here and be speaking for them. I also find it interesting that suddenly how many are offended matters. Previously it only mattered that some were offended. I note also that when it comes to Norwegians, you are willing to concede that they might have individual opinions and not be a homogenous group. I note that you are here judging whether they have a right to complain and setting up some standards about what a legitimate grievance and a legitimate response is in your opinion, with respect to Norwegians.

My opinion based on some Norwegians I have met, is that most wouldn't give a damn and won't waste their energy being offended about inaccurate portrayals of Vikings, because they are not Vikings today. Actually Vikings in my opinion would think those horned helmets would be silly, but would not be offended by them if people think that is what they wear. Vikings were basically small boat pirates that earned a living by raiding coastal villages and sea ports. Since they go around looting and taking hostages, I don't think a guy in a horned helmet is going to offend them. That is my opinion, but of course that is all we'll get, as we can't ask a real Viking about such matters. If I offended any Vikings, I am sorry!

BTW, thank you Hussar. You are a gift. Whenever you get into a thread, I no longer have to argue my own point of view, as you suitably destroy the opposing view.

Finally, let me say that I notice once again that everyone is more willing to talk about how much of a tragedy it is that Africa is not represented in fantasy literature, or not represented well in fantasy literature, but no one is actually willing to state what a good respectful representation would be that would in fact not be condemned as racist. It's particularly ironic because it's quite clear to me that I'm one of the few people in the thread that has given Africa serious study with an eye toward fantasy D&D and actually understands how the lack of a good fantasy Africa is explained by the near perfect lack of information about historical Africa combined with the fact that any detailed pastiche fantasy Africa would be condemned as racist simply by presenting Africans as iron age tribal animists divided into a thousand often warring ethnic and linguistic groups. Witness for example how appalled people are by the notion of "wereleopards" in a presentation of Africa, and the guilt associated with such a presentation. Never mind that in the real Africa there actually were-people who practiced animagus magic to gain the power of leopards and terrorize their enemies. But we've already established that if I present Africans as they actually thought of themselves, someone is going to call me a racist. So why in the world would I publish anything about Africa? When it comes to Norwegians if I present them wearing bear skins and foaming at the mouth and chewing on their shields before going into battle and in my fantasy giving them the power that they believe this unleashed, I'll be praised for my depth of research and my detailed representation of Norse society in dark ages Europe. But if I do the same thing for Africa, with leopard skin wearing cannibals as they actually were, then I'll be called "as racist AF". Instead, someone will demand that I create a European style "Wakanda" (and probably a bunch of European nations with black skinned people and the superficial color of being African) that never existed to show my respect for Africa. But then if I do that, someone will complain about that as well. Heck, probably just presenting Africans in their historical costume would get me in trouble unless I alter that costume to cater to European sensibilities. It's a no win situation. And if you disagree, the best way to prove me wrong isn't to continue virtue signaling, but actually do the research and write the supplement.

 

[Imaro]

Lol Acts like they have deep historical knowledge, only seems to know about classical history.

I’m not surprised at all, frankly.

The fact is, Africa had all that Europe or Asia had. Apparently, ancient and medieval Somalia doesn’t exist though?

Eh, if I wanted to deal with dishonest “reversal” and other such rhetorical stratagems, I’d argue on Twitter.

I guess the empire of Mali & kingdom of Ghana weren't a thing either... smh.