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.

 

[Kobold Boots]

My next article is about a similar discussion around Asian cultures, so clearly I haven't learned my lesson.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the topic. However, it's been in vogue for quite some time to chat about social inequality or injustice and given the mix of ages, education levels and backgrounds of people in the community no topic that focuses on culture is going to avoid the discussion of stereotypes and such.

All we can hope for is that each discussion furthers the common good and doesn't repeat itself too much.

Good stuff talien.
KB

 

[Doug McCrae]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]

Looking back on content I've created in the past I would say that I have fallen into the trap of associating black people with animals. For example in a superhero scenario that had about 40 characters there was one black NPC and I made her a Tigra type. On another occasion I used the wereleopard bit as the main antagonists when the PCs visited West Africa. In thinking about this and interrogating my choices I certainly don't think I'm being "deeply thoughtful and intellectual" but I do, quite strongly, feel that it's the right thing to do.

Regarding treating fantasy Viking land in the same way, the big difference is that today in Western society people of Scandinavian heritage are not subject to discrimination due to beliefs about their lack of intelligence and propensity to violence that are rooted in 19th century scientific racism and people of sub-Saharan African heritage are. I don't see awareness of a double standard as itself being a double standard. If it is then it's a positive one.

 

[Celebrim]

The mere act of exploration -- one of the pillars of DnD -- is in itself a sort of "othering" of a culture.

*face palm*

The height of intellectual attainment is not inventing a label and finding boxes to slap it on. I mean, two can play this game:

"The mere act of eating in an ethnic restaurant or visiting a foreign location - one of the pillars of woke society - is in itself a sort of "othering" of a culture. Explorers from afar visit a strange, new land or roam the streets of an exotic city. All of the people, sights, and sounds of this new place are not strange to themselves. They are quite normal in their own view. It is the visitor who finds this "other" culture to be exotic."

Yay, I can spew Sokal word salad too!

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]

Looking back on content I've created in the past I would say that I have fallen into the trap of associating black people with animals.

Then perhaps you should be careful about projecting to much of yourself into things. And maybe you should have led with your confession rather than led with generic accusations.

The smartest man I ever met was a Haitian mathematician. I'd suggest I was projecting him into every dark skinned character I had, except that since I grew up in the Caribbean I've known too many dark skinned people to have any single archetype for how dark skinned people are. Whether that's true of you I wouldn't know, but once again to the point how you are viewing this tells me a lot more about you than it tells me about the content creator, and just maybe people ought to lead with that sort of introspection rather than thinking they are being positive by finding racism in everything they view.

When I run a game, I don't have the slightest interest in your real world prejudices. I've no intention of addressing them directly or by analogy in any of my games. I do want you to understand why the Tumessi hate the Har and the Har hate the Tumessi, and why the sea people have a legitimate gripe against the Concheeri and I don't want you to see any direct commentary on any real world ethnic group because I'm not trying to create a mindless pastiche. I might be making commentary on holding grudges, hatred, and racism, but I'm sure as heck not making commentary on Irish, Africans, or English colonialism because none of that history has any bearing on my imagined world and if you are bring that into my game you are missing the freaking point and the problem is in you, not me. If I have a story about some marginalized character, I'm probably not making a commentary on black/white relations. I'm probably making commentary about how we as humans find any excuse to hate and marginalize people using whatever convenient differences are to hand, so that picking on a kid with glasses is at it's root exactly the same behavior as genocidal acts against an entire ethnic group, and the only real functional differences is how aware we may be of our hatred in one case or the other because socially we've ranked hatred as more or less acceptable depending on who we target it at. I'm probably making commentary on the fact that a person living today who ranks hatred on the basis of skin color as the worst sort of hatred, feels self-satisfied in critiquing people living in the past as more hateful than he is back when hatred on the basis of skin color was treated as lesser sort of hatred, and pays no attention to his own behavior toward other people now that the scales have been shuffled temporarily.

 

[Mallus]

My next article is about a similar discussion around Asian cultures, so clearly I haven't learned my lesson.

Go for it! If nothing else, I'll be on somewhat more solid ground when I chime in.

(Well, not really - my proper-shaped eyes notwithstanding, culturally I'm from New Jersey. Perhaps your next next article could discuss shopping malls and Bruce Springsteen?)

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Fantasy can be a softer way to show wrong things what need to be fixed, but also to show our true potential to do fabulous things if we propose it and we work hard for that. We can use fiction to show a better future where we have learnt from past mistakes, to forgive, trust each other again, reconcile and to get the right balance between self-cricitism and faith in oneself.

We agree we have to take care to try avoid false stereotipes to make a fool like that sad example of the scene in Sevilla(Spain) from "Impossible Mission II".

If you want to talk about horrible things in the History and past ages, you should remember this: they key is the respect for the human dignity, without this, reporting machismo(male chauvinism), racism or homophobia isn't enough. If we don't respect human dignity then we will be like the characters from "Games of Thrones" (Joffrey Baratheon* with a crossbow killing Ros or Sansa Stark sending his "wives" to devour her "ex-husband" Ramsay Bolton). If you try write fiction to report religious fanatism from previous ages, you may find somebody who complains you never report atheists have killed more in shorter times (1793-94 French Terror or Mao's cultural revolution, for example). If you talk about Torquemada, but you don't use internet to try help Asia Bibi (do you know who is her?) then you are a hypocrite.

About racism I dare to say something, and I hope to be enough polite and politically correct: Thousands years ago the Latins were the supreme power, and the blue-eyed and blond-haired from North Europe the "third world". (Life takes many turns) Once I read Jew community in the first Century was until the 10% of the population of the Roman Empire (the gentiles were suffering a brutal demographic crisis). After the fall of the Roman empire, the Visigoths arrived to Spain, my land, "without green cards", and the relation with Hispanolatins wasn't good. Both communities had got differen legal codes, and mixed marriage was forbiden, but step by step this last one started to be more allowed, and after Hispanogoths and Hispanolatins become one folk, the Spanish. Who cares now about Normands vs Saxons in the Robin Hood's age? In Coria del Rio, a Spanish town near Sevilla there is a surname, Japon, by Christian Japanese ancestors who came here in the XVII century. If we are self-critical then we may be exigent with the others, but with a right assertive tone, without showing contempt nor hostility. And we would save a lot of troubles if we start to see the rest of people like the future ancestors of your descendent's "consuegros" (parents in law of your children). If you want to criticice, do it like they were members of your own family, to correct, not to humilliate.

And if you really want to convice then do remember you can't if the other doesn't trust you because you are too agresive, you don't listen(making an effort to understand his point of view) and disrespected him. Don't try to force them to give you the reason. If you want use the fiction to report the wrong things in the real life, then be enough polite and subtle. Don't "scare away customers" or they will not keep listening you.

* The character Joffrey Baratheon from "Game of Thrones" is maybe one of the best examples to explain Voltaire's words "I would not wish to have to deal with an atheist prince, who would find it to his interest to have me ground to powder in a mortar: I should be quite sure of being ground to powder. If I were a sovereign, I would not wish to have to deal with atheist courtiers, whose interest it would be to poison me: I should have to be taking antidotes every day. It is therefore absolutely necessary for princes and for peoples, that the idea of a Supreme Being, creator, ruler, rewarder, revenger, shall be deeply engraved in people's minds" .

 

[Mallus]

I'd much rather get back to Fantasy Africa, but the fact that the discussion of Fantasy Africa included terms like "Othering" before anyone in the thread had othered anyone, and indeed accused of all things the movie "Black Panther" of "othering" suggests that the thread was doomed in the first place.

Yeah, "othering" is one of those terms that orignally came from academic writing (it dates back to Edward Said, right?), but its journey to popular usage has been a long and arduous one, and having spent a decade or so wandering through the wilderness of online culture(s) any useful meaning it had has been pretty thoroughly bleached out.

That said, this thread is going fairly well for the subject matter.

So, Wakanda... I think it could offer a useful blueprint of sorts for the treatment of non-Western cultures in gaming. Wakanda was created in the 1960s by two Jewish guys from New York City and reinterpreted in 2018 by Black American artists employing (mostly) a global Black cast, whose resulting film has become a monster worldwide success. The creative team behind Black Panther didn't bury or excise the original work by the two White nerdy guys, they built out of it, made it their own, offered a dazzling, more personal, vision of futuristic Blackness to proudly stand beside all the other dizzying futures that wear much paler faces.

Not a bad thing for future D&D materials to try an emulate. Find some more diverse artists to add to the foundation provided by Gygax and Tolkien and Howard (hell, and Lovecraft) et al.

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, "othering" is one of those terms that orignally came from academic writing (it dates back to Edward Said, right?), but its journey to popular usage has been a long and arduous one, and having spent a decade or so wandering through the wilderness of online culture(s) any useful meaning it had has been pretty thoroughly bleached out.

Even if I concede it had useful meaning at the beginning. I understand there might be some value at calling out some pattern of behavior, but the problem with any label is that quite soon it simplifies away all the individuality and particulars of the thing it labels. Worse, it simplifies the operation of the mind, so that soon you are impoverished by the labels and slapping them on things that they don't fit.

Wakanda isn't an example of "othering". There might be a pattern there to tease out, but it isn't the pattern of "othering". It might be possible for exploration in an RPG to act as "othering", but it isn't inherently othering to explore other cultures or to borrow ideas and images from them. If it is, we are rather doomed, since everything we do will be racism - which I suppose some have their own reasons for wanting to claim.

So, Wakanda... I think it could offer a useful blueprint of sorts for the treatment of non-Western cultures in gaming.

Sure. A blueprint. Not the only blueprint but a useful one. First it requires us to not be looking for a flaw in it and notice the value it could have. We could just as easily write outraged essays about how it is just Blaxploitation, and that the Black Panther is a white guys version of black hero that has created a simplified narrative for looking at race relations and so and so forth. Those things are true, but so what? We could write endless things about division and hate and if we weren't careful, all we'd do is multiply division and hatred. Or we could just decide nothing is ever going to be perfect and a comic book or an RPG can't possibly heal all the harms of the past or address them, but coming together is a whole lot better than finding reasons to be angry or hateful.

Someone needs a hero that looks like them. Fine, I'm good with that. I think it's a good first step. I would like that we learn to identify ourselves with something less superficial than looks, but I realize that we have a lot of biology to overcome and that's not easy. I would like that we learn that if you are white, you aren't actually especially closer to earning the honor of Beethoven, Emanuel Kant, or Isaac Newton than you would be if you were black, because you in fact didn't do any of those things and you can't claim especial honor on account of someone long dead and any puffed up pride you have on account of that is a vice and ridiculous. I'd like that we learn that if your skin is dark you are no less the heir of a bunch of dead white guys than you would be with a different color, and that you don't need to look back at history trying to find someone black to take pride because you didn't do those things either, and it's just the mirror of the same vanity that puffs up some slacker in a basement that his skin happens to be the same color as Thomas Edison even though he blew off the algebra homework. And I'd like that we define ourselves and say "who we are" as you just did, not by some false past that you aren't a part of, but by what's around us now and what you plan to do about it.

But that's asking a lot, I know.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

One of the conclusions I've come to is that a key way to ensure one culture isn't a mishmash of stereotypes is just to have more than one. I.e., more than one "Asian" culture and more than one "African" culture goes a long way to ensuring more nuance. Most fantasy worlds that started out Eurocentric suffer from this (my own world included!) because that's what the authors were familiar with. But fantasy RPG universes are now played by people all over the world, so the discrepancy is more noticeable than it might have been in the past.

Does the Forgotten Realms adequately portray all the cultures of Europe? The Red Wizards of Thay don't depict Poland or Russia, Comyr isn't Germany. I suppose Waterdeep would be the equivalent to Paris? What do you think? What if I wanted to transpose the Adventure Storm King's Thunder to a fantasy version of Europe. Lets say this map of Europe:

This is a hex map of Europe showing various terrain types, and cities with their names in native languages. One flaw is the hex numbers aren't very clear, also the scale is 50 kilometers to a hex, a big problem since they didn't have kilometers in the 12th. How do I know its the 12th century? The label says "ADMC" AD stands for Anno Domini, meaning "The Year of our Lord" in Latin, and "MC" is a roman numeral 'M' means 1000 and 'C' after it means you add 100 to get the year 1100 AD. I am somewhat familiar with the political situation in Europe at around 1100 AD, this is 34 years after William conquered Britain. This period is what's known as the Early Renaissance. the question is where to you put the non-human races. Dwarves can live in the Carpathian Mountains. Elves can live in the Black Forest of Germany and the Ardens, Perhaps Finland would be a good home for them. Gnomes live in a forest. Halflings, I'm not so sure. Orcs can come from the mountains or Norway. Each addition changes Europe somewhat. What you refer to as Africa is sub-Saharan Africa, the northern part is an Arab culture, I think they did a good job of depicting Eastern cultures such as China and Japan.

 

[Celebrim]

Personally, I'm not a fan of pastiche. I find pastiche more likely to insult and much more grossly limiting than the practice of mythopoeia. I do not want to see a France, England, Korea, and Japan on a fantasy map. If I see an Africa on a map, I don't want to see strictly a pastiche of each and every real world tribe and linguistic group having a history that oddly manages to mirror that of our own world despite not only different "rolls of the dice", but hugely different histories, physical laws, and governing principles.

If you want to see what I think doing it wrong looks like, look at Maztica. I saw that not because I find the work especially immoral or racist or anything, but because I find it especially uncreative. I don't want to see a 'new world' in a universe with teleportation and a hundred active deities. If I see an Incan Empire on the map, I want to see it as it might have been in a whole other world - the good and the bad - and not tied to our stereotypes regarding a region past or present. I don't even want to see it done 'realistically'. I don't want to hear about how the Incans didn't have metalworking any more than I want to hear how potatoes weren't known in England in the middle ages, because my world isn't meant to have that one to one and onto relation to this reality but to be something I imagined as if in a dream.

I'm shameless about mish-mashing everything. All that I ask is you see in any that resembles the real world the passionate way I collect facts and history and artifacts of culture, and delight in it all with a childish glee and wonder. I won't drop France on the map unless I can also squeeze India into it, and I would not say whether Venice, Portugal or England more informs a maritime power. I'm trying to have fun. The last thing I need is someone saying, "But that's not how you prepare paella!" I probably know that. I mean no insult by having it done differently in some mish-mash of Azerbaijan and Argentina, with Rakshas and cowboys and whatever else I threw in on a whim.