Malê Rising

It's an interesting place, certainly, but also a potentially volatile one. The Horn of Africa is, in TTL as in OTL, one of the main canaries in the climate change coal mine, and ITTL the process is starting earlier. That means migration and competition over land and water, which is mediated somewhat but not entirely by TTL's stronger Ethiopian and Geledi states. Clan rivalries among Somalis in Sanaag are growing stronger rather than dissipating, and those who migrate to other countries often bring their customs and feuds with them. Many urban Somalis consider their country cousins an embarrassment, but the states of the Horn and East Africa have to take their conflicts seriously.

The settlement Ibrahim is trying to broker is, as you say, consistent with Xeer and its focus on compensation - he realizes that if he wants to make peace, he has to play by Somali rules. The procedures aren't what they would be in Xeer jurisprudence, but it's common enough in Somalia for disputes to be negotiated between the parties.

Somalia would be an ideal place for Desalinization technologies to take off if it has the tech base. Maybe relatively low tech ones like this? http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/
 
Telynk that's some interesting developments for Native autonomy and interband/reserve government. Are they the only group to achieve such an organization (though that's probably more Jonathan's determination)?

Jonathan, so the second generation of Singh's line has taken over (can't remember if they have mentioned before). That was a nice view into the area's development, especially with so much aerospace business at stake.
 
Somalia would be an ideal place for Desalinization technologies to take off if it has the tech base. Maybe relatively low tech ones like this? http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/

It's starting to take off already by 1978 - the early-onset climate change regions are more developed ITTL, and thus have been putting more resources into the water-shortage problem. The plants being built in the 1970s are early models, nowhere near as advanced as what we can build in OTL's present, but are already part of the master plan in many arid coastal zones.

Of course, desalination comes with its own environmental issues - nothing is without cost.

Anyway, after a few attempts to plot out the next academic update, I've decided that thematic posts aren't really working - I can't cover the whole world in a reasonable amount of space, and thematic updates also don't lend themselves to resolving the cliffhangers from the 1955-70 cycle. So I think I'll do the post-1970 cycle geographically after all, treating core regions in detail and non-core regions less so, and weave the international economic and political developments into them. Strange that the last cycle is the hardest one to get my head around - or maybe not so strange, given the scope of the divergences and the uncharted waters into which TTL's world is sailing.

The next academic update will thus be southern Africa, although there might be one more narrative first while I'm thinking it through - the keywords that occurred to me were "Monrovia Chinatown."
 
Not much to say in that latest update, but I do like the notion of ITTL Moghadishu Somalis wearing dhotis. I always have a peculiar interest in people wearing clothes from different cultures or regions. :D
 
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Maria Teresa Cardoso, The Honor of Fools: Portugal and the End of Empire (Luanda: Nova Imprensa, 2011)

… Portugal entered the 1970s believing that its internal conflicts had been largely solved, and that the remaining ones were at least under control. It would soon learn differently, and ironically enough, the catalyst would come from the world’s premier conflict-resolution tribunal.

On 11 February 1972, the Court of Arbitration issued its ruling in Kingdom of Yeke v. Republic of Portugal, capping a five-year dispute between Portugal and its largest princely state. Yeke had called on Portuguese aid against a domestic uprising, Portugal had sought to condition that aid on steps toward democratization, and Yeke claimed that the Great War-era treaty between the countries as amended by the Central African Accords of 1965 didn’t allow such conditions. [1] With the parties unable to settle their differences at the negotiating table, the issue went to court.

The litigation process was drawn-out as often happened in the Court of Arbitration, with the court examining records from the Great War through the 1960s, hearing the report of a special master and taking testimony from officers and diplomats, including those few from the Great War period who were still alive. In conferences and arguments, the court made clear that it was deeply divided, and it was no less so when it issued its judgment: the seventeen judges, between them, wrote eleven opinions, and the web of concurrences and partial dissents made the thread of the ruling hard to follow. But the decision itself was clear enough: by ten votes to seven, the court ruled in favor of Yeke, and held that Portugal was required to provide unconditional aid to the kingdom’s government.

The judgment was a controversial one at a time when there were increasing calls for international humanitarian intervention in places like the former German Congo. [2] It was widely condemned as a throwback, and by the 1980s, the Court itself would partly retreat from it. But, as others argued, it was the inevitable product of the international system that had grown up over the last two decades. Treaties were the cornerstone of the Consistory network, and to a majority of judges, that meant the sanctity of treaties was paramount. They were unwilling to recognize a rule of law that would allow countries to selectively disregard treaties – and the powerful regulatory agencies that many treaties had created – based on subjective criteria. Domestic human rights violations might be a concern of the international community as a whole – several judges in the Yeke majority suggested that the court was now willing to accept such cases if brought by parties with standing – but not something for neighboring countries to take upon themselves.

The Yeke judgment was also, surprisingly as it may seem, driven by anti-colonialism. Since the beginning of the independence era, and especially since the collapse of its own colonial venture in the Congo, the Court had become increasingly hostile to colonial and quasi-colonial relationships. Three of the court’s opinions, representing a total of five judges, expressed distaste for the idea that one party to a treaty could compel another to change its form of government, arguing that after Portugal had trumpeted the Central African Accords as creating an equal relationship between it and the princely states, it could not then impose conditions on the defensive pact the accords created. And two of them made the point that Portugal could divest itself of any responsibility for its princely states’ internal troubles by the simple expedient of granting them full independence. In some ways, as the critics said, this was a holding that privileged “international persons” – be they nations, federations, princely states or agencies – over persons of flesh and blood, but it also reaffirmed that relations between governments must proceed on a basis of equality.

The Portuguese parliament briefly considered cutting its ties with Central Africa as some of the majority judges had suggested and attempting to renegotiate its relationship with the princely states from first principles. Portugal was just twenty years past a revolution in which it had been largely taken over by its colonies, and a majority of its legislators had no desire to maintain even the vestiges of colonialism. But economic interest and nationalism pulled them other ways. The copper wealth of Yeke, and the geographic bridge that Yeke and Portuguese Central Africa provided between Angola and Mozambique, weren’t things that Portgual was yet willing to give up, especially with its other sources of wealth doing poorly. And those who had fought for a unitary republic – and, more prosaically, struggled to bring the princely states into their patronage network – might be willing to revise the republic’s relationship with those states, as they had done in 1965, but not to divest them.

So, instead of independence, what happened was a massive escalation of the operations that were already occurring against the rebels and separatists in the princely states. This war would become known as the Fool’s Errand: the last colonial war in Africa, fought by a mostly-African government. It would drag on for years, and incredibly for more than a decade, as service against the Central African guerrillas became a rite of passage for conscripts and as blood and treasure were spilled in an endless and inconclusive conflict. As this went on, the promise of the previous decade, and the goodwill that had followed the settlement between metropolitan Portugal and its former colonies [3], became more and more hollow.

And this happened at a time when Portugal was under increasing political and economic stress. The recession of the 1970s, arising from the dislocation caused by increasing industrial automation and global economic integration, wasn’t as dire as the depression of sixty years earlier, but it was bad enough, especially in a country like Portugal where Angolan oil was a major source of revenue. The investment that flowed to Portugal as a relatively low-cost producer, and the creeping industrialization of coastal Angola and Mozambique, didn’t make up for the drop in commodity prices, and with the war forcing many Angola-Mozambique shipments to be made by sea or rerouted through Kazembe, industries in one province that depended on goods from others found their production costs rising. Unemployment rose sharply, and the safety net was severely strained; parts of the country even experienced some de-urbanization as unemployed workers returned to their villages to engage in subsistence farming.

The socialist Catholic political consensus that had held sway since the overthrow of the Novo Reino was also wearing out its welcome. There was still broad support for an economic and public welfare system based on Catholic social teaching, but feminism was becoming more widespread among urban women, and there was also growing opposition to the remnants of cultural censorship and the sometimes-patronizing hand with which social services were delivered. As well, the asymmetric federalism into which Portugal had fallen largely by accident stirred resentment in provinces that didn’t have local autonomy, especially the far-flung ones in Asia and northwest Africa that wanted the freedom to integrate with their neighbors.

This was the 1970s in Portugal, often known as the Decade of Fools. It wasn’t entirely that: the republic remained as culturally creative as ever, and the racial tensions of prior decades receded into the background as coastal Angola and Mozambique settled into comfortable mestiço societies. But even aside from the Fools’ Errand as background, this was an age when no government seemed able to come to grips with the entirety of the country’s problems. The government of 1974-76, which tried hard to broker a peace in Central Africa, was inept in its economic stewardship, driving unemployment to levels above 20 percent; the following government succeeded in stabilizing the economy but was sharply reactionary and fell after ordering soldiers to fire on student demonstrators; the one after that implemented cautious social reforms but took a hard line on the conflict in the princely states. The easing of the global recession and the rebound of commodity prices at the end of the 1970s helped somewhat, but not enough: Portugal’s malaise was too fundamental for any of the established parties to cure.

As this series of governments proceeded to their farcical conclusions, pressure built up on the streets: among urban women, among the unemployed, among disillusioned veterans of the Yeke war. By 1980, it seemed that new political parties were forming on almost a daily basis, and the leveling effect of military service meant that these parties included Portuguese, Africans and Asians alike. But the patronage system, by then entrenched for half a century, prevented these parties from gaining a firm foothold. In hard times, patronage was more important than ever – everyone who wanted a job or a place on the welfare rolls depended on his patron to secure it – and the price of patronage was political support. However sympathetic the disenfranchised might be to the new social movements, they didn’t dare vote for them.

The consequences of this were twofold. Marginal communities and regions began forming parallel institutions as had often happened elsewhere, ranging from mutual-aid groups among the urban unemployed to councils of notables in East Timor or Portuguese Guinea who made accommodations with neighboring countries that the law nominally forbade. And the new movements’ target increasingly became the political system itself rather than particular policies. The urban and rural mutual-aid societies and veterans’ unions openly sought to break the patronage networks by providing alternative sources of social welfare, freeing people at the margins to desert the political machines.

In the early 1980s, many of the new parties were gathered into a loose alliance that combined secular reformers with more radical elements of the Church. One of the alliance’s chief architects, and one who straddled both worlds, was Laura Moreira, a professor of law at the Pontifical University of Luanda. Descended from both Portuguese and Kongo nobility (“and also peasants and prisoners,” as she always hastened to add), she was noted for her radically feminist theology and labor activism. She was the first to conceive of the new politics in terms of a strike, arguing that a collective withdrawal from the machines that provided livelihood to so many would have to provide for itself in the same way as a withdrawal from work and to defend against thugs sent to break them up. She also switched easily between the rhetoric of the young veterans, the ritual of the metropolitan Church and the vernacular uses that had been approved for African Catholics [4], brokering the accords that would bring them together and that would connect them to sources of money and support in the Portuguese diaspora.

The new movements reached critical mass at the same time as the war in Central Africa. For more than a decade, the army had won nearly all the pitched battles but was unable to subdue the guerrillas who took shelter in mountainous areas and across the Congo border. The 1980s saw that balance change: as both sides engaged in a downward spiral of reprisals, a growing number of princely-state soldiers deserted or defected to the rebels, and the Portuguese army sometimes found itself facing troops that it had armed and equipped. By 1984, the guerrillas controlled large parts of eastern Yeke and threatened to besiege the capital.

All this combined to create a perfect storm in the election of 1985, which came out little short of a revolution. The parties that had competed for dominance since the declaration of the Republic were swept from power, winning scarcely a third of the parliamentary seats as millions of clients deserted their political patrons. The alliance of new parties came in with a majority, forming a cabinet in which nearly half the ministers were under 30 years old. A collection of independent candidates, many of them parish priests or leaders of the traditional labor movement, rounded out the parliament, and cooperated with the new majority on individual issues.

The incoming government’s first priority was to make peace in Yeke and Portuguese Central Africa – a measure for which, by now, all sides were ready. A ceasefire was declared before 1985 was out, and in early 1987, final peace terms were agreed. National unity governments in which the guerrillas and opposition parties were represented would take office in each of the princely states and organize elections within a year, with the post-election governments free to choose between full independence, continued association under the Central African Accords, and incorporation as autonomous provinces of the Portuguese Republic. In the event, Yeke itself and a few of the Central African princely states withdrew from the Accords and went their own way, with the others splitting roughly equally between annexation and association.

At the same time, Portugal began a series of domestic reforms that would finish in 1997. Church and state were formally separated, with family law transferred to the civil realm and the government taking full control of social welfare programs, although in practice the Church would continue to have a profound political influence. Civil service, business licensing, scholarships and government aid were professionalized, taking away the bank of favors that had enabled the political machines to hold their clients. And in stages over a ten-year period, the federalism that had been extended to metropolitan Portugal, Goa and Lunda was expanded to include the whole republic, with each province having internal self-government and limited capacity for regional diplomacy and with ten members of parliament representing Portuguese citizens living abroad. For most, the diplomatic authority remained more theoretical than real, but East Timor would join the southeast Asian trade association, the Azores would seek closer ties to Brazil and the United States, and Mozambique would follow Goa as an associate member of the Indian Union.

This period would also see an economic recovery, with the Central African peace dividend and renewed oil revenue invested in industrial development and the accession of Kazembe, Barotseland and South Africa to the Central African Accords providing much-needed labor mobility and foreign investment. The transformation of the Accords from a Portuguese-dominated entity to a multipolar political and economic association would also bring Yeke back in by millennium’s end, again allowing tariff-free shipping between Angola and Mozambique. And increasing levels of education enabled the Portuguese of all races to join the shift toward a service and information economy, although in the early 2000s, low-end service industries still accounted for the majority of such employment.

Thus did Portugal enter the twenty-first century. Catarina da Costa, writing from Goa in 2009, argued that modern Portugal had achieved a synthesis of European, African and Asian cultures much like Brazil. But as she also conceded, the analogy is an imperfect one. Brazil exists on one continent, Portugal on three, and Portuguese provinces may be separated by thousands of kilometers. This, combined with the Republic’s latter-day federalism, means that each province has kept as much of its cultural patrimony as it wishes. The Republic’s three capitals have blended into a cosmopolitan mestiço culture, and there are many common threads even elsewhere: the Portuguese language, the Catholic Church, and African music and visual art are universal. But beneath this overlay, there is still a world of difference between traditional Lunda and equally traditional Tras-os-Montes, and the far-flung provinces are often as connected to their neighboring countries as to Luanda or Lisbon.

Portugal today, as it enters on its fourth Moreira premiership, might better be understood as several nations rather than one: a federation united by shared history and ties of blood, and one in which eclectic fusions such as Mozambican cuisine and the N'Délé Use are everyday fare, but one in which patriotism is local as well as national and in which no one people can claim to be dominant. Whether this will bring the lasting civil peace for which the Portuguese have struggled so long is for the future to determine…

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Mohammed Katebe, The New Central Africa (Zanzibar: Mapambazuko, 2012)

… After the initial shock of conquest during the Great War, the Portuguese princely states had experienced a relatively mild form of colonialism. Especially in Yeke, where the conquest had been a cooperative affair between the Portuguese army, exiled Omani nobles and discontented local elites [5], they had considerable internal autonomy. Their people were exempt from the corvee labor that existed in the outright colonies until the 1930s (although most were subject to cash taxes that forced them to work part-time in the formal sector anyway) and their customary courts and laws were left undisturbed. But they paid the same price as the Indian princely states under the Raj: subordination and stasis. Their ability to develop their economies was hemmed in by Portuguese-imposed restrictions, and the pax Lusitania froze their political systems in place and protected their aristocrats from any popular challenge.

The Central African Accords brought the hope of change: the Central African states now had full autonomy, including development matters, and the authority to build political and economic ties with neighboring countries. But here they ran into another trap of Portuguese colonialism: the near-absence of economic development to date. Yeke was copper-rich, but unlike Kazembe, there had never been any shortage of European labor to work the mines, and the Portugal had reserved jobs for its own surplus workers rather than training Africans as skilled tradesmen and engineers. The same was true of the cash-crop plantations in Portuguese Central Africa: only a few were African-owned, and although Africans found employment as unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, there was none of the transfer of technical knowledge that happened in the German Copperbelt. Except for the aristocratic class that had been bribed lavishly with revenues and shares in Portuguese enterprises, most people in the princely states had little to show for the seventy years of indirect colonial rule that preceded the Accords.

Along with this economic frustration came political frustration. Urban Yeke was home to a growing middle class, many of them educated at the universities in Luanda and Lourenço Marques, who demanded a say in running the country as well as development of professional jobs. Peasants, for their part, wanted tax relief, land reform and local control over development. Few of the princely rulers, newly free of Portuguese constraints, were willing to submit to popular ones, and the result was the popular uprisings that would lead to the decade-long Fool’s Errand. The promise of the Accords was strangled in its cradle, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the former princely states were able to get their real start on independence.

There was, at least, one thing still working in their favor: the Central African conflict had never been a total war, so the princely states emerged with their infrastructure largely intact and their physical recovery was quick. The intangible scars, though, would take longer to heal. The first democratic elections in the majority of states, conducted in early 1986, brought in uneasy coalitions of urban and rural reformers, often with conflicting agendas and often contending with a strong aristocratic party. Those states that opted for union with Portugal had the federal government to mediate conflicts and provide security; the others had to find their own ways for people who had recently been shooting at each other to work together.

Yeke, the largest of the princely states, followed a fairly typical course. The elected government embarked on a course of radical reforms, breaking up landed estates and forming local farmers into cooperatives with shared responsibility for subsistence and cash-crop production. The mines, too, were threatened with nationalization, but after tense negotiations, the government worked out a deal where the Portuguese mining firms would keep ownership in exchange for strict commitments to hire local workers and invest in management training and knowledge transfer. With the aid of high copper prices in the 1990s, Yeke was able to deliver considerable improvement in living standards, education and physical infrastructure. But this came at the cost of authoritarian centralization, with the cooperatives enforced against widespread rural opposition and development patterns dictated from the capital, and little was done to bring real closure to the period of conflict. This authoritarianism combined with economic recovery was the norm in the former Portuguese Central Africa between 1985 and the early 2000s; some states did slightly better than Yeke in terms of participatory government and restorative justice, and others worse.

Matters began to improve with the turn of the millennium, as the politics of the former princely states matured and the scars of war faded. Yeke’s return to the Central African Accords, now a more evenly-balanced framework, helped to stabilize its politics, and the opposition victory in the 2002 elections produced a healthy increase in decentralization and respect for civil liberties. But the aftereffects of the Fool’s Errand remain. Despite their economic growth, the former princely states started well behind, and their living standards are still lower than Portugal or even the Great Lakes commonwealths. Life expectancies are lower and Congo fever infection rates are among the highest remaining in Africa, given that this region was one of the last to gain access to the anti-retrocytophage treatments developed in the late 1970s. Labor emigration to South Africa and the wealthy coastal provinces of Angola and Mozambique, and a brain drain of students who go abroad to study and never return, are ever-present facts. The cliché that the Portuguese Central African states will always have potential may be too harsh, but that potential is only starting to be realized…

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Tlotliso Lethoba, South Africa: A Journey (Cape Town: Nations Press, 2009)

… A politician from 1970, transported to the South African Union of today, would find much that is familiar. The fall of Natal, and the upheavals of the 1950s and early 60s [6], proved to be the last major changes in South Africa’s political system. The constitution remains the same with only minor amendments; the forms and institutions of government are little changed; and aside from Mauritius, which joined the federation in 1992, South Africa remains within its 1970 borders.

The political parties have evolved and many like-minded factions in different states have fused into national movements, but their roots and traditions go back far; the lineal descendants of the Afrikaner Bond, the Liberal Party and the All-South Africa Reform Congress still compete in the elections. The prevailing internationalist outlook is also unchanged. South Africa is one of the countries that never wavered in its commitment to internationalism during the crisis of the 1970s; despite its opposition to the Yeke ruling and its concern that international regulation might undermine local control over development and be vulnerable to capture by special interests, it saw no other way to keep multinational companies accountable, and its diplomats did much to make the regulatory treaties of the 1970s and 80s work.

If the visitor from 1970 were a social scientist rather than a politician, he would find more to remark on. The historic division between the “Afrikaner bloc” stretching from the Rehoboth to the Cape to Vryheidsland and the “African bloc” of states with no significant European settlement still exists, but both have undergone considerable change. The process of cultural leveling among the Afrikaners has continued to the point where they are a true common culture; the difference between a Boer, a Griqua and an assimilated Cape Xhosa is now no more than that between a Londoner and a Yorkshireman.

In the process, Afrikaner identity, mostly in the Cape but even in the old Boer republics, has continued to be leavened by immigration and mutual assimilation. Xhosa and Tswana influence are more apparent in language, festival customs and literary themes than ever, and the southern and eastern European immigrants of the mid-twentieth century have been joined by an influx of Indian and Somali businessmen and a contingent of new Cape Malays to join the old. Second-generation Somalis who speak fluently colloquial Afrikaans and perform praise-songs in that language to the beat of electric drums are almost a fixture, and not only in Cape Town.

Nor is the African bloc of states the bastion of agricultural conservatism that it was once considered. The old stereotype is still mostly true of Swaziland, just as Stellaland and the Transvaal Boerestaat are islands of old Afrikaner culture amid the new, but in the others, the social changes of the 1940s through 60s have taken root. By 1985, all the African-bloc states had their own universities, and by the 1990s, high-yield crops had enabled most to shift decisively from village-based to urban societies. Basotholand, which had started first, continued to lead the way; by 1990, more than half its people lived in cities and an emerging high-tech sector was forming around the national university. But Zululand and Transkei, led by the descendants of the young veterans who had overturned their politics in the 1950s, also had growing industrial plants, and the economy of the metropolitan regions of the South African Republic spread by the 1990s to take in the major Pedi and Tsonga towns. Even the Tswana, who had once rivaled the Swazis for traditionalism, built an urban service economy after diamonds were discovered in 1977, although, as in the Kingdom of the Arabs, much of the revenue from the government mining company has gone to subsidizing that part of the population that prefers to engage in economically marginal but culturally satisfying occupations.

The African bloc has also become more mobile. In 1970, young men from these states might move to the Cape or Natal for work, but would rarely move from one indigenous state to another; the strong clan bonds and divergent customs and languages were a disincentive to newcomers. But as cities grew and traditional authority structures weakened, and as the Nguni and Swazi language families merged into a common urban creole, it became commonplace for Xhosa to study at the Ulundi university or Tswana to find work in metropolitan Thaba Bosiu. By the turn of the millennium, these trends had carried over to increasing intermarriage and sharing of customs, and some wondered whether the Southern Bantu peoples were developing into an Afrikaner-style cultural fusion which took in the white immigrants in the African-bloc states much as the Bobotie Indaba had brought black and Coloured Cape citizens into the Afrikaner people.

And then there were the states that fell outside the Afrikaner-Southern Bantu duality, and they too had changed. Mauritius, obviously, belonged in this category; it was South Africa’s bridge to India as Mutapa was its bridge to Portugal, and its Indian majority had become an extension of those in Natal and the Cape. Nyasaland, thoroughly African but too distant geographically and culturally to become part of the southern Bantu commonality, retained the strong independent streak that it had developed during the struggle against colonialism, and looked as much to the Great Lakes commonwealths and former Central African princely states as to Cape Town for cultural and economic partnership. Coffee, tea and cotton brought it a modest prosperity, and the Central Asian conflict provided the seed from which a community of Portuguese-speaking immigrants grew.

Mutapa, as always, was in a class by itself. It was a partnership of three strong cultures, one in which the European settlers had assimilated to African language and folkways to a degree unusual in South Africa but retained distinct identities. By millennium’s end, Marius Fourie’s Springbok Clan descendants and the grandchildren of the Portuguese peddlers who were adopted as the Rooster Clan really thought of themselves as Shona, but the clan structure lent itself to self-government and preservation of rituals. This was more true of the Boers, who mostly stayed on the land and preferred to observe the ban on same-clan marriages by seeking partners among the Roosters or in the Boer republics, but even the Portuguese who intermarried more freely and became co-venturers with the entrepreneurial Shona were still themselves. The partnership might someday become a fusion like the metropolitan Cape, but if so, it would happen very slowly.

Also outside the major cultural blocs were the nomadic Khoikhoi and San peoples, who had been largely assimilated within the Cape but who led a separate existence in the Kalahari. In 1970, they were looked down upon by the settled peoples but mostly left alone, and many were barely aware of their South African citizenship. As more of the desert region was given over to mining and tourism, and as governments and private companies encroached on their customary lands, they were made aware of it whether they wanted to be or not.

By the later 1980s, the pressure on the San peoples in Bechuanaland had forced them into a political awakening, in which they took inspiration from indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australasia. They took their case to the union parliament with the support of Namaland, which alone among South African states had a dominant Khoikhoi culture (albeit with an Afrikaner overlay), and also to the courts. The Central Kalahari customary rights litigation played out for more than a decade, first in the Bechuanaland courts and then in the federal tribunals, and the plaintiffs’ pleadings were notable for using the language of anti-colonialism against the Bantu-speaking majority. Along the way, the Basarwa gained the active support of indigenous movements on four continents and their cause was discussed in the Consistory, and when the South African Supreme Court finally handed them a victory in 1998, its judgment would cite precedents from around the world…

… In some ways, our visitor from 1970 might think that South Africa hasn’t changed enough. In Matabeleland – another state that doesn’t fit comfortably into the duality – the parallel British, Boer and African governments have persisted through inertia and managed to cooperate after a fashion, but the grievances from the Imperial-era land seizures and warfare remain, and neither side has made a real effort to address them. The peoples of Matabeleland, even after so many years, are still strangers living side by side, and their unresolved conflict has frozen other aspects of their cultures; their social attitudes would be familiar to a traveler from 1970 or even two decades earlier.

The union faces other challenges: lingering and even growing inequality between the countryside and the towns, the cultural loss and anomie that for many is a by-product of the urban fusions, the environmental consequences of decades of mining. But as it prepares for the centenary festivals that will take place in 2011, it has done both its founders and their descendants proud…

_______

[1] See post 5978.

[2] See post 6008.

[3] See post 5978.

[4] See post 4683.

[5] See posts 1924 and 2129.

[6] See post 5978.
 
I love this Portugal and how different it is from OTL's. :D
What's the relationship between Brazil and Portugal like? Has Portugal's African music spread to Brazil, for example?
 
It's an utterly banal thought, but as I read that the main thing which occured to me is just how good the fusion cuisine must be in TTL's Portugal.


*cough* ANYWAY, one thing the update didn't mention is Macao- what's the status of that city, and for that matter Hong Kong at the moment?
 
So I take we're entering the wrap up phase for Male Rising?

Portugal has had a very cool, if turbulent outcome. It is hard to say if their federation will hold given the distance and each others varying interests as a result. However, given all they've already been through and increasing knowledge sharing and communications technology, it is in the realm of possibility for their union to continue forward. Though I suspect they'll always be differences.

It's funny how much larger culture blocks have grown in South Africa, yet their divisiveness has frozen any greater acculturation between them, at least for the time being. Nice turn of events with the Khoisan with them tapping into the decades of indigenous legal precedents.
 
So I take we're entering the wrap up phase for Male Rising?

We are. My best guess is eight to ten more academic updates and a few narrative and literary updates as the mood strikes me, followed by the final series of 2015 narratives.

Loving the differences between, and the different fates of, Portugal and South Africa ITTL.

I love this Portugal and how different it is from OTL's. :D

What's the relationship between Brazil and Portugal like? Has Portugal's African music spread to Brazil, for example?

There's a lot of cultural cross-fertilization between Portugal and Brazil. They've had very different histories at this point, but their ancestral culture and religion are the same and the African and even Asian influences are similar. The spoken dialects of Portuguese are different (as they are across tri-continental Portugal itself) but literature and mass media in both countries are in standard Portuguese so they're easily accessible to people across the ocean. A Portuguese tourist would find Brazil familiar enough to be comfortable but exotic enough to be interesting, and a Brazilian who finds a job in Luanda or Lisbon would settle in quickly. So there are definitely musical and literary genres, television shows, fashions, etc. that have followings in both countries, and they tend to consider each other as cousins.

It's an utterly banal thought, but as I read that the main thing which occured to me is just how good the fusion cuisine must be in TTL's Portugal.

*cough* ANYWAY, one thing the update didn't mention is Macao- what's the status of that city, and for that matter Hong Kong at the moment?

For cuisine, think Mozambican food with Chinese and Indonesian accents and somewhat more Indian influence than OTL - yeah, it's pretty good. Angolan food influences have also spread, given that Angola is the richest province and the de facto capital, but ingredients like caterpillar and grasshopper thus far have only a limited following in the metropole, while the Mozambican recipes travel better.

I'll probably get to Macau in a bit more detail when I update East Asia, but it's a demilitarized cross-border region under shared sovereignty.

Portugal has had a very cool, if turbulent outcome. It is hard to say if their federation will hold given the distance and each others varying interests as a result. However, given all they've already been through and increasing knowledge sharing and communications technology, it is in the realm of possibility for their union to continue forward. Though I suspect they'll always be differences.

There certainly will be differences, which is why the end product (or at least the current end product) is a loose federation. But at this point, the great majority of Portuguese, whether European, African or Asian, want the federation to work, which is a good deal of the battle right there. All this will take place offstage in the unknowable future, but the prospects are good.

It's funny how much larger culture blocks have grown in South Africa, yet their divisiveness has frozen any greater acculturation between them, at least for the time being. Nice turn of events with the Khoisan with them tapping into the decades of indigenous legal precedents.

There's a fairly fundamental difference between the settler and non-settler states, so at least for now, they've formed separate cultural blocks. On the other hand, the Nguni languages (principally isiZulu, isiXhosa and siSwati) are mutually intelligible as are the languages in the Sotho family (Setswana, Sesotho, Sepedi), and the folkways of the Southern Bantu peoples are fairly close, so it seems natural that as the African peoples become more urbanized and their elites mix, they'd start to develop a common culture. This would have started in the universities, possibly as early as the 1950s or 60s, spreading to the cities in the 1980s and to the countryside after 2000.

The northern peoples (Venda and Ndebele northward) have been slower to join the melting pot - the Ndebele are Nguni-speakers but are less urbanized, have less shared history and are held back by nationalist politics, while the others are outside the Nguni-Sotho sphere altogether.

The Basarwa lawsuit ITTL has a parallel in OTL, when a tribe of them successfully challenged their expulsion from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Unfortunately I can no longer find a copy of the actual judgment; one of the judges on the case, Unity Dow, is also one of Botswana's major writers, and her judgment was very eloquent. ITTL, with a stronger political and legal network of indigenous movements, it makes sense for the Basarwa to hook up with them.

Not much to say in that latest update, but I do like the notion of ITTL Moghadishu Somalis wearing dhotis. I always have a peculiar interest in people wearing clothes from different cultures or regions. :D

Plenty of that here, never fear -- even aside from the effects of folk migration and settlement, fashion is an integral part of TTL's world pop culture.

This TL is awesome, I have just read the whole thing

Thanks and great to see you! The former German colonies and Congo will be next.
 
Lovely update on Portugal; I don't know if the viable parts can stay together forever (esp. if the de facto capital is in Luanda; the metropole isn't going to like that) but it was a nice glimpse at true Lusotropicalism.

How is the Right doing TTL? It seems as if the forces of conservatism have been losing on most fronts; I imagine Hungary can't be too much longer for the world.
 

Sulemain

Banned
Lovely update on Portugal; I don't know if the viable parts can stay together forever (esp. if the de facto capital is in Luanda; the metropole isn't going to like that) but it was a nice glimpse at true Lusotropicalism.

How is the Right doing TTL? It seems as if the forces of conservatism have been losing on most fronts; I imagine Hungary can't be too much longer for the world.

Hungary ITTL was/is Reactionairy far more then it/was Conservative. I could actually see TTL's UK Conservatives taking on the role the Unionists in Scotland did back in the day: carrying the standards of local cultures and traditions in a globalised world:

"Yeah, the Global Community is great. BUT THINK OF BURNS NIGHTS!"
 
Hungary ITTL was/is Reactionairy far more then it/was Conservative. I could actually see TTL's UK Conservatives taking on the role the Unionists in Scotland did back in the day: carrying the standards of local cultures and traditions in a globalised world:

"Yeah, the Global Community is great. BUT THINK OF BURNS NIGHTS!"

I quite liked one of the American parties for being paleoconservative, but I forget which one it was.

Still, although the TL is by no means Whiggish, it does seem that right-wing forces have been largely defeated, more so on economics than on culture
 
So it seems Portugal has become the pluricontinental state that OTL Portugal wanted to be, though the Estado Novo would probably be aghast at all the social and cultural changes the nation went ITTL to achieve it. And on a related note, it looks like the concept of pluricontinental-ism itself would be more accepted ITTL than IOTL, with Germany, Italy, France, and a few other nations having integral domains far from their associated metropoles.
 

Gorro Rubio

Banned
Excellent update, as usual! I'd love to taste Portuguese cuisine and listen to its music. I hope the federation to remain :eek:
On a completely different topic, I've got a question about the (proper) Ottoman state. Looking at the map, it seems that Turks would be plurality in the country, but not a majority though. Am I correct?
 
Lovely update on Portugal; I don't know if the viable parts can stay together forever (esp. if the de facto capital is in Luanda; the metropole isn't going to like that) but it was a nice glimpse at true Lusotropicalism.

The metropolitan Portuguese have autonomy, and Lisbon is still the unquestioned cultural center and the seat of the presidency, so most of them are satisfied. And besides, it's nice to be able to get a job in Luanda without a visa or take a vacation in Goa without a passport, and there are enough overseas Portuguese at this point that independence would break up a lot of families. Of course this only applies to most European Portuguese people - there's still an independence party that gets 20 or 25 percent of the metropolitan vote - but the tensions that led to the 1960s crisis are much abated, and few people are angry enough to do anything beyond voting autonomist. A crisis could change that, but there's none on the immediate horizon.

So it seems Portugal has become the pluricontinental state that OTL Portugal wanted to be, though the Estado Novo would probably be aghast at all the social and cultural changes the nation went ITTL to achieve it. And on a related note, it looks like the concept of pluricontinental-ism itself would be more accepted ITTL than IOTL, with Germany, Italy, France, and a few other nations having integral domains far from their associated metropoles.

It wouldn't work without the social changes - given the populations involved, a Portugal that doesn't want to become an apartheid state has to decolonize, be taken over by its colonies, or become a federation. TTL's Portugal, in order, tried apartheid and colonial takeover, and finally settled on federalism, which is the only real long-term option for a true Lusotropical state. The secular modernization that happens along the way is probably inevitable too, although as noted in the update, the Church still has a strong political and social influence.

And yes, the idea of a pluricontinental state is more mainstream ITTL - one of the ironic effects of colonized peoples forcing the colonial empires to be more equitable is that the longest-associated and most integral parts of those empires became more likely to stay.

How is the Right doing TTL? It seems as if the forces of conservatism have been losing on most fronts; I imagine Hungary can't be too much longer for the world.

Hungary ITTL was/is Reactionairy far more then it/was Conservative. I could actually see TTL's UK Conservatives taking on the role the Unionists in Scotland did back in the day: carrying the standards of local cultures and traditions in a globalised world

I quite liked one of the American parties for being paleoconservative, but I forget which one it was.

Still, although the TL is by no means Whiggish, it does seem that right-wing forces have been largely defeated, more so on economics than on culture

The Democrats are the paleoconservative party; at the federal level, they're joined at the hip to the more conventionally pro-business Republicans, but as of 1968 they hold the presidency. Some of the most prominent critiques of American suburban sprawl and consumer culture have come from them.

The Russian narodniks have some paleocon traits too: as one of them said in a narrative update, they're the most conservative anarcho-communists you'll find anywhere. Their economics are pretty far left, but culturally, they're all about localism, Christian tradition and maintaining the Gemeinschaft.

Anyway, I'd agree that the economic Overton window ITTL is to the left of OTL. German-style social market economies which leave plenty of room for capitalism are popular (so are social democracies and syndicalist cooperatives, but we're talking about the right side of the spectrum here), and some countries are rough analogues to 1950s America, but laissez-faire or minimal regulation is far less common. To a great extent this is a function of greater international regulation combined with the fact that extreme, totalitarian left ideologies never became as powerful or scary as IOTL. Some of the less internationalist countries - Chile, maybe - might approach laissez-faire in the present day, but they're the minority. The Right ITTL is focused more on culture, systems of governance and the autonomy of private social institutions (church, family, etc.) than anything else.

On a completely different topic, I've got a question about the (proper) Ottoman state. Looking at the map, it seems that Turks would be plurality in the country, but not a majority though. Am I correct?

This is true. The innermost tier of the Ottoman Union is essentially a Turkish-Arab state, and if the second tier is counted, ethnic Turks are a plurality.

Little bit late here for JE, but I just saw a link to a series of photos of magazines, paintings or the link relating to the Russian settlement in Somalia.

http://www.rferl.org/media/photogallery/africa-sagallo-russian-colony/26934711.html

Very cool. I assume that ITTL, they didn't waste much time in changing their clothes. :p
 
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