First I should apologise for a late post; last weekend was very full of family business and I didn’t have a post even started before Sunday night, and then once I had, I realised I’d written the text for a post ahead of the one I’d meant. So that should speed things up this weekend, but what I meant to report first on was this online seminar, which actually fits well with the last post even though the timing was mostly a coincidence. On 28th April 2021 the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds and the Leeds Law School at Leeds Beckett University jointly played virtual host to Tanya DePass and B. Dave Walters for a presentation entitled "Into the Motherlands: creating just and resilient communities". This turns out to have been part of a kind of tour of the Internet that Ms DePass, at least, was doing at that point to boost the attention then being paid to Into the Mother Lands, which the publicity for this paper explained as, "a tabletop role playing game set within a world unmarred by legacies of colonial violence". This sounded unusually geeky for my place of work; I was right then embroiled in this decolonisation initiative and also vaguely interested in gamifying my research for a funding bid that in the end failed. Also, I’ve played a game or two in my past, and we were in the middle of lockdown still and it sometimes seemed like a licence to go to anything at all, since it still didn’t mean leaving the house. So I attended, and it was fascinating.
DePass and Walters had, you see, been trying to write a different world. They had gathered a group of likeminded creators and built themselves a scenario and ruleset in collaboration. Once they had what they wanted, they got a group of people together and turned their playtesting into a TV stream. When they had enough people interested from that, they put together a Kickstarter to turn the thing into a real published game, and this was the phase in which I met the project in this paper. The aim with which DePass and Walters had set out, you see, was to try and capture the fun of rôle-playing games without carrying on board the worse tropes of the fantasy genre about gender and, especially, race. The pair, who did the paper more or less as a duologue, had some very sharp things to say about how those lines usually play out down pale=good or intellectual or magical and dark=bad or physical or monstrous.1 Into the Mother Lands tries to get round that by three means: firstly, it has no limits on the characteristics of the various species that inhabit the world where it’s set, Musalia. Secondly, all the creative work is done by people of colour (the term used in the seminar); and thirdly, all the humans in the game are themselves people of colour who have never known colonialism. As my notes have it, in what is presumably a paraphrase rather than a quote, "framing a world like this lets us carry over the idea that a better world can exist" (Walters), "and avoid the narrative of murder achievements" (DePass). And as aims go that seems fair enough to me.
The Internet Movie Database masthead for the Into the Motherlands</cite< TV stream
The creators apparently found it very hard to get their key concept off the ground in development, however. A lot of the issues were with gameplay and the conflict and tension necessary to drive plots, which now had to be created some other way. The thing that caught the interest of this listening medievalist, though, was the scenario they’d had to imagine in order that this phenomenon, always-free black humans, could be conceptualised in this game, because their answer was medievalism, and there, you see, comes the relevance to the blog. Have you ever heard of Mūsā I, Emperor of Mali?
Mansa Mūsā I depicted in the so-called Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresques, Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, MS Esp. 30, fo. 6, public domain claimed by Wikimedia Commons. The Atlas was made in 1375 CE and he died around 1337, so this is something like contemporary renown.
I had, very dimly, maybe once heard of Mansa Musa, as he is more usually known, but I couldn’t have told you a thing about him at this point. More people probably ought to have heard of him, though. He ruled Mali in the fourteenth century and may have been the wealthiest man the world has ever known. He is most famous for going on hajj to Mecca and distributing so much gold on his journey, particularly during a three-month stay in Cairo, that it caused hyper-inflation and kept the price of gold down for a full decade. There is much much more that could be said about him, too, including that he established something like non-Egyptian Africa’s first university.2 However, here we actually need to focus on his predecessor and brother, Mansa Abū Bakr. Mansa Abū Bakr was interested less in the East and more in what might lie in the West, and equipped an Atlantic expedition to find out, which never returned. Undeterred, he therefore kitted out a more serious one and abdicated to lead it himself, setting up Mūsā in his place. And then off Abū Bakr sailed and what happened to him, no-one knows.3 There were some exciting theories in the 1970s about how this might mean Africans got to the Americas before Europeans did (Vikings not included, of course). I spent a while looking for where these had got to after this seminar, having tripped over them while trying to get more about Mansa Mūsā for the bibliographic mill, and it seems they died on the vine, or more specifically, that they dropped out of academic discourse and into popular discourse while the scholars still interested in this idea preferred to try to leave Africa out of it and focus on Asia instead.4 But DePass and Walters were, less seriously, working in that earlier tradition, because their answer to the question, how do we get a world where free black humans play on equal terms with the other inhabitants? was, in the end: what if Abū Bakr’s expedition was lost because it passed through a wormhole and ended up on a different planet? And thus was Into the Mother Lands given its back-story, and it may not be great history; but the point is, that’s how far out and how far backwards one has to think to unseat the present race dynamic between the ex-or-still-colonial nations and their erstwhile subjects. This struck me quite hard.
Now, shortly after they’d explained this, I had to run off for a meeting with, as it happened, Adam Kosto. I didn’t, therefore, get to hear the discussion, much less contribute to it, though I’m not sure I would have dared. What I also didn’t do, I have to say, is subscribe to the project’s Kickstarter or (because it was funded in 90 minutes) actually get or play the game, though that may not in fact have been possible because the publisher they had in mind part-folded shortly afterwards. (They now have a new one and the game is probably coming out next year.) I didn’t even watch the stream, I’m afraid, but I did keep thinking with it. I also searched up a lot of literature about Mūsā I and precolonial Afro-American contact, as we see in n. 4 below. But mainly what I keep thinking is twofold: on the one hand, how alarming it is that it should even be plausible that to envisage a world in which black is not generally the victim of white, you have to think back six hundred years; but, on the other hand, that this means the world really really does need medievalists. It’s possible it doesn’t need exactly the ones it’s got, but we can work on that, and it would be lovely to think we could have anywhere near as much fun as Tanya DePass and B. Dave Walters seemed to be doing their part of it back in April 2021.
1. Starting reading on this would be Paul B. Sturtevant, "Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre", Race, Racism and the Middle Ages 36 in The Public Medievalist (5 December 2017), online here, which makes it clear it’s not just Dungeons and Dragons.
2. The main primary source for the Cairo story appears to be the Masālik alabṣar fī Mamālik al-amsār of the Mamlūk administrator Ibn Faḍl al-‘Umarī, available as Ibn Faḍl Allāh Šihāb al-Din Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Faḍl Allāh al-‘Umarī, Masālik alabṣar fī Mamālik al-amsār, ed. & transl. Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid, Textes arabes et études islamiques 23 (Le Caire 1958), of which parts are translated into English in Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyá Ibn Faḍl Allâh al-ʿUmarī, Egypt and Syria in the early Mamluk period: an extract from Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-’Umarī’s Masālik al-Abṣār fī Mamālik al-Amṣār, transl. D. S. Richards (Abingdon 2017), but I don’t right now have access to either of these so can’t say where in Fu’ad’s version it occurs or if it does in Richards’s. For Mūsā I more generally, see J. E. G. Sutton, "The African Lords of the Intercontinental Gold Trade Before the Black Death: al-Hasan bin Sulaiman of Kilwa and Mansa Musa of Mali" in Antiquaries Journal Vol. 77 (Cambridge 1997), pp. 221–242, DOI: 10.1017/S000358150007520X. There must be something else but that’s what I know about. I mean, there’s always D. T. Niane, "Mali and the second Mandingo expansion" in Niane (ed.), Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 4 (London 1984), pp. 117–171 & M. Ly-Tall, "The decline of the Mali empire", ibid., pp. 172–186, the whole volume online here…
3. This is also from al-‘Umarī, which I find from Jean Devisse, "Africa in inter-continental relations" in Niane, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, pp. 635–672 at pp. 664-666, the only pages in the whole chapter that deal with Africans looking out rather than other people looking in, and dismissing it as economically insignificant (though, interestingly, prepared to believe that they might have made it to South America, p. 666). However, Devisse used some other translation of al-‘Umarī, so I can’t give you a uniform cite. I can give you the English version of it he quotes (pp. 664-665), though, and that goes like this, in the voice of Mūsā I himself speaking of his predecessor:
"He [Mansa Abū Bakr] did not believe that the ocean was impossible to cross. He wished to reach the other side and was passionately interested in doing so. He fitted out 200 vessels and filled them with men and as many again with gold, water and food supplies for several years. He then said to those in charge of embarkation, ‘do not return until you have reached the other side of the ocean or if you have exhausted your food or water’. They sailed away. Time passed. After a long time, none of them had returned. Finally one vessel, only one, returned. We asked its master what he had seen and heard: ‘We sailed on and on for a long time until a river with a violent current appeared in the middle of the sea. I was in the last vessel. The others sailed on and when they reached that spot they were unable to return and disappeared. We did not know what had happened to them. For my part, I came back from that place without entering the stream.’ The sultan rejected his explanation. He then ordered 2000 vessels to be fitted out, 1000 for himself and his men and 1000 for food and water. He then appointed me his deputy, embarked with his companions and sailed away. That was the last we saw of them, him and his companions."
So make of that what you will!
4. This is now kind of a zombie debate, which isn’t to say it’s been resolved. However, in each of its phases it’s primarily been driven by a single scholar at a time. In the 1960s and 1970s that was one M. D. W. Jeffreys, who may have started this work with "Pre-Colombian Negroes in America" in Scientia: Rivista di Scienza Vol. 88 (Bologna 1953), pp. 202–218, online here, but then got the idea that maize could be attested in Europe prior to Columbus, necessitating some pre-Columbian contact; he did several articles on that but I think Jeffreys, "Maize and the Mande Myth" in Current Anthropology Vol. 12 (Chicago IL 1971), pp 291–320, on JSTOR here, completes them all. His work was already provoking reaction by then, as witness Raymond Mauny, "Hypothèses concernant les relations précolombiennes entre l’Afrique et l’Amérique" in Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos Vol. 1 (Gran Canaria 1971), pp 369–389, online here, A. R. Willcox, "Pre-Columbian Intercourse between the Old World and the New: Considered from Africa" in South African Archaeological Bulletin Vol. 30 (Wits 1975), pp. 19–22, on JSTOR here; and Almose A. Thompson, "Pre-columbian black presence in the western hemisphere" in Negro History Bulletin Vol. 38 (Washington DC 1975), pp. 452–456, on JSTOR here. Then things seem to have gone quiet again until a guy called Carl L. Johnannessen revived the maize question. Initially he was doing that from some quite thin art-historical evidence (and, importantly for us, steering the question away from Africa): witness Carl L. Johannessen and Anne Z. Parker, "Maize ears sculptured in 12th and 13th century A.D. India as indicators of pre-columbian diffusion" in Economic Botany Vol. 43 (New York City NY 1989), pp. 164–180, on JSTOR here, and this understandably met some pushback: you can read it through the collection of counter-evidence amassed by a supporter, J. Huston McCulloch, in "Maize in Pre-Columbian India", in Some Archaeological Outliers: Adventures in Underground Archaeology (Columbus OH 2006), online here, but you can find it done most thoroughly in Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Warren Barbour, "They Were NOT Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s" in Ethnohistory Vol. 45 (1997), pp 199–234, on Academia.edu here, with a host of related papers showing up there I can’t index now – but note that one of their concerns is that attempts to assign particular archæological and technological phenomena to African influence can only work by removing it from the Native American record, which is a point. The wave they’re trying to stem there must be as much or more Jeffreys’ fault, as his work became accessible on JSTOR and suchlike, I assume, as anything that’s happened since. None of this deterred Johannessen, however, who subsequently went big and added 69 other species of plant and 8 of various sorts of creature to the list of things he wants to explain by pre-Columbian contact, in John L. Sorenson and Carl L. Johannessen, Scientific Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages, Sino-Platonic Papers 133 (Philadelphia PA 2004), online here. A fairly recent review of the situation might be Richard V. Francaviglia, "’Far Beyond the Western Sea of the Arabs…’: Reinterpreting Claims about Pre-Columbian Muslims in the Americas" in Terrae Incognitae Vol. 46 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 103–138, DOI: 10.1179/0082288414Z.00000000033. But I bet you could find another one which disagreed entirely…
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
Just to address an African elephant in the room, did they explain why the Malian Empire, the largest empire in west Africa at the time, was not a colonial power? Especially considering that it was an Islamic state, a religion that is hardly West African in origin and is pretty blatantly colonial. An (ex-)emperor with a large fleet turning up in a distant country (even one through a magic portal) wasn’t going to produce a non-colonial society. It seems a bit overly reductive to assume colonialism is a condition of skin colour.
I think what we have here is the same appeal to the medieval other as you see in national origin stories, or the idea of a free peasant society. You take a desire to find a primeval purity, be in race, popular political participation or a pre-colonial society and plant it in the medieval period at the edge of the historical record where few people know enough to challenge you. It’s medievalism as a convenient vehicle for an ideology. As a basis for a fantasy game, it’s fine, but if it speaks to a movement proclaiming a view of African history as peaceful until European colonisation happened then there’s an issue for historians, because I know of no reason to assume Africa was more (or less) peaceful than contemporary Europe or Asia.
None of which makes this a bad idea for a game incidentally (I’d love to know what their plot device is in place of violence). It’s not as if most fantasy worlds aren’t based on some form of medievalism of the type I just complained about, and other than sometimes doing a sort of meta-analysis of these as I engage it doesn’t make me not engage with them. Although it’s weird how fantasy authors and game designers forget to read out papers to get better backgrounds for their creations…
The issue of violence was one that got a lot more space in the talk than the medievalising background, which I don’t think the speakers thought they had an interested audience for. If I remember, they were aiming for a default of peace within which tensions arise that can drive plots, and individual game instances, and those would ineluctably have sometimes to build up to conflict. But it could at least be conflict between relative equals, module individual variation and so on.
As to the historical points, I have to admit, I don’t myself know enough about Mali to know whether I’d count it as colonial. That might partly be because I usually run with an economic definition of colonialism in which the British Empire, for example, was, but the Roman Empire, by virtue of being equally exploitative of all its regions (bar maybe a special place for Egypt) and equally open of access to power for all its populations – except maybe on grounds of wealth – was not. That doesn’t, of course, mean it wasn’t a violent, oppressive slave society; of course it was, even if relaxing somewhat on the slavery and then the violence in favour of ideological oppression from the mid-3rd century onwards. For similar reasons, I’m not sure I’d agree that Islam is either inherently or "blatantly" colonial, as opposed to expansively conquering in its first century of existence. It didn’t then impose a hierarchy either of economic power or of race on its populations. OK, maybe the latter given Arabic priority in Islam, but its own Scripture is against it there. Is that what you meant? If so I’d still argue it doesn’t set up the same kind of constraints as modern colonial Empire. Obviously there have also been expansive Islamic conquerors since 730-odd; but I don’t know if the Mansas were among them or how they got to their position, except that control of gold must have been a lot of it. So I guess the immediate question is, "what do you mean by ‘colonial’?" And then, I suppose, we could try and figure out what DePass and Walters mean by it, which on the available evidence is going to be harder…
I’m not going to ever accept that a definition of colonialism exists which can preclude the Roman Empire (there’s not a lot of people in the western bits speaking a pre-Roman language for a start). An attempt to define colonialism only by the modern experience of European empires and their victims is odd: it might well exclude the Russians in northern Asia for example. But it’s also deliberately excluding comparisons, and any historical study that is excluding comparata on the basis merely of definition is at best flawed and is potentially simply an equivalent to the use of the fall of Rome for the purpose of modern politics you highlight in the next main post, but generally for different politics.
Colonialism only makes sense as a widespread historical concept of it describes something that can exist in any empire (or, I would argue, religion). I’d suggest contrasting it on a spectrum with confederation, with colonialism at the extreme being building a new settlement and filling it with inhabitants of the core culture (something the Romans did a lot, hence the word colony…) whilst federation at the extreme is simply paying a token acknowledgement of suzerainty to a distant and non-intervening power (I’m not certain if citing Peter’s Pence and the habit of early English ecclesiastics of turning up at Rome at this point would be an example of my normal sardonic view of history…). Seeking to require certain standards of behaviour such as economic exploitation or definition of race shouldn’t be definitive but should only help place the society on the continuum, and any other that might be useful.
From the point of view of a medievalist, it’s always grating when definitions of a useful concept come wrapped up in the particular historiographical trappings of the study of modern, mainly twentieth-century, history. It’s rarely an open statement of ‘you don’t count and are irrelevant’ so much as a failure to adequately recognise that the jon-modernist perspective might be useful. But it always disappoints me when I see medievalists accept this sort of terminological narrowing which if it serves anything useful, serves only the research into those societies those narrowing the definition in the first place are working on. If a concept is historically useful then it needs to be applicable (or it’s absence easily demonstrated) to the middle aged as much as the modern.
This is interesting. What it’s telling me is that there is something specific about the economics and hierarchies of the post-1492 European overseas empires which is what I mean by colonialism, in part because it’s the something which is implied in "postcolonial" and "decolonising", and I do think that’s a specific thing which is worth isolating and identifying. At the same time I do see the force of an argument that says that if my usage of colonialism excludes the empire which invented the colonia I may have gone wrong somewhere. Equally, though, if the definition has to be, "building a new settlement and filling it with inhabitants of the core culture" then we likewise have the problem that large parts of Africa, and especially the Belgian Congo, Sierra Leone and Nigeria and Tanzania as they now are, didn’t experience that sort of colonialism over the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, since they only ever had skeletal European administrative or military presences. For most people a definition of colonialism would need to cover that as well as the much-more-Roman-looking situation of Australia. In terms of working within the discipline that’s actually more of a problem for me. I’m not averse to sticking to an old meaning of a term to make the point that it has a deeper history; but if doing so involves not just saying that the older and the newer periods aren’t the same (a problem either way) but that my colleagues job titles and specialisms are stupid because of their anachronistic entitulature, I’m causing problems I don’t need to… Furthermore, if I stick with my usage I don’t think it does disable comparison; in fact, by noting a difference I think it makes the comparison significant. And then once we’re in the room we can point out that Tanganyika and Australia suffered modally opposite forms of exploitation…
I should also add that after I’d posted this, two tabs down in the collection of stuff I’d opened to have a look at later, I found this excellent blog-post by Isaac Samuel that collects and examines all the sources for Mūsā’s pilgrimage in order to answer a particular question about slaves in his entourage. This may be of relevance to Allan’s question, indeed, but I would have needed to post it anyway!