Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
For reasons relating to rocketry, I have a keen interest in details about Geledi Sultanate and Kismayo Free port--including whether the latter is associated with India as CarlAlbertForPresident read it, or "Independent" as I did.
I'd also, again for stuff relating to rocketry, like to ask everyone to reconsider the plausibility of a nuclear arms race and associated missile race happening ITTL in a manner at all similar to OTL. OTL, this escalation was the work of two very powerful superpower blocs which had just emerged from a titanic world war, one which transformed the industrial organization of the USA and fostered massive government projects, and gave the Soviets, already geared toward centralized government megaprojects as they were, a transfusion of both general modernized military-industrial development cross-checked with the latest Western (and Nazi) tech, and legitimacy as well. And having been "grown" in these fashions both core powers of each bloc were also geared to continuing preparations for another such struggle to the death, against each other. (The Soviets were stretched to near collapse in 1945 and not I think inclined ever to actually take the first shot, and the Americans demobilized almost everything in the post-war half decade, but the frameworks and potentials were there, already developed and tried out).
ITTL, the closest things to that situation I could dredge up in a desperate search for some parallel was the much milder rivalry between Germany and Russia, and then we were later told of the much more serious conflict brewing between the latter and China. But China's dynasty is probably not capable of exceeding Mao's rate of industrializing China and though it started earlier, I can't see China as one of the leading powers in purported general global escalation of nukes and missiles. I can see them having a precious few of these kinds of weapons, comparable to OTL PRC in the later 1960s, but that's it.
In the rest of the world, there is simply nothing and no one who needs or would have a legacy of the types of war machines that terrorized the world in the early 1940s of OTL. The other powers, except insofar as they are simply escalating to keep up with Russian armament, are by now half a century past any memory of major existential struggles with comparable developed rival powers; all the bloodshed since the settlement of the Great War has been either colonial powers trying to impose rule on less developed peoples or battles between third-string powers.
The nations which have the best potentials for being first with nuclear devices of any kind, and also advanced rocketry, have very little incentive to develop such systems--the main one would in fact be uncertainty and fear that rivals might, irrationally, go ahead and develop them, perhaps in secret.
But to do so, any such power would have to carry out large, complex, and optionally secret projects that seem like no big deal from OTL's perspective--but despite the proto-"Wizard War" aspects of the long-ago Great War, have little precedent and example ITTL.
It would be rather far-fetched and awkward, I feel, for even the Germany of this timeline to carry such a thing off, and to do it in secret would be both likely to backfire (as the government has not had the experience of doing it nor the excuse of an existential war going on to justify drastic measures, therefore the secret would be likely to leak) and to quite alarm such neighbors as France and Britain.
Doing it more openly would drag the subject into political debate, about just whom these highly advanced weapons are meant to be aimed at and why; any plausible threat power would be able to plausibly respond with projects of their own.
And that is why, for a very long time now (ever since we've first seen the world court system in action and first seen the US Peace Party score some goals) I've been hoping to see this timeline pave a different path to space. One based precisely on the fear of such an arms race as has been generally assumed here to be plausible and inevitable, being denounced as an avoidable threat by effective pacifist voices established in every first-rank power--and a positive visionary alternative being proposed, to wit a world-court supervised pooling of multi-national effort toward achieving orbital travel that could put the spy-satellite potential so attractive to rival powers fairly at the impartial service of all nations, and under supervision of impartial court observers enable the peaceful use of orbital space and beyond as the common heritage of all humanity (with fair revenues for private enterprise of course) and pre-empt the militarization of space travel.
The less militarized ATL is also why I was keen to push a wacky preview of this sort of mentality, as an example, in the United States. Even OTL, where the USA of the first decades of the 20th century had several outright colonial holdings overseas, intervened routinely in Central America and imperialist visionaries anticipated and plotted the "American Century," the armed forces of the USA on the very eve of the Second World War--indeed, some years into it--were a mixed bag. The Navy was a first-rank force to be sure, but the Army, despite ongoing colonial commitments, was smaller than that of Bulgaria in 1940 (admittedly a year the Bulgarians were highly mobilized
).
ITTL, even if we set at nought the political factor I assumed of the armed forces in general and the Army in particular coming under a dark cloud due to President Lodge's dubious and unpopular war and high-handedness regarding it, we can only expect both services to be even smaller than their OTL counterparts. But if we shrink the US Army much below its OTL levels in the 1920s and '30s, it would pretty much vanish!
Therefore I suggested that the Americans would find a different path toward something resembling the OTL military-industrial complex, one less forthrightly geared to "defense" and more to "progress." Without this, I fear the USA is simply out of the running in the space adventure.
To be sure, some might be able to imagine purely private action (not necessarily for profit) substituting for the overarching organization provided by defense-related government bureaucracy OTL.
Anyway Falecius's recent guest posts have elaborated the idea of "the Legatum," sort of a "Mandate with a human face," and this is exactly the sort of framework I imagined might foster a global space program. Not to provide one single program, but rather a framework to encourage various schemes to cooperate and to share certain of the fruits of success in achieving spaceflight; in return the Space Legatum would promote funding and secure suitable sites for spaceports.
Because you see, the best sites remain on the Equator, and while many peoples living near the Equator ITTL are considerably better off than OTL, none of the leading powers are centered there. The good launch sites are on the eastern coasts of continents or big islands, and the best ones IMHO are the northeast coasts of South America (including the OTL French Guianian site of Kourou) and the east coast of Africa.
The equatorial peoples who are substantially better off in terms of per capita wealth and general level of local technical development do not happen to live on these east coasts; the good launch sites are places where considerable investment from afar will be needed. Vice versa, this also means a relatively clean, fresh start for the launch complexes--they will not be competing for land that is already intensively developed, and so it should be possible to compensate any locals displaced quite generously.
Which is why my skyward turned eyes have been thus redirected toward Somalia with some interest. The Horn of Africa strikes me as superior in having a large fan of launch tracks that don't pass over any land at all for many hundreds of miles away, indeed except for a few islands on a few vectors a clear thousand nautical miles or so (and even those islands are many hundreds of miles downrange) allowing launches to all orbits, from the Equator to polar.
So you see, I'm keenly interested in what has been happening in that particular backwater. Where would we find the right mix of infrastructure or potential for development (ports, railroads, etc) and relatively deserted land near the coast, and what would be the political context on the ground when a world court committee comes bearing a proposal for establishing an international enclave--in return for hosting which, the local government gets both the pork-barrel benefits of a spaceport funded by rich foreign nations on its soil and compensatory development aid as well?
I'd think a Legatum spaceport somewhere between Kismayo Free Port and the tip of the Somalian peninsula would be attractive to the Germans, the Ottomans, the Indians, the British including South Africa, the West Africans, Ethiopians, and the progressive elements of East Africa in roughly that order; via Ethiopian sponsorship Russia would have good access as well.
The upcoming (to an extent of course, ongoing) upheavals in East Africa strike me as a situation in which the World Court system might get involved right as they are also dealing with petitions to establish some sort of international regime with oversight of long-range rocketry and space travel.
I'd also, again for stuff relating to rocketry, like to ask everyone to reconsider the plausibility of a nuclear arms race and associated missile race happening ITTL in a manner at all similar to OTL. OTL, this escalation was the work of two very powerful superpower blocs which had just emerged from a titanic world war, one which transformed the industrial organization of the USA and fostered massive government projects, and gave the Soviets, already geared toward centralized government megaprojects as they were, a transfusion of both general modernized military-industrial development cross-checked with the latest Western (and Nazi) tech, and legitimacy as well. And having been "grown" in these fashions both core powers of each bloc were also geared to continuing preparations for another such struggle to the death, against each other. (The Soviets were stretched to near collapse in 1945 and not I think inclined ever to actually take the first shot, and the Americans demobilized almost everything in the post-war half decade, but the frameworks and potentials were there, already developed and tried out).
ITTL, the closest things to that situation I could dredge up in a desperate search for some parallel was the much milder rivalry between Germany and Russia, and then we were later told of the much more serious conflict brewing between the latter and China. But China's dynasty is probably not capable of exceeding Mao's rate of industrializing China and though it started earlier, I can't see China as one of the leading powers in purported general global escalation of nukes and missiles. I can see them having a precious few of these kinds of weapons, comparable to OTL PRC in the later 1960s, but that's it.
In the rest of the world, there is simply nothing and no one who needs or would have a legacy of the types of war machines that terrorized the world in the early 1940s of OTL. The other powers, except insofar as they are simply escalating to keep up with Russian armament, are by now half a century past any memory of major existential struggles with comparable developed rival powers; all the bloodshed since the settlement of the Great War has been either colonial powers trying to impose rule on less developed peoples or battles between third-string powers.
The nations which have the best potentials for being first with nuclear devices of any kind, and also advanced rocketry, have very little incentive to develop such systems--the main one would in fact be uncertainty and fear that rivals might, irrationally, go ahead and develop them, perhaps in secret.
But to do so, any such power would have to carry out large, complex, and optionally secret projects that seem like no big deal from OTL's perspective--but despite the proto-"Wizard War" aspects of the long-ago Great War, have little precedent and example ITTL.
It would be rather far-fetched and awkward, I feel, for even the Germany of this timeline to carry such a thing off, and to do it in secret would be both likely to backfire (as the government has not had the experience of doing it nor the excuse of an existential war going on to justify drastic measures, therefore the secret would be likely to leak) and to quite alarm such neighbors as France and Britain.
Doing it more openly would drag the subject into political debate, about just whom these highly advanced weapons are meant to be aimed at and why; any plausible threat power would be able to plausibly respond with projects of their own.
And that is why, for a very long time now (ever since we've first seen the world court system in action and first seen the US Peace Party score some goals) I've been hoping to see this timeline pave a different path to space. One based precisely on the fear of such an arms race as has been generally assumed here to be plausible and inevitable, being denounced as an avoidable threat by effective pacifist voices established in every first-rank power--and a positive visionary alternative being proposed, to wit a world-court supervised pooling of multi-national effort toward achieving orbital travel that could put the spy-satellite potential so attractive to rival powers fairly at the impartial service of all nations, and under supervision of impartial court observers enable the peaceful use of orbital space and beyond as the common heritage of all humanity (with fair revenues for private enterprise of course) and pre-empt the militarization of space travel.
The less militarized ATL is also why I was keen to push a wacky preview of this sort of mentality, as an example, in the United States. Even OTL, where the USA of the first decades of the 20th century had several outright colonial holdings overseas, intervened routinely in Central America and imperialist visionaries anticipated and plotted the "American Century," the armed forces of the USA on the very eve of the Second World War--indeed, some years into it--were a mixed bag. The Navy was a first-rank force to be sure, but the Army, despite ongoing colonial commitments, was smaller than that of Bulgaria in 1940 (admittedly a year the Bulgarians were highly mobilized
).ITTL, even if we set at nought the political factor I assumed of the armed forces in general and the Army in particular coming under a dark cloud due to President Lodge's dubious and unpopular war and high-handedness regarding it, we can only expect both services to be even smaller than their OTL counterparts. But if we shrink the US Army much below its OTL levels in the 1920s and '30s, it would pretty much vanish!
Therefore I suggested that the Americans would find a different path toward something resembling the OTL military-industrial complex, one less forthrightly geared to "defense" and more to "progress." Without this, I fear the USA is simply out of the running in the space adventure.
To be sure, some might be able to imagine purely private action (not necessarily for profit) substituting for the overarching organization provided by defense-related government bureaucracy OTL.
Anyway Falecius's recent guest posts have elaborated the idea of "the Legatum," sort of a "Mandate with a human face," and this is exactly the sort of framework I imagined might foster a global space program. Not to provide one single program, but rather a framework to encourage various schemes to cooperate and to share certain of the fruits of success in achieving spaceflight; in return the Space Legatum would promote funding and secure suitable sites for spaceports.
Because you see, the best sites remain on the Equator, and while many peoples living near the Equator ITTL are considerably better off than OTL, none of the leading powers are centered there. The good launch sites are on the eastern coasts of continents or big islands, and the best ones IMHO are the northeast coasts of South America (including the OTL French Guianian site of Kourou) and the east coast of Africa.
The equatorial peoples who are substantially better off in terms of per capita wealth and general level of local technical development do not happen to live on these east coasts; the good launch sites are places where considerable investment from afar will be needed. Vice versa, this also means a relatively clean, fresh start for the launch complexes--they will not be competing for land that is already intensively developed, and so it should be possible to compensate any locals displaced quite generously.
Which is why my skyward turned eyes have been thus redirected toward Somalia with some interest. The Horn of Africa strikes me as superior in having a large fan of launch tracks that don't pass over any land at all for many hundreds of miles away, indeed except for a few islands on a few vectors a clear thousand nautical miles or so (and even those islands are many hundreds of miles downrange) allowing launches to all orbits, from the Equator to polar.
So you see, I'm keenly interested in what has been happening in that particular backwater. Where would we find the right mix of infrastructure or potential for development (ports, railroads, etc) and relatively deserted land near the coast, and what would be the political context on the ground when a world court committee comes bearing a proposal for establishing an international enclave--in return for hosting which, the local government gets both the pork-barrel benefits of a spaceport funded by rich foreign nations on its soil and compensatory development aid as well?
I'd think a Legatum spaceport somewhere between Kismayo Free Port and the tip of the Somalian peninsula would be attractive to the Germans, the Ottomans, the Indians, the British including South Africa, the West Africans, Ethiopians, and the progressive elements of East Africa in roughly that order; via Ethiopian sponsorship Russia would have good access as well.
The upcoming (to an extent of course, ongoing) upheavals in East Africa strike me as a situation in which the World Court system might get involved right as they are also dealing with petitions to establish some sort of international regime with oversight of long-range rocketry and space travel.
I didn't think that the Legatum might be involved in the space race.
It is really more "UNESCO with teeth" than "Mandate with a human face", although, ITTL, thanks to precedents like International Congo (by the way, Venice and Friuli may have established a precedent for Congo in "sueing its way to freedom", to a point) these two notions may be closer than they would be in an OTL-like framework.
I guess that a Legatum-like institution role, if any, may emerge later on in the space movement, when questions like "whose the Moon is" (I'm looking at you, Harriman) begin to become important.
GRAAAH!
Stupid library firewall strikes again!
The current firewall the local council uses* can't tell the difference between the council's own computer network. It's blocked both imgur and deviantart, and won't let me see any image hosted on either site if they've been linked too.
Could you do me a favour and attach it to a post, so that I may bask in its awesome glory, like everyone else can?
*And, according to the library staff, the council's own IT department
Stupid library firewall strikes again!
The current firewall the local council uses* can't tell the difference between the council's own computer network. It's blocked both imgur and deviantart, and won't let me see any image hosted on either site if they've been linked too.
Could you do me a favour and attach it to a post, so that I may bask in its awesome glory, like everyone else can?
*And, according to the library staff, the council's own IT department
Oh, so that's the state where.... wow. James and Charles Brooke would be impressed*.
*though both of them would probably be horrified by how much war has changed since the mid-19th century.
Last edited:
Barack Obama [1], The Bloody Forties and the New East Africa (Kisumu: Nyanza State Historical Series, 2009)
… The withdrawal of Zanzibari troops from the seceding provinces on New Year’s Day, 1940 was greeted with dancing and celebration by people who had come to view Zanzibar as just another colonizer. Few imagined that within months, the celebrations would be drowned in blood. But in retrospect, maybe they should have.
More than a hundred provinces were free of Omani dominion, each of them now a potential nation. Hardly any of them, excepting the indigenous kingdoms that had managed to become direct vassals of Zanzibar, were large enough to be viable as states. Their borders had been drawn arbitrarily, to reward merchants and army officers who were of service to the Sultan, and because the great majority of them had been pre-state societies before Zanzibar absorbed them, there were no precolonial boundaries to fall back on.
The state of administration was little better. During the colonial period, three parallel administrations had operated in the interior: Omani bureaucrats, Britain’s African Civil Service, and whatever government was set up by the local feudalists. During the nineteenth century, British administration became dominant, but Tippu Tip and his successors built up the Zanzibari civil service as an effective rival, even recruiting some of the better British Empire administrators as Omani nobles. The aftermath of the Imperial era saw the effective end of British rule in Tanganyika and the eastern Congo, something that cleared the way for the construction of the Zanzibari state but also left gaps of coverage and experience. And while some of the feudalists, and later the Free Provinces, set up effective governments of their own, most had only begun to do so by the time the 1930s rebellions changed the issue from state-building to independence. [2]
Now, the Zanzibari civil service itself was being withdrawn. Many bureaucrats did stay in their home provinces, and were available to serve the new governments, but they didn’t cover all the necessary functions: Zanzibar had always kept direct control of defense, policing and tax collection, so the newly independent provinces had to construct their revenue and security operations from scratch. Some of them had planned for this moment and begun to recruit police and tax officials; most, however, had not.
The most rational course of action, given the circumstances, would have been for the provinces to form local federations or region-states, as eventually did happen in much of the former empire. But here, parochial loyalties and personal conflicts between leaders reared their heads, and so did ethnic politics. The homelands of East African ethnic groups overlapped more often than not – it wasn’t uncommon for a given province to be home to three or four – and the wars and economic migration during the Zanzibari era had made them even more so. And to add fuel to the fire, feudalists had often favored different ones: for instance, one noble who held land in the Mount Elgon area had favored the Teso in land-use disputes and given them preferment for jobs and subsidies, while his neighbor had done the same for the Sabaots. Attempts at federation consequently fell apart not only over where the borders would be but who would dominate within those borders.
It is thus hardly surprising that people would fall back on their simplest and most immediate loyalties: ethnic group, tribe and clan. And it is also unsurprising that, in a region awash with weapons from the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these loyalties would play themselves out on the battlefield. By late 1940, the Somali provinces had dissolved into clan fighting, and much of the rest of the interior had become an ethnic battleground. What weak governments existed were, by and large, unable to stop the fighting, and in many cases they became active belligerents. On top of this, would-be warlords and conquerors fought for territory, with the territorial and ethnic warfare often overlapping.
These were the Bloody Forties: ancient rivalries and newfound chaos combined with modern weapons. Some describe this era as a civil war, but it was really hundreds of separate wars, sometimes merging but more often occurring on a local scale. And because these wars pitted peoples against other peoples rather than armies against armies, they were indescribable in their brutality, equaling the worst atrocities of the Siege of India or the Great War’s Congo theater. There were expulsions, mass rapes and mutilations, massacres, and in extreme cases, attempts at genocide. More than half the interior was in flames after the first round of fighting, and the massive flows of refugees and defeated soldiers threatened to overwhelm the provinces that had thus far held aloof.
The indigenous states that had stayed intact as Zanzibari vassals were in a somewhat better condition to weather the storm, but they were not immune. In Kagera, to the south and west of Lake Victoria, the nine traditional kingdoms had maintained continuity throughout the colonial period. Because of the stability guaranteed by Omani rule, they hadn’t become revolutionary commonwealths like the other Great Lakes states, instead retaining their cattle-based feudal societies. But radical ideas had crossed the border from Rwanda, Burundi and Ankole, taking root in both Christian and Muslim communities, and once Zanzibar’s stabilizing hand was withdrawn, these notions erupted into popular revolt. By 1942, Kagera had become a peasant-herder commonwealth like its neighbors, albeit retaining the nine kingdoms in a federal structure. It was now a Great Lakes state among others – the first, in fact, in which the radicalism of multiple religions was synthesized.
The events in Kagera were relatively benign, but those elsewhere were not. The kingdom of Ufipa on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika had kept itself out of the first round of fighting, and had even begun to develop a cautious prosperity as an entrepot for trade with Sud-Kivu and the Portuguese empire. But it was unable to withstand the flood of refugees and the accompanying flood of soldiers turned to banditry, and by late 1942 it had collapsed into violent chaos. The same happened to Manyoni in south-central Tanganyika; the northern kingdom of Maralal, which had opted for a closer association with Zanzibar, was able to stay intact with its former patron’s aid, but still faced widespread fighting and instability.
The same happened to many of the province-states that hadn’t succumbed to the initial collapse. The province of Pokot, for example, had kept itself together through 1940 and 1941 with a strong leader and an alliance with the Turkana people to the north, but when the Turkana fell into clan warfare and the violence around Mount Elgon spread northward, it was overwhelmed. And as Manyoni fell, so too did its neighbor Iringa. By 1943, only the strongest notional states remained, and all but one were cases in which several provinces had managed to put aside their differences and federate: the emerging Luo nation of Nyanza which had help from Buganda and Ankole; the Manyara-Dodoma alliance that had a secure border with the rump Zanzibari empire to cover its flank; and a Bembe state based at Kigoma. The sole exception was Kismayo, which had acquired an Indian majority during the colonial era: they, and the local Somalis, called on India for protection, and a free port was declared under the protection of the Indian army. Zanzibar, which stood to gain if the port stayed open, tacitly accepted the situation, and Kismayo would be largely peaceful for the rest of the troubles.
But the rest of East Africa was not. The middle years of the Bloody Forties had arrived, the worst years, in which it seemed like all the region was burning. And the rest of the world was at a loss over what, if anything, to do. Germany, Ethiopia and Bunyoro all moved to occupy the areas near their borders and prevent the fighting from spilling over, all the while struggling to house and feed refugees. The Great Lakes commonwealths guarded their borders against bandits, did their best to care for the innocents who fled, and reoriented their economies and politics toward Ethiopia and the Nile community. The Geledi Sultanate, seeing a chance to expand for the first time in generations, marched into the Somali provinces in April 1944 and by the end of the following year had imposed peace on the warring clans. But the world as a whole, anxiously watching the conflagration between Russia and China, lacked the will to attempt any broader intervention.
One attempt was made, in the eastern Congo in 1943. This area was still technically under international sovereignty, with Britain and Zanzibar acting as joint trustees since the Great War, and now that the trusteeship had dissolved, some argued that the international community had a duty to resume control. But few nations were willing to contribute troops – Britain, the nominal trustee, had no further appetite for African military adventures, and others were on guard against any spillover of the Sino-Russian war – and any German or Portuguese involvement was fraught with the potential for self-aggrandizement. Ultimately, an undermanned force consisting mainly of troops from Scandinavia and the Low Countries bolstered by recruits from western Congo, set out upriver under the Court of Arbitration’s auspices.
Their mission failed, chiefly because they made the mistake of viewing the entire east of Congo as territory to be pacified rather than seeking the help of the local states. As such, they met with organized resistance from those states as well as the ethnic and warlord militias. The operation had some initial successes but quickly turned into a nightmare of guerrilla ambushes and broken supply lines, and after a stinging defeat at the hands of a Sud-Kivu army that heavily outnumbered them, the participating nations lost their will. In March 1945, the last of the international troops pulled out of the region, and the interim administration that had been set up at Alessandriville [3] never set foot there.
It would instead be the local states that ended the fighting in eastern Congo. Samuel the Lamanite was dead, but his republic remained, and it had been augmented by dissident American Mormon immigrants during the 1920s and 30s. It stood out as an island of stability, and in time of war, many of the neighboring peoples were attracted to its messianic Afro-Islamic Mormon ideology. The same went for the descendants of the Eighth King in Ituri [4], whose own radical messianism attracted recruits, and although the more conventional kingdom of Maniema lacked a similar vision, the promise of stability was itself enough for recruits to flock to its banner and villages to invite its army to protect them. By 1947, the three states controlled all of northeast Congo not occupied by another power, although sporadic fighting would continue until the end of the decade.
It was Sud-Kivu, however, that expanded most dramatically. Prince Dietrich, the son of Dietmar Köhler and his mestiço Angolan wife, proved to be his father’s son. He followed Dietmar’s strategy of expanding into areas where his rule would be seen as rescue rather than conquest, and offering high rank and rewards to those who submitted. He was ruthless toward warlords who refused to submit or ethnic militias who continued to commit atrocities, but otherwise treated new territories no differently from established provinces and ensured that they were governed by locally appointed officials. In mid-1946, he had more than doubled his father’s territory in the eastern Congo – although, ironically, his northern border stopped just short of the lake from which his country took its name – and along the way, he had declared the Kingdom of Kivu and promoted himself to its throne. The following year, he ventured east of Lake Tanganyika, absorbing the embattled Bembe state as a vassal and taking over what had once been the Fipa kingdom.
In the meantime, other processes were at work in the lands to the east. The kingdoms and province-states that had weathered the storm had begun to get their feet under them, and were now expanding much as the eastern Congolese states had. And in addition, a network of village and district self-defense groups had come into being. These groups demanded that their members renounce any allegiance to ethnic or clan militias, and in the absence of government, they managed their own affairs using an ethic of mutual aid. They resembled the Islamic quasi-anarchism of Rwanda but built from the ground up, and it is rumored that they had the same author. Over time, a number of these became strong enough to stand off bandits and would-be warlords and act as nuclei of new communities.
By 1948, the fighting was decreasing in intensity and an uncertain stability – albeit in circumstances much reduced from those of the 1930s – had returned to parts of the interior. That July, a group of leaders was able to make their way to Kampala to confer on the region’s future. The consensus was that a series of regional federations was the best chance for peace going forward, but that the emerging states weren’t strong enough to subdue the remaining militias and provide for returning refugees on their own. Although there was some dissension, the majority agreed on a document calling for a two-year interim administration led by the Court of Arbitration, which would act as peacekeeper, facilitator in drawing borders, and arbitrator in the event that the parties failed to agree. Amnesty would be offered to soldiers who surrendered, subject to restitution and participation in formal peacemaking ceremonies.
The petition was presented to the Court in early 1949 and, after consultation with representatives of the great and regional powers, the judges ruled unanimously in its favor. This time, there was no shortage of nations willing to commit resources: the Sino-Russian conflict was over, and its aftermath had reinforced the growing consensus in favor of collective security. Ethiopia, which was a strong proponent of the petition, took the lead in assembling a force – it was judged best that Zanzibar not do so, although it contributed money – and the temporary administration arrived in Kisumu at the end of the year.
The two-year transitional period was largely one of taking stock. The last of the militias would not be subdued until 1953, and renewed fighting sometimes erupted when restorative-justice processes broke down, but international and local forces quickly took effective control on the ground and began collecting weapons. Refugees returned home, first in a trickle and then a stream, allowing losses to be assessed for the first time with some accuracy. Those losses were of apocalyptic proportions: the population of the region as a whole had declined by 25 to 30 percent, and in some areas by half or more. The destruction of homes and infrastructure was incalculable, and public health – a dire necessity given how the Congo fever always accompanied war and refugees – was in ruins. With peace at hand, the rebuilding could begin, but it would be a daunting task.
The court, acting as a regional super-government – the provinces which had effective governments and the districts reliably controlled by self-defense militias governed themselves with the court as referee and fiscal conduit, while areas without effective governments were under its direct rule – also began the task of drawing borders. For the most part, it was able to do so with the parties’ agreement. There was a broad consensus that the kingdoms which had existed before the Bloody Forties would maintain their independence (or, in Manyoni’s case, be restored), that the eastern Congolese states would keep what they had taken, and that the existing status of Nyanza and Kismayo would be recognized. The territories that remained would be grouped into two federations, Kenia and Tanganyika, with strong local autonomy and internationally-assisted collective security arrangements. [5]
The only two major disagreements concerned the occupied parts of northeast Congo and the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Many regional leaders urged the occupying powers to quit the Congo, as Ethiopia had agreed to withdraw from the Turkana areas it had seized during the war, and turn the occupied zone into a third federation. The court, however, found that there were no local institutions capable of assuming control and that an immediate withdrawal would likely start further fighting, so it instead confirmed the occupying powers as trustees until such time as the entire Congo was decolonized. And despite the Tanganyika Federation’s claim to the lakeshore area, the court awarded it to Kivu after ascertaining that the kingdom could provide more effective government and that its people were not discontented under the Köhlers’ rule. This was the one aspect of the court’s award that would lead to lasting bitterness: the border dispute would not be resolved until the 1980s, and a Fipa government in exile exists to this day.
On New Year’s Day 1952, the new East African nations celebrated their independence for a second time, as they had done twelve years before. This occasion was a far more subdued one than the first, in recognition of the task that lay ahead. They had begun to pull themselves up from the ruins, but the material, cultural and moral scars would be a long time healing…
*******
Aishwarya Trivedi, East Africa Under the Omani Raj (Zanzibar Univ. Press, 2007)
… Oman faced the 1940s as a shrunken but more cohesive empire; the provinces that wished to leave were gone, the interior provinces that remained were fully equal to those of the coast, and a democratically elected Majlis took its place alongside the house of nobles. The sultan was himself left-leaning and committed to reform, and sought a genuine break with the old order. The realm would face hard economic times from the loss of trade with the interior, but it was at peace and could chart its own future. [6]
The first Majlis election in 1941 brought the empire’s simmering radicalism into the halls of power: candidates appealed to Abacarist concepts of self-government and liberty, the Muslim anarcho-syndicalism of revolutionary Rwanda, and most of all Tippu Tip’s prophetic Ibadism with its emphasis on social justice. The left held a near-majority in the lower house, and the onset of recession gave impetus to its demands for social insurance and democratization of provincial governments.
The sultan was not unsympathetic to their agenda, and also saw in it a chance to further weaken the nobility. The nobles had elected him, but most of those who had voted in his favor belonged to the provinces that had seceded: of those that remained, a majority had voted against him and many were outright hostile. He was more comfortable as a constitutional monarch of a popularly governed state than he was facing an entrenched noble class jealous of its remaining power and privilege.
His chance came after the Majlis passed a bill requiring all provinces to have responsible elected governments, only for the nobles to reject it. The Sultan asked the ulema to resolve the dispute as the 1939 constitution permitted it to do, arguing that democratic self-rule was a religious mandate. And the ulema, in which protégés of Tippu Tip predominated, obliged: in a ruling replete with quotations from Paulo Abacar the Elder’s Thawra[7] and references to Ibadi concepts of justice, it held that democratic government was the only way to ensure that the requirements of consultation and consensus rule were truly met. Indeed, the court applied that principle not only to the provinces but to the nation, holding that whenever the Majlis and the nobles disagreed, the Majlis must attempt to reach a compromise but was entitled to prevail if such proved impossible.
The more discontented among the nobles would have to be bought off with subsidies and honors, but at a stroke, their power had been neutered. Henceforth, except in the autonomous Yao kingdom (which had its own ulema) and in mostly-Christian Kirinyaga, the Majlis and the religious court would be the real powers, and any threat the nobles posed to the Sultan’s throne was defused. There would be danger down the road from the ulema assuming the role of super-constitutional court, but for now, it had brought real democracy to Zanzibar.
In the wake of the ruling, the rest of the left’s reforms passed with little difficulty. In 1945, a system of free clinics was set up, served in rural areas by a corps of itinerant doctors modeled on the jajis; a 1947 bill nationalized water resources; a series of laws enacted between 1944 and 1953 established a comprehensive system of social insurance. The recession and resulting revenue shortages meant that benefits were often meager, but they were enough to keep millions from falling into poverty, especially when augmented by the parallel institutions that the anarcho-syndicalists had created. Indeed, the Sultan was able in some cases to co-opt the anarchists into the state as social service administrators, in exchange for subsidies to worker-managed enterprises and autonomous rural collectives.
In a not entirely unrelated development, the empire also finally shed its “Omani” label. The nation had not been Omani in any meaningful sense for decades, but inertia had kept it from changing; now, however, the new majority saw no point in continuing to call it after its old ruling class. The name “Zanzibari Empire” was proposed, but rejected as exalting the capital over the other provinces; in the end, the state would enter the 1950s as the Empire of East Africa.
Exactly how it would fit into the new East African order was a matter yet to be settled. Many Zanzibaris had felt responsible for the brutal fighting in their former provinces, and as the fighting died down, there was an unresolved sense of guilt that the political situation had left the empire unable to intervene. The Court of Arbitration’s assumption of trusteeship was seen as a chance to make a new start and rebuild goodwill by contributing money and technical aid, and when the interior states regained independence, Zanzibar looked forward to renewing its relationship with them as equals. But the interior nations suspected that these overtures masked a hidden desire for commercial advantage, and in too many cases, they were right…
*******
David Marsden, The Colonial Century: Britain’s Strange Career in Africa (London: Macmillan, 1990)
… In Empire Office banter, the Nyasaland Protectorate was often called the Nyasaland Afterthought, and it was so in more ways than one. Founded by British colonial officers who valued Nyasaland mainly as a right-of-way for the Cape to Kilwa railroad, the protectorate was always the Office’s stepchild. No more than a few hundred Europeans, mainly missionaries and coffee planters, ever settled there, and colonial rule, while arbitrary, paternalistic and sometimes stifling to native elites, had little impact on the lives of the rank and file.
Such a colony – and one whose borders conformed fairly closely to those of a precolonial state – would at first glance be a prime candidate for early inclusion in Wells’ All-Dominion Empire. There was little in it the Empire valued, its society was conservative and culturally cohesive, and its elites would have been perfectly happy to accept George V as the king of a self-governing state. But geopolitics conspired against such a plan.
Cohesive Nyasaland might be, but it was too small and poor to bear the cost of its own defense, and it was in a hard neighborhood. Left to itself, it – and its part of the rail connection between South Africa and Zanzibar – would be vulnerable to Portuguese attack, and once violence erupted in Tanganyika and the eastern Congo, a second threat opened up. Under the circumstances, independence was out of the question.
The obvious solution was to join Nyasaland to South Africa; it had a border with Mutapa, and as part of the South African Union, it would be more than capable of protecting itself. But Mutapa, in addition to being a member state of the union, was a dominion of Portugal, and South Africa in general had friendly relations with the Portuguese empire. Neither Mutapa nor the union wanted to take on a responsibility that might commit them to war with Portugal in the event of trouble.
So Nyasaland – or Malawi, as its national movement preferred – went through the 1940s in an odd sort of limbo. Responsible government was awarded in 1945, but the governor’s retention of a legislative veto and police and fiscal power left the elites unsatisfied. The nationalist party became more radical, with many who would previously have welcomed dominion status now wanting to leave the empire entirely, and sedition arrests grew in frequency. Britain was in the unenviable position of holding a colony that neither it nor its subjects wanted to keep, but that it couldn’t afford to cut loose.
Recognizing that matters could only become worse, London reached out to Portugal, now free of the Novo Reino, in an attempt to heal the lingering bitterness of Great War diplomacy and achieve a settlement in which Nyasaland could become independent safely. The exploratory talks that began in 1953, eventually including representatives from South Africa and Nyasaland itself as well as Britain and Portugal, would ultimately lay the groundwork for the Central African Accords…
*******
Amadeo Mukadi, “The Decolonization of the Congo,” African History Quarterly 59:288-96 (Fall 2005)
… The Congolese greeted the independence era with a growing sense of impatience. British colonies were becoming dominions; France’s colonial subjects had been made citizens; the Copperbelt and Südwestafrika had entered freely-chosen relationships with Germany; even Portugal was starting to treat its African domains more equitably. Congo was still a ward of the court, with its people treated as incapable of self-government and its resources exploited by foreign profiteers.
The legal victories of the 1930s [8], which had seemed revolutionary at first, were far less satisfying in the changed atmosphere of the 1940s. The Congolese had won the right to form political parties and civic associations, but not to self-government – as a Congo Reform Congress orator would put it, “we have the right to ask for what we won’t get.” Freedom of speech and cultural expression, which the Court of Arbitration had also recognized, were hedged public safety exceptions that were often used to suppress labor protests and close down unions. The courts did enforce labor laws with increasing frequency, and a 1943 decision prohibited discrimination in places of public accommodation, but the Congolese wanted more than that: they wanted to control their own destiny.
At the same time, the fighting in East Africa persuaded the Congress of the dangers of decolonizing too precipitously. An independent state needed institutions capable of assuming the functions of government, and Congo didn’t have such institutions: it didn’t have them because successive colonial authorities had prevented them from being created, but that didn’t change the fact that they didn’t exist. The Congo, if given immediate independence, would be a vast but very weak state, primed for conflict between ethnic groups and local power bases.
This was enough to convince the Congress, which had planned a campaign of protests demanding independence, to change its approach. Instead, in 1945, it filed a petition with the Court of Arbitration demanding that Congo be prepared for independence. The petition included a blueprint for a ten-year transitional period in which Africans would be admitted to the senior civil service, legislative and law enforcement bodies created, physical and administrative infrastructure built, and responsible government granted. At the end of that period, Congo would be granted unconditional independence.
A number of colonial administrators, including the incumbent governor-general, sided with the Congress, recognizing that the age of colonialism was passing and that the court could not justify keeping the Congolese as wards indefinitely. But others, affected by the widespread prejudice against pre-state peoples, argued that Congo was not yet ready to begin the transition, and these had powerful support among the rubber, forestry and mining companies that profited from colonial rule. The hearing on the petition stretched out over months, with both sides’ lawyers presenting mountains of evidence on the capabilities of the Congolese and the best practices in preparing colonies for self-rule.
The ultimate decision, issued in March 1948, was an obvious compromise, prompted by the Chief Justice’s wish that the court speak unanimously on such a fundamental matter. The court did rule that colonial powers had a duty to prepare their subjects for independence, and that the Congolese had a natural right to eventual self-government. However, “in light of the Congo’s present state of development,” the court declined to set a specific timetable or to create provincial legislatures immediately. Instead, the transition would begin with the recruitment of Africans to upper civil service jobs and the restructuring of administrative departments, to be followed by elected municipal councils. Provincial and national elections would follow “when the Congolese had gained sufficient experience at local government,” with such experience to be judged by the governor of each province.
Neither side was pleased by the ruling. The concessionaires realized they would soon have to work with Congolese officials and even junior ministers, and that they would have to begin treating their workers more equitably or at least give the new officials a share of the spoils. The Congress, for its part, suspected that it was a way to delay independence and give the colonial interests more time to entrench themselves. Nonetheless, both agreed to abide by the decision for the time being.
Both would, however, find their suspicions justified. The companies were dismayed to find that, rather than the compliant candidates they proposed, the provincial governments took the ruling seriously and appointed young university graduates and experienced junior administrators to high-ranking posts. These, in turn, broke the cozy relationship the concessionaires had previously enjoyed with the Congolese government, enforcing labor and conservation laws vigorously and even prosecuting corporate executives.
At the same time, the Congress’ worst fears about the 1950 municipal elections were realized, as the companies and their allies in the colonial service used a combination of intimidation and bribery to influence the outcome. The Congress won a majority of seats in the urban councils, but most of the rural districts were taken by independents from chiefly families who were in the rubber barons’ pockets and – worse yet, given the recent experience of East Africa – won their seats through appeals to ethnic loyalty.
And as the Congress also suspected, worse was to come: although the conservatives in the colonial government secretly approved of the elections’ outcome, they also cited it as proof that Congo remained affected by tribalism and was not ready for responsible government at the provincial or national level. The governor-general issued an ordinance in 1952 requiring that each province appoint an advisory council with a majority of African members, but he could do no more on his own authority.
By 1954, after a second round of municipal elections failed to improve its position, the Congress decided to resume its original plan of direct action. It prepared another court petition, but at the same time, it declared that a program of strikes, protests and civil disobedience would begin immediately and continue until real concessions were made. In early 1955, matters came to a head in a way that would affect not only the international zone but the regions still under German and Portuguese trusteeship…
_______
[1] A very distant ATL-cousin, albeit in the same family line. Obama (b. 1961) is a professor of public administration at the University of Nyanza, holding degrees in architecture and urban planning, who has held several senior civil service posts and junior ministries. He is credited with the design of the modern city of Kisumu and has become a significant public intellectual since his resignation from government, although his one bid for elected office failed. He is married to Michelle Robinson, an economist of mixed British and Igbo ancestry, whose parents immigrated to Nyanza during the period of international administration, and has daughters Akinyi (b. 1992) and Caroline (b. 1996) and son Barack Jr. (b. 2001).
[2] See posts 916, 3108, 3872 and 4177.
[3] OTL Kinshasa.
[4] See post 1044.
[5] A map of the final borders is on the previous page at post 5173.
[6] See post 4890.
[7] See post 139.
[8] See post 4731.
I was thinking something about TTL's technology: will there be nuclear weapons and space flights?
Awesomely rich and well-thought update.
Looks like that, while having passed a fairly nasty decolonization phase (sort of worse than IOTL), most of Central-Eastern Africa is headed to a much brighter future.
Also, it seems that Ethiopia is still growing in importance and influence to become the local most important regional power.
Looks like that, while having passed a fairly nasty decolonization phase (sort of worse than IOTL), most of Central-Eastern Africa is headed to a much brighter future.
Also, it seems that Ethiopia is still growing in importance and influence to become the local most important regional power.
Wait, isn't Lake Victoria named differently ITTL? I seem to recall it being called in a different term during the Nile War.
Well, it certainly sounds like the forties are putting paid to any idea that this timeline is all sweetness and light!
Very likely the latter, given that the mountain's name is pronounced that way.
And yes, that is an Indian port, or at least a free port under Indian protection.
Falecius is right - the Legatum concept, which is primarily about preservation and local control of historic or ecologically important sites, isn't really suited to scientific projects or voyages of discovery. I won't say much more now, because the space program(s) will be part of the 1955-70 cycle, but I'll say that space development will be driven less by military imperatives (although those imperatives won't entirely be absent after the Russia-China conflict) and that there will be some degree of internationalization, although, at least initially, it won't extend to everything that is done in space.
He had to show up sooner or later, didn't he?
I was originally going to add that he lost the election because his partial Gujarati parentage and residence in India as a child made many voters question whether he was a true Luo, but I decided that Luo birthers were a bit much.
Kivu has a future - although that future might not always involve being a feudal state under a warlord-adventurer family. (The family might contrive to stay on top if it plays its cards right, but in a modernizing region, the feudalism will have a sell-by date.)
The devastated parts of East Africa will rebuild - Cambodia and Rwanda did, after all - but they've suffered a catastrophe comparable to those (my very rough estimate is 2.5 to 3 million dead), so they'll have collective PTSD for a long time. The East Africans in the war zone will still be recovering in the 1970s.
Zanzibar and the Great Lakes states, of course, have a brighter present and a more certain future, although the Zanzibaris haven't hit their last bump in the road.
The empire is gone, long live the empire. Oman proper is a British dominion, with the urban population just beginning to challenge tribal-dominated feudalism.
With the colonial powers withdrawing, it's the most populous and militarily powerful country in the region, and its industrial development has given it much more economic clout than in OTL. The Nile War has also catapulted it to a leading role among the riparian states, and it's using that position for more than just water management issues.
Ethiopia probably won't be the most ideologically influential state in the region - Zanzibar and the Great Lakes commonwealths will have more of an impact on culture and political worldviews - but it's a diplomatic powerhouse and likely to remain one.
Damn, you're right. It's called Nalubale (the Baganda name), and while a British writer might refer to it as Lake Victoria, a Luo from Nyanza never would.
I'm not going to actually change the update, because I hate that "last edited by" message, but please consider it amended.
I'd have thought the Great War and the Indian war of independence would have done that, but yes, the 40s are a bad time in many places, with the legacy of colonialism and unresolved issues from the Great War coming home to roost. I've always said that TTL's international system will be the product of much painful experience - progressive ideologies and more equitable attitudes toward non-Europeans are part of the equation too, but the painful experience is necessary.
I suppose you need to have sticking points arise here and there in most any timeline, and this one seems no different. Of course, we just saw the invasion of Natalia fairly recently, which thankfully was rather short from what I could see. East Africa looks to be in for interesting times, with the lack of a cohesive set of government institutions and being relatively unstable as a result. And by unstable, of course, I mean bloody...
As for the growth of more fair treatment of non-Europeans, having traumatic experiences teach the needed lessons to arrive at those new conclusions are needed to shock hard-set preconceptions out of place IMO.
As for the growth of more fair treatment of non-Europeans, having traumatic experiences teach the needed lessons to arrive at those new conclusions are needed to shock hard-set preconceptions out of place IMO.
We've been discussing those extensively in this thread, given that the timeline is moving close to when those would be practical. It's been heavily implied by Jonathan that the Germans are presently working on nuclear weapons...
Anyways, on the subject of an 'internationalization' of spaceflight, my opinion is that it's quite likely, to some extent (at least, there will be more joint missions along the lines of the ISS, and that will probably be in some sense thought of as the 'typical' way of organizing particularly complicated space missions like lunar landings or space stations). This, however, has less to do with the Legatum per se than with the confluence of a number of features of the timeline.
First, and perhaps most obviously, the mid-century world is not going to be dominated by competition between two superpowers, but instead between multiple Great Powers--the British, French, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Americans, Ottomans, Italians, Russians, and Indians, to start. This means that major cooperation in space missions won't require (initially) two permanent enemies to get along, but rather a mere congruence of interests between two powers. For example, if the United States announces that it is going to launch a lunar mission, it might make sense for, say, the British and Germans to cooperate in launching their own lunar mission, with the British (say) supplying a launch location and launch vehicle while the Germans supply a lunar lander.
(At the same time, as I've also mentioned before, this multiplicity of actors means that competition is also given a boost; if one side decides it doesn't want to play anymore, there are plenty of other parties that can decide to fill the void)
Second, and more subtly, however, this means that parallels to the real-life efforts to internationalize space--the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty, especially the latter--are far less likely to be sabotaged and undermined by chronic suspicion by each 'bloc'. Such attempts are quite likely, in my opinion, given that as I just mention they were done IOTL, where there has not been an example of a true international regime administering some area, let alone doing it at all well. In this timeline, it seems even more likely that some such administration would be set up, probably under Court auspices; if nothing else, geosynchronous orbital space (even IOTL under an international regime, that of the ITU) and, eventually, low orbit debris removal would be strong candidates for internationalization (particularly because debris removal tends to imply ASAT capabilities, so going to the Court will be a straightforward way of defusing concerns about such systems being misused).
Third, the previous point about the world being multipolar also implies a certain congruence of capabilities. In reality, during the 1960s only the United States and Soviet Union really had space programs; although the British, French, Japanese, and Chinese all had their own efforts, they had nowhere near the same capability level. That meant that neither the Soviets (who anyways were not allies or friends with anyone with independent space capability) nor the United States actually could cooperate with other powers on space missions, to any significant or deep extent (beyond the level of, say, flying some European or Japanese scientific instruments, along the lines of the use of Hasselblad cameras on the lunar missions). Once Europe and Japan did develop significant capabilities, the United States began pretty freely and deeply cooperating with them on various missions, Freedom/ISS being the obvious example (where not only have the partners contributed a number of modules directly, but as part of the barter agreements many of the nominally American modules were actually built by EADS or the Japanese), but I can also cite the Galileo mission (where the spacecraft's propulsion system was built in Germany) or the Cassini-Huygens mission (where Huygens was supplied by ESA) as examples. Obviously the United States has not been a perfect partner in this regard--too often the missions are thought of as being American 'plus'--but on the whole we have done a fair bit internationally since it made sense to do so.
As for overarching international control, a la the ESA, however, I don't see that being a general approach incorporating all actors. ESA started up primarily because none of the European states had the economic, technical, or political bases by themselves to pursue a large-scale space program, particularly the ESA's Big Three (France, Germany, and Italy) and Could Be Big But Decided Not To (Britain). ITTL, that obviously is not the case, and none of them have any particular reason to give up control over their space programs to an international body. At the risk of stating the obvious, while this timeline has invented or developed 'post-Westphalianism,' at each step these new trans-sovereign bodies arise due to some particular cause, eg. the state of Alsace-Lorraine has to do with an attempt to settle the Great War in such a way that it wouldn't be repeated, not because Germany and France just one day woke up and decided that it would be a jolly good idea for them both to have rights and responsibilities in the region. Outside of some specific areas, like orbital debris management, geosynchronous orbital positions management, or lunar property management, I can't see any particular reason for any given country surrendering its ability to manage its own space program to some new international body.
However, this doesn't mean ESA-like bodies won't exist! As I noted before, there are a number of candidates in the less-wealthy parts of the world where resource sharing could be vital to help them develop their space programs, such as West Africa, and Imperial programs could be viewed as a form of this (a British program is likely to include Australia and Canada, for example).
Rereading the update, just how developed are the Geledi Sultanate?
Also, I am massively interested in Samuel's kingdom of the Lamanites. How mixed are its citizenry? How does Salt Lake City view the polity and the dissident Mormons whom emigrated there? How developed is its infrastructure? How does the political structure of the kingdom work? Considering the 'Kingdom' part of the title, I'm inclined to think they have an elected system of kingship ala. West Africa or Zanzibar, or am I wrong?
Also, I am massively interested in Samuel's kingdom of the Lamanites. How mixed are its citizenry? How does Salt Lake City view the polity and the dissident Mormons whom emigrated there? How developed is its infrastructure? How does the political structure of the kingdom work? Considering the 'Kingdom' part of the title, I'm inclined to think they have an elected system of kingship ala. West Africa or Zanzibar, or am I wrong?
Will Kismayo be used as the launch centre for any future Indian space agency, or are there better sites?
Kivu's Sarawakesque situation is interesting, but I do get that the end of the regime will come; the only difference is whether Kohler will see the writing on the wall and adapt (which they seem to be notoriously good at), or if he tries too hard to hold onto his kingdom.
Kivu's Sarawakesque situation is interesting, but I do get that the end of the regime will come; the only difference is whether Kohler will see the writing on the wall and adapt (which they seem to be notoriously good at), or if he tries too hard to hold onto his kingdom.
iddt3
Donor
So I've been having a terrible, terrible thought lately. You know what fictional universe stands in starkest contrast to the one? The one that people love to hate? What happens if you somehow slam together the Male-verse and the Draka-verse? The narrative engines underlying both are completely different, but part of me just really wants to see a descendent of Abacar, in company with Indian Socialists, Venetian Anarchists, and a certain Ethiopian Empress, raising the flag of the International Court over the ruins of the Archon's Palace.