Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
For those who've already read post 1020 (and, for that matter, those who haven't), I've added a footnote.
I did some googling, which led me to this, which was about the fourth century BC albeit written during the first. My Latin isn't up to the task (or to any task much beyond deciphering courtroom inscriptions) and there doesn't seem to be a translation, but upon running it through an autotranslator, Livy appears to be speculating about a war between the early Roman Republic and Alexander, complete with a discussion of the forces that would have been available to each. Fascinating.
In any event, Livy's counterfactual may be the oldest surviving one, but I doubt it was the first. All of us imagine alternate histories countless times during our lives - the natural human reaction when something goes wrong is to ask "what if I had done X" - and both statesmen and historians will inevitably ask that question on a grand scale. What isn't inevitable is alternate history breaking out from academic counterfactuals and occasional rhetorical flourishes to a literary genre, and I suppose that's what I was talking about when I questioned whether allohistory would exist in TTL. But we're getting very meta, and that's as far as I'll take the issue right now.
Thanks for the reminder. The 1886-93 cycle, which begins with the next update, will include a visit to the United States, and while the Charleston earthquake doesn't seem to have been catastrophic on the scale of the 1906 San Francisco one, it was very strong by east coast standards and would certainly draw attention to South Carolina. It's likely that disaster relief by both the federal and state governments will be a political event.
Now that I'm reading FABR, I see what you mean - EdT's 1880s-90s Africa is vividly realized, he covers many of the same regions that I do, and his love for the subject matter is very clear. Variations on a theme, I guess.
I did some googling, which led me to this, which was about the fourth century BC albeit written during the first. My Latin isn't up to the task (or to any task much beyond deciphering courtroom inscriptions) and there doesn't seem to be a translation, but upon running it through an autotranslator, Livy appears to be speculating about a war between the early Roman Republic and Alexander, complete with a discussion of the forces that would have been available to each. Fascinating.
In any event, Livy's counterfactual may be the oldest surviving one, but I doubt it was the first. All of us imagine alternate histories countless times during our lives - the natural human reaction when something goes wrong is to ask "what if I had done X" - and both statesmen and historians will inevitably ask that question on a grand scale. What isn't inevitable is alternate history breaking out from academic counterfactuals and occasional rhetorical flourishes to a literary genre, and I suppose that's what I was talking about when I questioned whether allohistory would exist in TTL. But we're getting very meta, and that's as far as I'll take the issue right now.
Thanks for the reminder. The 1886-93 cycle, which begins with the next update, will include a visit to the United States, and while the Charleston earthquake doesn't seem to have been catastrophic on the scale of the 1906 San Francisco one, it was very strong by east coast standards and would certainly draw attention to South Carolina. It's likely that disaster relief by both the federal and state governments will be a political event.
Now that I'm reading FABR, I see what you mean - EdT's 1880s-90s Africa is vividly realized, he covers many of the same regions that I do, and his love for the subject matter is very clear. Variations on a theme, I guess.
Ahmadu Odubogun, “Archaeology, Race and Colonialism: The Case of ‘Nigeria,’” Journal of Ancient Africa 23:479-93 (Autumn 2008)
… In late 1887, Captain Edward Johns, a British officer on leave from the Bonny garrison, went prospecting near the village of Taruga in the Benue Valley, in what was then the Crown Colony of Lower Niger. The venture met with little success until January 11, 1888, when one of his hired diggers reported a find: not the tin ore that Johns had hoped for, but a terra-cotta statuette of a young woman with an enlarged head. [1]
Prospecting quickly forgotten, Johns promised his men bonuses if they found more statues, and they quickly unearthed six others. Along with them were iron tools and beads with bits of slag, a clear sign that whoever had made the statues knew how to work metal. Immediately upon his return to Bonny, Johns dispatched the seven statues to the British Museum with a note on the location and circumstances of their finding.
The “Taruga Statues” were an instant sensation. They were clearly made by a sophisticated and artistic people, showing great detail and individuality; each statuette soon had a popular name, with “the Priestess,” “the Warrior King” and “the Horseman” (the last showing a rider with a head elongated to the point of resembling his mount’s) splashed across the pages of illustrated newspapers. More than that, though, the discovery upset everything that European academics had hitherto believed about Africa. African civilization was supposed to be centuries old, not millennia, but scholars at the Museum compared them to the statuary of other ancient cultures and proclaimed them two, three or even four thousand years old. The origin of the Taruga culture became one of the Victorian era’s great mysteries.
Drawn by visions of lost cities, dozens of professors and amateur archaeologists descended on the region. Several made important finds, but the one who would eventually dominate was Sir Arthur John Evans, a somewhat unorthodox academic who had recently made his reputation by excavating an Iron Age cemetery at Aylesford. Evans fancied himself as much an anthropologist as an excavator, and was convinced that he could reconstruct the entire culture from the scant available evidence.
Even before leaving for Africa, Evans was convinced that, despite the unmistakably African features of the statuettes, the Taruga culture was of Egyptian or Assyrian in origin. He pointed to certain items of jewelry shown on the statues, such as broad pectoral collars and heavy bracelets, that had counterparts in Egyptian art, and argued that other aspects of the Taruga works’ artistry suggested Mesopotamian influence. He also noted that several of the indigenous peoples of the region had legends of ancestors from the east, such as the belief that the Kanem empire was founded by immigrants from Assyria or that the Yoruba hero-god Oduduwa was a refugee from Mecca.
He would ultimately favor the Egyptians, with the decisive factor being the annual floods of the Niger. Evans argued that civilizations that arose in similar environments would share similar characteristics, meaning that the ancient Niger cultures would have resembled predynastic Egypt and were thus a natural place for Egyptian refugees to find a home. He claimed to find further evidence of this in Taruga statuary as well as what he believed to be Egyptian-style architecture (most of which was later found not to exist or to be natural formations, although recent finds have indicated that the Taruga did have walled hilltop towns). [2]
In 1891, Evans published his findings under the title Nigeria: An African Empire Before Christ. His contention was that the founders of the Taruga were Egyptians who fled their homeland, possibly due to a dynastic struggle or during a period of collapse, and intermarried with the Africans of the Benue and Niger valleys. They established a trading empire that spanned the whole of the lower Niger – Evans’ belief was that the ancient Niger, like the Nile, tended inexorably toward a unitary state – and that accounted for Taruga-style statuary being found at several widely spaced sites.
Evans dubbed this empire “Nigeria,” and profusely illustrated his book with drawings of “reconstructed” Nigerian cities and temples. These illustrations showed an African populace, dressed as shown in the Taruga statues and riding richly caparisoned horses, amid roads and buildings that were Egyptian in character albeit made of materials that could be found locally. He provided elaborate descriptions of the statues’ ritual function and the gods they represented, claiming that the statuettes suggested several ancient Egyptian cults, and argued that the elongated head of one statue was in fact the crown of the Two Lands and a symbol of pharaonic kingship.
Evans certainly was not without his critics. Although the theory of Egyptian or Mesopotamian origin was generally accepted – it was common doctrine at the time that civilization had diffused from a single point, and few believed that Africans could have invented the Taruga culture unaided – several rival academics pointed out that there was no real proof for the Nigerian empire, and that Evans’ hypotheses about its architecture, ritual and social structure were confected from his imagination. They argued, quite correctly, that he had taken very scanty evidence and seen what he wanted to see. They also pointed out gaping holes in his evidence, such as the absence of hieroglyphic writing in the Taruga culture, something he attempted, rather feebly, to explain away by arguing that the Egyptian refugees had lost the art during their struggle for survival.
But Evans’ Nigeria fit the racial theories of the time. The British elites had, early on in their involvement with Africa, developed an admiration for Fulani martial courage and a guarded respect for the modernity and acumen of the Malê, which had developed into a general notion that the Islamic state-level civilizations of West Africa were a cut above the pre-state peoples elsewhere on the continent. Evans’ theories were proof of exactly this: that the Sahelian race, under Egyptian tutelage, had been uplifted to a higher level of culture than the untutored savages of the Congo and southern Africa. Within months, several books were published echoing Evans’ origin theories: both phrenologists and respectable doctors claimed to find similarities between the physical characteristics of ancient Egyptians and those of modern West Africans, and anthropologists “discovered” Egyptian elements in Yoruba, Hausa and Fulani cultures. Egyptian, Assyrian or Babylonian influences were also posited for the Great Lakes kingdoms.
Thus, although most academic scholarship rejected the Nigeria theory or accepted it in a vastly reduced form, preferring to limit conclusions about the Taruga culture to what could actually be divined from the archaeological finds, the Nigerian Empire became an accepted part of African historiography well into the mid-twentieth century. It reinforced existing European prejudices and practices, providing justification for the greater respect given to Muslim West Africa and the Great Lakes (and, conversely, for the lesser respect given to pre-state peoples) while providing a comforting reminder that African civilization was a product of foreign tutelage. And even many Africans found the Nigeria theory appealing: Egyptian-influenced or not, Evans’ Nigerians were of mostly-African blood, and the Nigerian Empire showed that Africa was as anciently civilized as Greece or Rome.
One who remained skeptical was Usman Abacar, who had taken a lively amateur’s interest in the findings at Taruga and elsewhere. In an 1891 letter to John Alexander, who was soon to vacate his parliamentary seat, Abacar wrote that “the Taruga people are being studied as an Assyrian civilisation or an Egyptian civilisation to the exclusion of being an African civilisation: they are painted as a nation foreign in its ways, with African ways – which you will surely agree they had, at least in some measure – denied to them.” And unlike many other skeptics, Abacar was in a position to do something: in this and other letters, he made clear his desire to see the medical college and agricultural institute that he had sponsored at Ilorin expand to a full research university, so that an African institution could take part in the study of classical Africa.
Early the following year, he would introduce a bill in Ilorin’s legislature to do exactly that, and although the Great War would interrupt the university’s construction, it would open in time for the beginning of the twentieth century. The names of the Ilorin University’s founding fathers are inscribed on its gate, but it may owe its existence as much to Sir Arthur John Evans as to any of those listed…
_______
[1] The statue was made by what, in OTL, would come to be known as the Nok culture. The first OTL findings were made in the late 1920s near the village of Nok (hence the name); in TTL, the more significant Nok site at Taruga is first to be unearthed. The names given to the statutes are TTL only; they do not have similar names in OTL.
[2] See Rupp, Ameje & Breunig for what little is known about Nok settlements.
… In late 1887, Captain Edward Johns, a British officer on leave from the Bonny garrison, went prospecting near the village of Taruga in the Benue Valley, in what was then the Crown Colony of Lower Niger. The venture met with little success until January 11, 1888, when one of his hired diggers reported a find: not the tin ore that Johns had hoped for, but a terra-cotta statuette of a young woman with an enlarged head. [1]
Prospecting quickly forgotten, Johns promised his men bonuses if they found more statues, and they quickly unearthed six others. Along with them were iron tools and beads with bits of slag, a clear sign that whoever had made the statues knew how to work metal. Immediately upon his return to Bonny, Johns dispatched the seven statues to the British Museum with a note on the location and circumstances of their finding.
The “Taruga Statues” were an instant sensation. They were clearly made by a sophisticated and artistic people, showing great detail and individuality; each statuette soon had a popular name, with “the Priestess,” “the Warrior King” and “the Horseman” (the last showing a rider with a head elongated to the point of resembling his mount’s) splashed across the pages of illustrated newspapers. More than that, though, the discovery upset everything that European academics had hitherto believed about Africa. African civilization was supposed to be centuries old, not millennia, but scholars at the Museum compared them to the statuary of other ancient cultures and proclaimed them two, three or even four thousand years old. The origin of the Taruga culture became one of the Victorian era’s great mysteries.
The Priestess
Drawn by visions of lost cities, dozens of professors and amateur archaeologists descended on the region. Several made important finds, but the one who would eventually dominate was Sir Arthur John Evans, a somewhat unorthodox academic who had recently made his reputation by excavating an Iron Age cemetery at Aylesford. Evans fancied himself as much an anthropologist as an excavator, and was convinced that he could reconstruct the entire culture from the scant available evidence.
Even before leaving for Africa, Evans was convinced that, despite the unmistakably African features of the statuettes, the Taruga culture was of Egyptian or Assyrian in origin. He pointed to certain items of jewelry shown on the statues, such as broad pectoral collars and heavy bracelets, that had counterparts in Egyptian art, and argued that other aspects of the Taruga works’ artistry suggested Mesopotamian influence. He also noted that several of the indigenous peoples of the region had legends of ancestors from the east, such as the belief that the Kanem empire was founded by immigrants from Assyria or that the Yoruba hero-god Oduduwa was a refugee from Mecca.
He would ultimately favor the Egyptians, with the decisive factor being the annual floods of the Niger. Evans argued that civilizations that arose in similar environments would share similar characteristics, meaning that the ancient Niger cultures would have resembled predynastic Egypt and were thus a natural place for Egyptian refugees to find a home. He claimed to find further evidence of this in Taruga statuary as well as what he believed to be Egyptian-style architecture (most of which was later found not to exist or to be natural formations, although recent finds have indicated that the Taruga did have walled hilltop towns). [2]
In 1891, Evans published his findings under the title Nigeria: An African Empire Before Christ. His contention was that the founders of the Taruga were Egyptians who fled their homeland, possibly due to a dynastic struggle or during a period of collapse, and intermarried with the Africans of the Benue and Niger valleys. They established a trading empire that spanned the whole of the lower Niger – Evans’ belief was that the ancient Niger, like the Nile, tended inexorably toward a unitary state – and that accounted for Taruga-style statuary being found at several widely spaced sites.
Evans dubbed this empire “Nigeria,” and profusely illustrated his book with drawings of “reconstructed” Nigerian cities and temples. These illustrations showed an African populace, dressed as shown in the Taruga statues and riding richly caparisoned horses, amid roads and buildings that were Egyptian in character albeit made of materials that could be found locally. He provided elaborate descriptions of the statues’ ritual function and the gods they represented, claiming that the statuettes suggested several ancient Egyptian cults, and argued that the elongated head of one statue was in fact the crown of the Two Lands and a symbol of pharaonic kingship.
The Horseman
Evans certainly was not without his critics. Although the theory of Egyptian or Mesopotamian origin was generally accepted – it was common doctrine at the time that civilization had diffused from a single point, and few believed that Africans could have invented the Taruga culture unaided – several rival academics pointed out that there was no real proof for the Nigerian empire, and that Evans’ hypotheses about its architecture, ritual and social structure were confected from his imagination. They argued, quite correctly, that he had taken very scanty evidence and seen what he wanted to see. They also pointed out gaping holes in his evidence, such as the absence of hieroglyphic writing in the Taruga culture, something he attempted, rather feebly, to explain away by arguing that the Egyptian refugees had lost the art during their struggle for survival.
But Evans’ Nigeria fit the racial theories of the time. The British elites had, early on in their involvement with Africa, developed an admiration for Fulani martial courage and a guarded respect for the modernity and acumen of the Malê, which had developed into a general notion that the Islamic state-level civilizations of West Africa were a cut above the pre-state peoples elsewhere on the continent. Evans’ theories were proof of exactly this: that the Sahelian race, under Egyptian tutelage, had been uplifted to a higher level of culture than the untutored savages of the Congo and southern Africa. Within months, several books were published echoing Evans’ origin theories: both phrenologists and respectable doctors claimed to find similarities between the physical characteristics of ancient Egyptians and those of modern West Africans, and anthropologists “discovered” Egyptian elements in Yoruba, Hausa and Fulani cultures. Egyptian, Assyrian or Babylonian influences were also posited for the Great Lakes kingdoms.
Thus, although most academic scholarship rejected the Nigeria theory or accepted it in a vastly reduced form, preferring to limit conclusions about the Taruga culture to what could actually be divined from the archaeological finds, the Nigerian Empire became an accepted part of African historiography well into the mid-twentieth century. It reinforced existing European prejudices and practices, providing justification for the greater respect given to Muslim West Africa and the Great Lakes (and, conversely, for the lesser respect given to pre-state peoples) while providing a comforting reminder that African civilization was a product of foreign tutelage. And even many Africans found the Nigeria theory appealing: Egyptian-influenced or not, Evans’ Nigerians were of mostly-African blood, and the Nigerian Empire showed that Africa was as anciently civilized as Greece or Rome.
The Warrior King
One who remained skeptical was Usman Abacar, who had taken a lively amateur’s interest in the findings at Taruga and elsewhere. In an 1891 letter to John Alexander, who was soon to vacate his parliamentary seat, Abacar wrote that “the Taruga people are being studied as an Assyrian civilisation or an Egyptian civilisation to the exclusion of being an African civilisation: they are painted as a nation foreign in its ways, with African ways – which you will surely agree they had, at least in some measure – denied to them.” And unlike many other skeptics, Abacar was in a position to do something: in this and other letters, he made clear his desire to see the medical college and agricultural institute that he had sponsored at Ilorin expand to a full research university, so that an African institution could take part in the study of classical Africa.
Early the following year, he would introduce a bill in Ilorin’s legislature to do exactly that, and although the Great War would interrupt the university’s construction, it would open in time for the beginning of the twentieth century. The names of the Ilorin University’s founding fathers are inscribed on its gate, but it may owe its existence as much to Sir Arthur John Evans as to any of those listed…
_______
[1] The statue was made by what, in OTL, would come to be known as the Nok culture. The first OTL findings were made in the late 1920s near the village of Nok (hence the name); in TTL, the more significant Nok site at Taruga is first to be unearthed. The names given to the statutes are TTL only; they do not have similar names in OTL.
[2] See Rupp, Ameje & Breunig for what little is known about Nok settlements.
Kaiphranos
Donor
Neat stuff--it's interesting to see how even the parts of history we share with an ATL may be perceived differently in different timelines.
Though come to think of it, presumably events in Egypt and the Near East will have had effects on the archeology of those areas in this timeline as well. Evans' conceptions of Egyptian and Assyrian civilization (or even those of his more orthodox colleagues) might not exactly match 1:1 with the archeological ideas of our 1890's, depending on when (or if!) certain sites are discovered. The Amarna Letters were a chance discovery in 1887, for example...
Though come to think of it, presumably events in Egypt and the Near East will have had effects on the archeology of those areas in this timeline as well. Evans' conceptions of Egyptian and Assyrian civilization (or even those of his more orthodox colleagues) might not exactly match 1:1 with the archeological ideas of our 1890's, depending on when (or if!) certain sites are discovered. The Amarna Letters were a chance discovery in 1887, for example...
What happened before the POD is shared; the way people interpret it after the POD isn't, especially where the past in question is as little-known as the Nok culture. And especially where Victorians are involved.
Archaeology and anthropology have historically been influenced by prevailing political and racial theories (hence the reputation of the latter as "handmaiden of colonialism"), so it seems likely that their interpretations would vary between timelines; hell, even in OTL, the Nok culture would probably have been interpreted differently if discovered in the 1880s. And as you can see, these difference s are influencing the story.
For what it's worth, the current belief is that the Nok were a collection of interrelated farming and ironworking settlements rather than an empire, although we don't really have much to go on. TTL's twenty-first century will probably know more about the Nok than we do, given how little systematized research has been done in OTL.
Definitely - the state of knowledge will be roughly parallel, but not exactly the same. One thing that certainly will be different, with Evans in Africa, is the prevailing conception of Minoan civilization (and if you've been to Knossos, you'll understand why I picked him for the role of "reconstructing" the Nok people).
Definitely. When you mentioned Evans, I was thinking "Oh no, not him!". I like what you did there.
OTOH, the "lost cities of ancient civilisations in the jungle" trope will probably be even stronger ITTL.
THAT will be incredibly useful for me in the not-too-distant future (not that I'm implying anything
)Awesome chapter! The use of Arthur Evans was inspired
I wonder what people in TTL will make of Great Zimbabwe when that starts to be investigated in detail... And if Evans will try to get his mitts on that, too...wolf_brother
Banned
OTOH, the "lost cities of ancient civilisations in the jungle" trope will probably be even stronger ITTL.
I wonder what Haggard's writing will be like ITTL.
THAT will be incredibly useful for me in the not-too-distant future (not that I'm implying anything
It's always good to see the Nok get attention. And it just occurred to me that your timeline may be one in which *Evans' Nigerian Empire actually happens, in pretty much the way he theorized...
Awesome chapter! The use of Arthur Evans was inspired
Great Zimbabwe was originally thought to be Phoenician in OTL; not until 1929 did any scholar opine conclusively that it was of Bantu origin, and the matter remained in controversy for decades longer. In TTL, the Egyptian theory will have a leg up due to Evans', er, work, although there will be those who speak for the Babylonians and Assyrians, and others who point to the Periplus of Hanno and suggest a secondary layer of Phoenician influence. There will of course be those who correctly argue for Bantu origins, especially once African academics get into the game, but the theories will be very jumbled through the first third of the twentieth century.
For a while, it will be received wisdom among TTL's Egyptologists that the New Kingdom had trade networks extending the full length of the Nile and down the East African coast, which will "explain" the origins of Zimbabwe and the Great Lakes civilizations. This in turn will bring some of the Egyptologists south to search for evidence of those networks, and eventually to work at Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe - maybe Evans will be among them, maybe not. I'd kind of like to get Wallis Budge into the mix - I know what you think of him, but he has a compelling life story, and maybe he might be one of those who ferret out the truth about the southern African sites.
Lost cities will definitely be a big deal, both in boys' adventure stories and the exploits of adventurer-archaeologists and treasure hunters. The search for such cities will play a part in Congolese history and in the Great War, which is all I'll say now.
Haggard... oh, man. Surviving "Nigerian" cities deep in the jungle or in isolated valleys, still keeping the old Egyptian ways. Dusky pharaonic princesses needing to be rescued. Feuding Afro-Phoenician, Afro-Egyptian and Afro-Assyrian tribes. Treasures from ancient tombs - Nok statues with jeweled eyes, proto-Yoruba wood-carvings that come to life, talismans enchanted by the Near Eastern gods. More of a West and Central African focus OTL, but King Solomon's mines would of course be somewhere near Great Zimbabwe.
Maybe we'll see an excerpt of his ATL work, although the next couple of literary interludes will be by African authors.
Ooo... good question. Oh, but hes probably post pod, no? But yes, Haggard, Burroughs, and the Boys Own paper, or rather their analogs, are likely to have a different view of africa.
Like what you are doing with the Nok, and i, too, shudder to think what Evans would do with the great zimbabwe. Which ive actually been lucky enough to see.
I wonder, though, whether the better status of black states will shorten the 'must have been whites here' idiocy?
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Haggard was born in 1856. However, based on a few minutes' googling, he was a younger child and his parents married soon after the POD, so it's entirely possible that they would still marry and that they'd have a child with his name who gets the writing bug as a young man. He wouldn't be exactly the same person, but he'd be close enough, and his different mix of genes could account for the difference in focus and style between his OTL and TTL work.
For aesthetic reasons, I think I'll go with Haggard having an ATL sibling rather than using the "someone a lot like him but from a different family" gambit. That won't work with Burroughs, though: someone else will have to fill his literary space. I have some ideas for TTL's Burroughs- and Kipling-analogues although I'm not sure how far I'll take them.
Shorten it, yes, especially since African archaeologists will be active at several of the sites by the early twentieth century. Eliminate it, no: in fact, the earlier discovery of the Nok sites, at a time when late-Victorian notions of history were still current, will give it added credence for a while.
And don't worry, Evans will leave Great Zimbabwe alone - except, of course, for the part where he reconstructs the royal chambers...
You know, your writing may be having an unintended effect on the forums.
The existence of these more advanced states in West Africa is effectively splitting the racial views of the Victorians into two subsaharan standards. You've commented and demonstrated how this means that West Africans will be treated more seriously and their existing political formations more preserved than elsewhere. Meanwhile in the rest of Africa, people's will continue to be looked on as generic savages, with the distinctions between one group and another hardly recognized.
But there are real world effects, as well. As I was writing a timeline featuring earlier and more intensive European penetration of Africa, I caught myself detailing precisely the situation of the Sahel, especially the Niger and Senegal systems, while in relative terms hand waving the details in the Congo, Portuguese colonies, and north of OTL South Africa. In essence, I'd started to develop precisely those blinders the Europeans of your TL did, when exposed to your Africa!
That's something that was once extremely common on AH.com for Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa, and Egypt. People treated those few as independent actors, while the rest of the continent was meandering around just waiting to be colonized. It's the natural reaction to having more information on (or, in the case of Liberia, more sympathy towards) certain countries.
What your timeline has successfully done is not so much to end that pattern as to reduce the number of ignored areas. The tendency will perhaps always be there to skim past those areas we know little about, but hopefully the Terra Incognita of the board's consciousness continues to recede in the face of works like yours.
The existence of these more advanced states in West Africa is effectively splitting the racial views of the Victorians into two subsaharan standards. You've commented and demonstrated how this means that West Africans will be treated more seriously and their existing political formations more preserved than elsewhere. Meanwhile in the rest of Africa, people's will continue to be looked on as generic savages, with the distinctions between one group and another hardly recognized.
But there are real world effects, as well. As I was writing a timeline featuring earlier and more intensive European penetration of Africa, I caught myself detailing precisely the situation of the Sahel, especially the Niger and Senegal systems, while in relative terms hand waving the details in the Congo, Portuguese colonies, and north of OTL South Africa. In essence, I'd started to develop precisely those blinders the Europeans of your TL did, when exposed to your Africa!
That's something that was once extremely common on AH.com for Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa, and Egypt. People treated those few as independent actors, while the rest of the continent was meandering around just waiting to be colonized. It's the natural reaction to having more information on (or, in the case of Liberia, more sympathy towards) certain countries.
What your timeline has successfully done is not so much to end that pattern as to reduce the number of ignored areas. The tendency will perhaps always be there to skim past those areas we know little about, but hopefully the Terra Incognita of the board's consciousness continues to recede in the face of works like yours.
If I've made anyone more aware of, or interested in, African peoples and history, that has been an entirely intended (or at least hoped-for) effect. I'm probably not giving anything away by saying that Africa is one of my passions and has been so for about twenty years. I want to see Africa get more respect and attention, here and elsewhere.
It's very flattering, all the same, to hear that I've had some success. And I'd love to see others take up and explore some of the areas that are more peripheral to this timeline - a more widespread Swahili civilization, for instance, or something involving the Luba kingdom or Msiri's Katanga, or Madagascar if Radama I's reforms had continued - and lift the veil even further. (In which respect, I'm looking forward to seeing your work.)
And just for fun, three versions of the flag of the Ogeechee Republic (see posts 367 and 386), the last and best of them by metastasis_d:
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birdboy2000
Banned
Spent the better part of last night and today reading this timeline in its entirety. I'm blown away. Amazing writing and a fascinating scenario, and I've been keeping a wikipedia tab open half the time because I've been learning plenty. I'm not operating from total ignorance, having played Victoria 2 mods (and I'm tempted to start a Sokoto game in your honor) and more valuably, lurked discussions about how to model Africa and googled a few of the polities involved - but I've learned a heck of a lot more.
And you may at that, given time. I'm afraid though some parts may not be to your taste. It has a much less positive tone than your work. Not all bad - it's arguably a Khoi Khoi wank, for example - but definitely not a better or more moral world than ours.
You mentioned before that you're a meliorist and, truth be told, I am as well. But when it comes to reading (and sometimes, writing) alternate history I find I'm almost as hard on a mildly unlikely "better" world as I am on a genuinely implausible dystopia. Couldn't say why that is....
I've heard tell somewhere that the original design of the Statue of Liberty was to have been a freedwoman with broken chains at her feet holding up a child (and perhaps holding a book as well). Nixed of course when someone advised the French artist just how controversial that gift would be in Gilded Age USA!
I suppose here it would hardly be less controversial. It makes me feel better about my adoration of that particular US icon to know this backstory for it.
And wonder if at least, the artist might have gotten far enough to make a scale model (such a model, I believe his final draft before undertaking the full-scale work, is stationed along the Seine) according to the original concept--and gift it to South Carolina.
Is Charleston itself thoroughly a city of and for African Americans (and their friends) by now, or is it a bastion of white resistance, to an extent anyway? In the former case the statue could be set up in the harbor, in the latter it might have to go in some more backcountry Gullah stronghold town.
Since the big, whitewashed (vaguely Greco-Roman classical) statue is named Liberty Enlightening the World, the little one might be called "Freedom Inspiring the World" or some such.
And she should definitely be holding some kind of book. With no visible text on it, so it can be imagined to be a Bible, a Koran, or something else...
----
Damn, I forgot when suggesting this that ITTL France is not a Republic at this point and perhaps never will be again. That might put the kibosh on even the whitewashed version, which would be a shame.
But perhaps Plon-Plon is enough of a liberal and keen enough to cultivate US goodwill to give his blessing to the project?
The Bonaparte dynasty after all is a child of the Revolution; I don't think the French Revolution was dependent on the US one for inspiration or guidance, but in a timeline where American independence was achieved by democratic revolution, I daresay a successful French one that happened later would claim kinship.
I suppose here it would hardly be less controversial. It makes me feel better about my adoration of that particular US icon to know this backstory for it.
And wonder if at least, the artist might have gotten far enough to make a scale model (such a model, I believe his final draft before undertaking the full-scale work, is stationed along the Seine) according to the original concept--and gift it to South Carolina.
Is Charleston itself thoroughly a city of and for African Americans (and their friends) by now, or is it a bastion of white resistance, to an extent anyway? In the former case the statue could be set up in the harbor, in the latter it might have to go in some more backcountry Gullah stronghold town.
Since the big, whitewashed (vaguely Greco-Roman classical) statue is named Liberty Enlightening the World, the little one might be called "Freedom Inspiring the World" or some such.
And she should definitely be holding some kind of book. With no visible text on it, so it can be imagined to be a Bible, a Koran, or something else...
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Damn, I forgot when suggesting this that ITTL France is not a Republic at this point and perhaps never will be again. That might put the kibosh on even the whitewashed version, which would be a shame.
But perhaps Plon-Plon is enough of a liberal and keen enough to cultivate US goodwill to give his blessing to the project?
The Bonaparte dynasty after all is a child of the Revolution; I don't think the French Revolution was dependent on the US one for inspiration or guidance, but in a timeline where American independence was achieved by democratic revolution, I daresay a successful French one that happened later would claim kinship.
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I'd never heard that rumor, and it sounded fascinating, so I did a quick check. The National Park Service has investigated and, unfortunately, found it to be false or at least highly improbable.
But this is allohistory, and maybe it could have happened that way in TTL! Edouard de Laboulaye, the statue's political sponsor, was a noted abolitionist, and he would surely have been inspired by the South Carolina rising. He might easily have decided that a heroic image of a freedwoman would be the best way to symbolize America's promise. And while, as you say, this France remains an empire after 1870, it's a more liberal one that would look on the United States as a kindred spirit; Laboulaye might well participate in Plon-Plon's constitutional reforms and end up in a position to sponsor the project.
Let's say, then, that Laboulaye and Bartholdi begin working up the statue soon after Napoleon IV's accession in 1872, and that Bartholdi does make a scale model of the freedwoman concept. Some of Laboulaye's American friends hastily talk him into changing the design, and the final statue takes shape much as in OTL. But Laboulaye still thinks of the South Carolinian freedmen as heroes, so he prevails on Bartholdi to give them the model.
So New York gets the Statue of Liberty, and Charleston gets the Black Marianne - which, according to some, bears a striking resemblance to Harriet Tubman, although the actual model was Senegalese.
The Black Marianne [1]
The white resistance is in the upstate counties, and in any event it's mostly political by this point. There are plenty of whites in South Carolina, and some of them are well-placed - the importers, bankers and professionals willing to play by the new rules are left alone - but the state government makes damn sure that its largest port remains under its control. The statue will be in Charleston's harbor, and will be a fitting tribute to South Carolina's new Atlanticism.
Anyway, thanks to birdboy2000 for the kind words and to future8 for improving the flag. I'm planning to update this weekend; in the meantime, anyone interested in my musings on the future 10^19 years hence is welcome to read and comment.
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[1] This is the statue often portrayed as the first draft of OTL's Statue of Liberty; in fact, it was sculpted in 2007. It stands in St. Maarten.
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