Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
The electoral law ruling is the biggest bit, but the Court has been building a habit of striking down important pieces of legislation; two recent cases involve the drug law and the medically assisted fecondation - both points on which components of the right have been heavily invested.
The electoral law ruling has caused a fairly strange sort of mess. I'll send you some details in PM tomorrow.
The gist of it is that the Italian judiciary is enjoying an inordinate amount of power of late, with a lot of complications... this is mostly because of the equally inordinate level of incompetence displayed by the legislature and the government, in turn partly a consequence of the electoral law the Court struck down.
This judiciary "supplence" is not unheard of in recent Italian history, but causes a lot of animose reactions (partly justified in my view) that poison the political activity even worse, possibly leading to a feedback loop of unbalance of powers.
But I don't want to derail the thread with discussions of matters of Italian constitutional law. I largely posted that comment because I had just dined with a close friend who happens to be a lawyer (and a very gifted vocalist on top of that).
Well, they're not trying to convince the peasants of anything, but I expect quite a few people will tell them to sod off anyway.
As far as I can tell, the Wandervögel ethos didn't have a notable Celtic component. To the extent that they looked for inspiration outside medieval Germany, they tended to go for Native American motifs - by that time, thanks to Karl May, it was they who were every German youth's favorite noble savage.
TTL's Wandervögel are somewhat more internationally minded than OTL's, though - that's one of the side effects of Germany still having an empire - so maybe they will borrow from Celtic culture, or at least their idealized notions of it.
Russia and Central Asia will be next, followed by East Africa.
Well, mostly, the noble savages of OTL Germany were the ancient Germanic people, including Goths and Vikings, the heroes of old German epics, historical figures like Arminius (Herrmann) the Cheruscan, who were often contrasted with the corrupt, civilized Romans. Before WWII, there was the "Völkische" movement, which preached the moral (and often racial) superiority of the Germanic people and often propagated a return to Germanic paganism. The Nazis were partially an outgrowth of this movement, incorporated many of its ideas in their ideology, and, as a result, mostly discredited them, although there still is (or was, when I was a boy in the 70s) some residue of Germanic romanticism in German pop culture.
Other noble savages of German pop culture were Native Americans (through Karl May, whom we have dicussed before); Celtic romanticism also was a part of German culture, like in many European cultures, since the 18th century Ossian craze, but to my knowledge, that was less about "noble savages" and more about romantic heroes and the "secret Druid knowledge" kind of mysticism.
EDIT: partly ninja'd by Jonathan.
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Interlude: The Kinder-Garten, 1935
Ndola, Kazembe
Nearly every house at the east end of Ndola had a garden – if the owner had to spend a month out of work, or if his pay didn’t stretch to support a family, it ensured that he’d have something to eat and even something to sell. Families could usually be found there at evening, and gardening was an occasion for socializing with the neighbors over shake-shake beer.
But the Munda mwa Makumbi – the Garden of the Clouds [1] – was something different. It wasn’t a garden, it was a farm. Fourteen years before, when this land had been bush country rather than the edge of the city, street children had marked off twenty hectares and protected it – the pockmarks on the buildings were mute testament as to how – and it was still their sanctuary and republic. Any child who worked a day each week at the garden was entitled to a share of its bounty, and more than that: those who were homeless could sleep under a roof, those dying of Congo fever could come there to be nursed, and those who had trouble in school or with the police could appeal for intercession. A few of the founders still lived there, men and women in their twenties now, and they watched over the newcomers.
Andreas Mwenya had lived at the garden once. He didn’t anymore. He was luckier than most street children; he’d known his father before the fever had claimed the older man, and he’d learned some carpentry. With so much construction in the city, he had work at good wages, and he had a house and garden of his own. But the farm had been his home and family years ago when he’d first been on his own, and when he walked through the gates, as he was doing now, he always felt as if he were coming home.
It was twilight, and the light of flickering campfires danced over the main building. Its familiar shape resolved before Andreas’ eyes: a long, low stucco structure with the words “Garten-Haus” painted over the door. On the side closest to him, the flames illuminated a mural: the Congo-fever demon lurking in the heavens, the fever sneaking down to earth while God and the spirits were distracted, a field of graveyards, and finally God blessing the people and sending them to defeat the fever with their wisdom and virtue. And in the field to the side, which was fallow for the year, hundreds of people had gathered.
Andreas scanned the crowd for familiar faces. It was hard to discern them in the darkness, but he knew they were there. These were the bamwana cha chembe – the eagle-children – and he was one too.
Someone called his name – yes, that was a familiar face, and a voice more familiar still. “Maluba!” he answered, and hurried to the place that had been reserved by the fire. Maluba was his age, fifteen, and six years ago they had been as brothers.
“Have some shake-shake,” Maluba said. “Are you working?”
Andreas took the offered cup and shook it, sipping the beer and chewing on the bits of fermented maize-porridge that remained. It was a ten-day brew: strong. “I’m on the Laumann building. Can’t you see me up there?”
“I’m looking there now. I don’t see you.” The Laumann building, at fifteen stories the tallest in Africa, was a looming shadow that could be seen even here, just south of the Afrika-Bank tower that was nearly as tall.
“Look up when you’re at work, if you’re not too lazy. You’ll see me looking down on you.”
“And all the men in suits there will look down at you. Even if they have to look up to do it.”
“Maybe they’ll come to the encampment, and we can climb the roof and look down on them.”
“Their children may.” Maluba’s voice was heavy with contempt that middle-class youths would call themselves bamwana cha chembe, but these days many did. “And this – they call it an encampment? If we were really camping, we’d go out to Kashiba or Chilengwa na Lesa. There’d be swimming and fish to eat, not just this maize and yams…”
“It takes two days to get to Kashiba, and this isn’t the school holidays.”
“The school can do without us for a week,” Maluba said, but not even he believed it. The eagle-children might quit a job to go on an encampment – the kind of work available to most people their age came and went anyway – but none of them would even think of quitting school. The night classes at the Realschule were tickets to the technical college, to the kind of jobs the office workers in the Laumann building did, to the future in the stars of which they all dreamed.
“Besides,” Andreas continued, “if it’s here sometimes, the young ones can come and listen. Speaking of which…”
“I’m here, meine Damen und Herren, and the party can start.”
“If I waited for you before I started anything, Jürgen, my mother would still be carrying me.” The German was twenty-three, older than all but a few of the eagle-children, and Andreas thought him as childlike in some ways as he was worldly-wise in others.
Jürgen ignored him and spread out the Navajo blanket that he’d picked up in Arizona two years before. A few weavers in Ndola were making ones like it now, and Andreas wondered what the men from the universities would think of that when he discovered it. He’d heard a market-woman tell one of the other Wandervögel, in all seriousness, that her people had a legend of ancestors from far across the western ocean, and no doubt he was already repeating the story to people back home.
“Football tomorrow?” he asked.
“Of course. I hope you brought a team.”
“What else? How would you learn to keep the goal without the Germans to teach you?”
“We’ve been getting a lesson ready for you all month.”
In fact, the honors were close to even. “We’ll see tomorrow. And for tonight… Aber am Abend laden wir uns ein, Lieder und Lachen, Rundgesang und Wein…”
At another time, Andreas might have sang along, but he could see the mwata – the elected king of his band – walking to the center of the fires, and he wanted to hear him speak. The man was one of the garden’s founders, twenty-five years old, and he was dressed today in royal regalia. The carved wooden staff and lukasa memory-board might have been carried by a Luba monarch; the robes were Lunda and the pickelhaube from Prussia by way of the gift that the old Kaiser had given to the king of Barotseland. [2] A man of their grandparents’ generation might have thought him ridiculous, but the mwata wasn’t a man of any one people; he sought to incarnate in the eagle-children the ancient heroes of all nations.
And that, indeed, was the subject of his address. “Some of them call us tribesmen,” he was saying, “but we in Kazembe have always been where nations meet. We are Luba and Lunda, we are Kaonde, we are Lamba and Bemba, yes, now we are even Arab and German. Nations have marched across the land for centuries, and who can tell anymore who belongs to which? War has brought us together, work has brought us together, fever has brought us together…”
Andreas felt a stirring at his side and saw that seven-year-old Bupe had leaned against him, struggling to keep her eyes open. “Sleep,” he said; it was a long day for her at school and at odd jobs, even though the people at the garden took care of her. He looked back across at Jürgen, who was listening intently; like the folklorist he fancied himself, he saw new folklore in the making.
“You don’t think he’s a feldwebel today?” Maluba asked.
Jürgen blushed deeply in the firelight; when he’d first arrived, his comparison of the mwata to a spike-hatted Great War sergeant had almost ended his welcome right there. “I just… didn’t expect that,” he explained again, though by now it was no longer necessary. “I should have remembered what I learned with the Navajo – it works better when you stop looking for people to be what you expect, and start looking at them as they are.”
“…we call ourselves the eagle-children, but we are also bamwana cha bulwele, the children of the fever,” the mwata went on. “And as fever-children, we must be each other’s family. If you have no parents, then God will be your father and your mother [3], and everyone here your brother and sister. No one will leave you like Luwe’s sister, to be eaten while they are out hunting. [4] When we camp together, we are a family, when we eat together, we are one, when we drink together…”
“In taberna quando sumus, non curamus quid sit humus…” Jürgen hummed, taking another drink of shake-shake even as the mwata had suggested.
“Bibit puer Nubianus, bibit vagus Africanus,” Andreas answered. “Shut up and listen,” he added, treasuring Jürgen’s look of surprise. Yes, look at us as we are.
“… we shall not wait for ichiyawafu for all nations to be one. We are knobs on Africa’s memory-board, and we will stand on the heroes’ shoulders when we rise to join the awantu of the moon and stars… [5]”
The mwata was getting ready to finish; the eagle-children wanted inspiration as much as anyone in their place, but they had no more patience for long speeches than the Wandervögel who had been their genesis, and they were hungry. No doubt the leader would finish with an appeal to education and science, a promise of a future where Kazembe would build towers to the stars and children would soar over Africa like eagles, because such was the way the speech always ended. Or at least it was how the speech ended when there wasn’t a fight.
Andreas didn’t notice at first, because it happened far across the campfires, where a group of latecomers had taken their places. They were the ones Maluba had derided, the middle-class children, the youths of sixteen and eighteen who lived in the neat Afro-modern houses on the Northrise or Intulo, the ones who seemed to sing and wander without care as the Germans did. Someone had said something – maybe a young man of Maluba’s opinions who’d had too much shake-shake had jeered at them for being posh, or maybe one of the newcomers had questioned whether the stars were really made for those who lived so close to the ground. They call us Skłodowska’s children, we who go to school for free, we who go at night, but not everyone sees us as she did.
It hardly mattered. Andreas was no king, but he was old enough to have responsibilities among the eagle-children, and Jürgen realized that he had them too. They joined the rush toward the fight, pulling the combatants apart, standing between them and reminding them that the encampment was for feasting and sports and song. They stayed long enough to register the fighters’ grudging nods and give them into their friends’ charge, and looked back with the others to see that the mwata had finished speaking.
“Watch out for them on the football field tomorrow,” Jürgen said, his arm over Andreas’ shoulder as they walked back toward their own fire.
Andreas nodded. “There’s always a fight when the mwata talks about peace, isn’t there?”
“Look at people as they are.”
“As they are. Yes.” The cooks were laying out the feast: roasted sweet potato and ears of maize, meal with groundnut sauce, vegetables, mopane caterpillars cooked with onion. Bupe, who had awakened, broke into a kasala, a praise-song for food, for peace, for friendship. The others joined in one by one. Praise-songs had once been for kings, but the bamwana cha chembe praised each other, for the future was theirs.
Jürgen had hung a Navajo necklace around Bupe’s neck and was singing with the others. “Football tomorrow. We’ll beat you, and then we’ll beat those posh bastards together,” he said. The man whose parents’ income had let him wander for three years after he left the army spoke without a trace of irony.
“We’ll beat you both, I think,” Andreas said. He ate from his bowl of meal. “And we’ll come to Germany and beat you again there.”
“Let me know when. I’ll make sure I’m back home, so I can buy the beer after.”
_______
[1] The spoken language of TTL Kazembe is a tricky issue. Kazembe was founded by a Luba-Lunda dynasty, but most of its people spoke a Lamba or Bemba dialect, and there was also some exposure to Swahili through contact with Arab traders and slave merchants. To the west and south, Kaonde or Lenje would have been spoken. In TTL, I imagine that labor migration from the rest of the kingdom to the Copperbelt has homogenized the languages into a simplified creole in which Lamba (the primary Copperbelt language) is dominant but which has substantial Luba, Lunda, Swahili and German influences – in other words, a rough equivalent to Lingala or to Swahili itself. For purposes of this story, I’ve drawn primarily from this Lamba dictionary from 1908, as well as folklore from throughout the region, but it should be borne in mind that the language being spoken by the characters is TTL’s Chizembe creole and not standard Lamba. This, in turn, gives me a get-out-of-jail-free card: any deviations from proper Lamba grammar and word formation should be attributed to changes in the language rather than to the crass ignorance of someone who is not remotely an expert in southern Bantu languages.
[2] In OTL, it was an early twentieth-century British officer’s uniform that the Lozi king borrowed, and which still features in his regalia.
[3] This also comes from the Bemba/Lamba aspect of Kazembe’s tradition; the Bemba view their creator deity as both male and female.
[4] A Copperbelt story.
[5] Another one.
Ndola, Kazembe
Nearly every house at the east end of Ndola had a garden – if the owner had to spend a month out of work, or if his pay didn’t stretch to support a family, it ensured that he’d have something to eat and even something to sell. Families could usually be found there at evening, and gardening was an occasion for socializing with the neighbors over shake-shake beer.
But the Munda mwa Makumbi – the Garden of the Clouds [1] – was something different. It wasn’t a garden, it was a farm. Fourteen years before, when this land had been bush country rather than the edge of the city, street children had marked off twenty hectares and protected it – the pockmarks on the buildings were mute testament as to how – and it was still their sanctuary and republic. Any child who worked a day each week at the garden was entitled to a share of its bounty, and more than that: those who were homeless could sleep under a roof, those dying of Congo fever could come there to be nursed, and those who had trouble in school or with the police could appeal for intercession. A few of the founders still lived there, men and women in their twenties now, and they watched over the newcomers.
Andreas Mwenya had lived at the garden once. He didn’t anymore. He was luckier than most street children; he’d known his father before the fever had claimed the older man, and he’d learned some carpentry. With so much construction in the city, he had work at good wages, and he had a house and garden of his own. But the farm had been his home and family years ago when he’d first been on his own, and when he walked through the gates, as he was doing now, he always felt as if he were coming home.
It was twilight, and the light of flickering campfires danced over the main building. Its familiar shape resolved before Andreas’ eyes: a long, low stucco structure with the words “Garten-Haus” painted over the door. On the side closest to him, the flames illuminated a mural: the Congo-fever demon lurking in the heavens, the fever sneaking down to earth while God and the spirits were distracted, a field of graveyards, and finally God blessing the people and sending them to defeat the fever with their wisdom and virtue. And in the field to the side, which was fallow for the year, hundreds of people had gathered.
Andreas scanned the crowd for familiar faces. It was hard to discern them in the darkness, but he knew they were there. These were the bamwana cha chembe – the eagle-children – and he was one too.
Someone called his name – yes, that was a familiar face, and a voice more familiar still. “Maluba!” he answered, and hurried to the place that had been reserved by the fire. Maluba was his age, fifteen, and six years ago they had been as brothers.
“Have some shake-shake,” Maluba said. “Are you working?”
Andreas took the offered cup and shook it, sipping the beer and chewing on the bits of fermented maize-porridge that remained. It was a ten-day brew: strong. “I’m on the Laumann building. Can’t you see me up there?”
“I’m looking there now. I don’t see you.” The Laumann building, at fifteen stories the tallest in Africa, was a looming shadow that could be seen even here, just south of the Afrika-Bank tower that was nearly as tall.
“Look up when you’re at work, if you’re not too lazy. You’ll see me looking down on you.”
“And all the men in suits there will look down at you. Even if they have to look up to do it.”
“Maybe they’ll come to the encampment, and we can climb the roof and look down on them.”
“Their children may.” Maluba’s voice was heavy with contempt that middle-class youths would call themselves bamwana cha chembe, but these days many did. “And this – they call it an encampment? If we were really camping, we’d go out to Kashiba or Chilengwa na Lesa. There’d be swimming and fish to eat, not just this maize and yams…”
“It takes two days to get to Kashiba, and this isn’t the school holidays.”
“The school can do without us for a week,” Maluba said, but not even he believed it. The eagle-children might quit a job to go on an encampment – the kind of work available to most people their age came and went anyway – but none of them would even think of quitting school. The night classes at the Realschule were tickets to the technical college, to the kind of jobs the office workers in the Laumann building did, to the future in the stars of which they all dreamed.
“Besides,” Andreas continued, “if it’s here sometimes, the young ones can come and listen. Speaking of which…”
“I’m here, meine Damen und Herren, and the party can start.”
“If I waited for you before I started anything, Jürgen, my mother would still be carrying me.” The German was twenty-three, older than all but a few of the eagle-children, and Andreas thought him as childlike in some ways as he was worldly-wise in others.
Jürgen ignored him and spread out the Navajo blanket that he’d picked up in Arizona two years before. A few weavers in Ndola were making ones like it now, and Andreas wondered what the men from the universities would think of that when he discovered it. He’d heard a market-woman tell one of the other Wandervögel, in all seriousness, that her people had a legend of ancestors from far across the western ocean, and no doubt he was already repeating the story to people back home.
“Football tomorrow?” he asked.
“Of course. I hope you brought a team.”
“What else? How would you learn to keep the goal without the Germans to teach you?”
“We’ve been getting a lesson ready for you all month.”
In fact, the honors were close to even. “We’ll see tomorrow. And for tonight… Aber am Abend laden wir uns ein, Lieder und Lachen, Rundgesang und Wein…”
At another time, Andreas might have sang along, but he could see the mwata – the elected king of his band – walking to the center of the fires, and he wanted to hear him speak. The man was one of the garden’s founders, twenty-five years old, and he was dressed today in royal regalia. The carved wooden staff and lukasa memory-board might have been carried by a Luba monarch; the robes were Lunda and the pickelhaube from Prussia by way of the gift that the old Kaiser had given to the king of Barotseland. [2] A man of their grandparents’ generation might have thought him ridiculous, but the mwata wasn’t a man of any one people; he sought to incarnate in the eagle-children the ancient heroes of all nations.
And that, indeed, was the subject of his address. “Some of them call us tribesmen,” he was saying, “but we in Kazembe have always been where nations meet. We are Luba and Lunda, we are Kaonde, we are Lamba and Bemba, yes, now we are even Arab and German. Nations have marched across the land for centuries, and who can tell anymore who belongs to which? War has brought us together, work has brought us together, fever has brought us together…”
Andreas felt a stirring at his side and saw that seven-year-old Bupe had leaned against him, struggling to keep her eyes open. “Sleep,” he said; it was a long day for her at school and at odd jobs, even though the people at the garden took care of her. He looked back across at Jürgen, who was listening intently; like the folklorist he fancied himself, he saw new folklore in the making.
“You don’t think he’s a feldwebel today?” Maluba asked.
Jürgen blushed deeply in the firelight; when he’d first arrived, his comparison of the mwata to a spike-hatted Great War sergeant had almost ended his welcome right there. “I just… didn’t expect that,” he explained again, though by now it was no longer necessary. “I should have remembered what I learned with the Navajo – it works better when you stop looking for people to be what you expect, and start looking at them as they are.”
“…we call ourselves the eagle-children, but we are also bamwana cha bulwele, the children of the fever,” the mwata went on. “And as fever-children, we must be each other’s family. If you have no parents, then God will be your father and your mother [3], and everyone here your brother and sister. No one will leave you like Luwe’s sister, to be eaten while they are out hunting. [4] When we camp together, we are a family, when we eat together, we are one, when we drink together…”
“In taberna quando sumus, non curamus quid sit humus…” Jürgen hummed, taking another drink of shake-shake even as the mwata had suggested.
“Bibit puer Nubianus, bibit vagus Africanus,” Andreas answered. “Shut up and listen,” he added, treasuring Jürgen’s look of surprise. Yes, look at us as we are.
“… we shall not wait for ichiyawafu for all nations to be one. We are knobs on Africa’s memory-board, and we will stand on the heroes’ shoulders when we rise to join the awantu of the moon and stars… [5]”
The mwata was getting ready to finish; the eagle-children wanted inspiration as much as anyone in their place, but they had no more patience for long speeches than the Wandervögel who had been their genesis, and they were hungry. No doubt the leader would finish with an appeal to education and science, a promise of a future where Kazembe would build towers to the stars and children would soar over Africa like eagles, because such was the way the speech always ended. Or at least it was how the speech ended when there wasn’t a fight.
Andreas didn’t notice at first, because it happened far across the campfires, where a group of latecomers had taken their places. They were the ones Maluba had derided, the middle-class children, the youths of sixteen and eighteen who lived in the neat Afro-modern houses on the Northrise or Intulo, the ones who seemed to sing and wander without care as the Germans did. Someone had said something – maybe a young man of Maluba’s opinions who’d had too much shake-shake had jeered at them for being posh, or maybe one of the newcomers had questioned whether the stars were really made for those who lived so close to the ground. They call us Skłodowska’s children, we who go to school for free, we who go at night, but not everyone sees us as she did.
It hardly mattered. Andreas was no king, but he was old enough to have responsibilities among the eagle-children, and Jürgen realized that he had them too. They joined the rush toward the fight, pulling the combatants apart, standing between them and reminding them that the encampment was for feasting and sports and song. They stayed long enough to register the fighters’ grudging nods and give them into their friends’ charge, and looked back with the others to see that the mwata had finished speaking.
“Watch out for them on the football field tomorrow,” Jürgen said, his arm over Andreas’ shoulder as they walked back toward their own fire.
Andreas nodded. “There’s always a fight when the mwata talks about peace, isn’t there?”
“Look at people as they are.”
“As they are. Yes.” The cooks were laying out the feast: roasted sweet potato and ears of maize, meal with groundnut sauce, vegetables, mopane caterpillars cooked with onion. Bupe, who had awakened, broke into a kasala, a praise-song for food, for peace, for friendship. The others joined in one by one. Praise-songs had once been for kings, but the bamwana cha chembe praised each other, for the future was theirs.
Jürgen had hung a Navajo necklace around Bupe’s neck and was singing with the others. “Football tomorrow. We’ll beat you, and then we’ll beat those posh bastards together,” he said. The man whose parents’ income had let him wander for three years after he left the army spoke without a trace of irony.
“We’ll beat you both, I think,” Andreas said. He ate from his bowl of meal. “And we’ll come to Germany and beat you again there.”
“Let me know when. I’ll make sure I’m back home, so I can buy the beer after.”
_______
[1] The spoken language of TTL Kazembe is a tricky issue. Kazembe was founded by a Luba-Lunda dynasty, but most of its people spoke a Lamba or Bemba dialect, and there was also some exposure to Swahili through contact with Arab traders and slave merchants. To the west and south, Kaonde or Lenje would have been spoken. In TTL, I imagine that labor migration from the rest of the kingdom to the Copperbelt has homogenized the languages into a simplified creole in which Lamba (the primary Copperbelt language) is dominant but which has substantial Luba, Lunda, Swahili and German influences – in other words, a rough equivalent to Lingala or to Swahili itself. For purposes of this story, I’ve drawn primarily from this Lamba dictionary from 1908, as well as folklore from throughout the region, but it should be borne in mind that the language being spoken by the characters is TTL’s Chizembe creole and not standard Lamba. This, in turn, gives me a get-out-of-jail-free card: any deviations from proper Lamba grammar and word formation should be attributed to changes in the language rather than to the crass ignorance of someone who is not remotely an expert in southern Bantu languages.
[2] In OTL, it was an early twentieth-century British officer’s uniform that the Lozi king borrowed, and which still features in his regalia.
[3] This also comes from the Bemba/Lamba aspect of Kazembe’s tradition; the Bemba view their creator deity as both male and female.
[4] A Copperbelt story.
[5] Another one.
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Interesting to see the attitudes developing between the middle-class snobs and the working-class adults. I take it that the Wandervogel idea has spread to the Africans themselves?
Yes, Jonathan said so in a previous post.
The "posh bastards" line, said by someone who wandered around the world for three years with his parents' money, is pure gold.
The Sandman
Banned
The "posh bastards" line, said by someone who wandered around the world for three years with his parents' money, is pure gold.
Well, it's not about having the money, it's about a) what you do with it and b) your attitude about having it.
Over time, it's becoming less mystic and more modern, as did we all during the twentieth century. But the mysticism still shows up sometimes, and there's nearly always some of it in youth movements.
Well, what better fit is there for the medieval-punk part of the Wandervogel ethos than the Carmina Burana? As far as I know, they weren't a cult item among the Wandervögel (or among anyone pre-Orff) in OTL, but in TTL they certainly are.
The fact that that particular song mentions a black man is just a bonus.
The snobbery is on both sides, and there are also people on both sides who don't partake of it; many friendships and marriages between working-class and middle-class kids will come out of the bamwana cha chembe.
As for the root of the prejudice: I hope it's come across in this and other updates that the process of industrialization in Kazembe is very different from the Niger Valley. The initial stages have gone much faster due to the presence of foreign capital, but the fact that foreign companies are driving the process also means that it has been more unequal and less cooperative. Add the Congo fever and a rapidly changing society to that, and you've got major class divisions - everyone is aspiring, but some are getting there a lot faster than others. It also doesn't help that the state structure is still catching up with the social changes: for instance, it still operates on the assumption that Congo fever orphans' families will care for them, so the resources available to street children are a patchwork. It'll all reach an equilibrium sooner or later, but the shakeout will be rough at times.
And yes, the Africans are picking up the Wandervogel ethos: it caught fire with the generation of children that relied heavily on each other for support. The middle-class kids are closest in attitude to the German Wandervögel; the working-class kids look on it more as mutual aid.
I'd assume that there's a more organized type of youth movement somewhere on the planet by now, but a Scouting analogue isn't what Kazembe is looking for.
The "posh bastards" line, said by someone who wandered around the world for three years with his parents' money, is pure gold.
To be fair, he hasn't exactly traveled in luxury, and he's worked odd jobs to stretch the money his parents gave him. It's just that he tends to romanticize his knight-of-the-road persona, and he's a bit oblivious to how his parents' wealth (and Germany's wealth in general) has made it possible for the Wandervögel to do what they do. He might believe in seeing things as they are, but he still has some work to do in that regard.
BTW, there was at least one future prime minister in that story.
I'd assume that there's a more organized type of youth movement somewhere on the planet by now, but a Scouting analogue isn't what Kazembe is looking for. - Jonathan Edelstein
Speaking about scouting, is there some kind of analog in the rich world?
Speaking about scouting, is there some kind of analog in the rich world?
Sure there is.
I vaguely recall that Baden-Powell's life was changed enough that he did not became its founder (IIRC, I suggested him spending the Great War in Turkestan, but I do not think Jonathan followed that idea), but the foundations and social demands for such a thing existed decades before his Brownsea camp both IOTL and ITTL
The earlier Great War must have impacted any such trend heavily, and in the mood of this TL, I suppose that the heavily internationalist emphasis of the OTL's Scout Movement will not be there; I expect something more plural and generally more markedly religious (BP's religion is a fairly strange thing, but he can be considered something of a theist; he was also a Freemason IIRC); as in, several different experiences that are tied into confessional structures (this happens within the real life Scout Movement, but is likely to be stronger ITTL).
The Great War would almost have to derail Baden-Powell's career: instead of spending the 1890s in Africa, he'd most likely be in Europe or Southeast Asia, and he might never come to an appreciation of bush-country scouting as a means of fostering self-reliance and discipline. I'd guess that his outlook in TTL is more conventionally military. But as you say, the forerunners of Scouting predated Baden-Powell by a considerable time, and the late-Victorian concern about urbanization and the morals of youth will still be there.
Some of the forerunner organizations were more explicitly military than the Scouts, and there may be youth groups in TTL that hew closer to the cadet model, while others are more focused on sports and the "playing fields of Eton" ethos. As you suggest, they probably won't be as internationalist as the Scouts, and some of them will be sectarian or political. Maybe there would be a continuum of youth movements, with no single one being iconic in the way that the OTL Scouts are - or maybe one of them would eventually hit on Baden-Powell's mix of militarism-light, adventure and skill-building. Either way, by the 1920s and 30s, many kids would be involved in something akin to Scouting, and it might be interesting to see what forms youth culture takes in the wealthier parts of the Islamic world.
Anyway, if I may be permitted one more Copperbelt digression: As alluded to in the update, Lamba tradition holds that the sun, moon and stars are populated by awantu, nonhuman people who have maintenance duties. From all I've been able to find, the awantu are portrayed not as spirits but as a race (or races) of ordinary, mortal beings. Premodern folktales of alien races aren't entirely unique, but they're very rare, and the Lamba are the only Africans I know of who have conceived of the idea.
Now combine that with TTL Kazembe's futurist notions and engineering orientation, and... well, I know we've talked about West African science fiction and magical realism, but I have a feeling TTL's Edgar Rice Burroughs may be from *Zambia.
Russia/Central Asia on Friday or over the weekend.
Haven't had a chance to read the latest update, but this is freaking awesome sauce right here!
Extremely fascinating. Reminds me of the Arabic story of Bulukya in the Arabian Nights. Any source on these Lamba stories?
Here at pages 223-25. Anthropologists tend to be precise people, so when they describe the awantu as "people of a different creation from humans" or "workers," I take it that they're referring to ordinary life forms as opposed to spirit-beings like the celestial bodies themselves. The maintenance duties of the awantu actually remind me a bit of the Little Prince sweeping the volcano on his asteroid.
For our Bazembe ERB, though, they won't simply be maintenance workers - he comes from a country of aspiring engineers and will most likely have grown up on German adventure stories, so he'll include rockets, romance and desperate battles among the Martian canals or beneath the clouds of Titan. On the other hand, cinema might be more faithful: with Kazembe's gritty industrialization and the awantu as a cosmic working class, the first movie to be produced in Ndola might be something like Metropolis IN SPACE!
I really need to come back to this.
Yeah, do that.
I was thinking more of C S Lewis Planetary Trilogy (with the guys mantaining the canals in Malacandra) but, again, this is very interesting.
EDIT: thinking about it, it would not be too incredible that Lewis knew about that book about the Lambas. It was apparently published in 1931, and Lewis' planetary trilogy was written a few years after. (One could even go as far as supposing that his form hnau may be reminiscent of awantu, but this sounds very far-fetched - Lewis seems to relate it to Greek nous).
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I know I'm far from the only person to say this, but I do so love those German hippies . More seriously, it's neat to see how the Deutschevolk continue to interact with their non-white Imperial subjects in a (for the time, anyhow) fair and equitable way. It's almost as if they've taken notes from the Brits, another empire that tended to treat its subjects relatively well*...cause-and-effect, or just level-headed folks in the right places at the right times? Either one works for me. I know this may come across as a "No shit, Sherlock" statement, but I really honestly love how Germany has turned out thus far ITTL relative to our experience (especially in Africa, one place I never really thought the Germans would consider expanding into for some reason), one can only hope it keeps on this course further on down the road!
*Again, bear in mind the "relatively" part. In any event, what would you say the overall sense of "health" is in the British Empire as of the last update? If no significant changes apply, please ignore.
. More seriously, it's neat to see how the Deutschevolk continue to interact with their non-white Imperial subjects in a (for the time, anyhow) fair and equitable way. It's almost as if they've taken notes from the Brits, another empire that tended to treat its subjects relatively well*...cause-and-effect, or just level-headed folks in the right places at the right times? Either one works for me. I know this may come across as a "No shit, Sherlock" statement, but I really honestly love how Germany has turned out thus far ITTL relative to our experience (especially in Africa, one place I never really thought the Germans would consider expanding into for some reason), one can only hope it keeps on this course further on down the road!*Again, bear in mind the "relatively" part. In any event, what would you say the overall sense of "health" is in the British Empire as of the last update? If no significant changes apply, please ignore
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