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howtofightwrite · 2 years

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How physically active were actually "medieval" noble women? I know is a long period but I usually see people complaning about noble women in fantasy doing stuff such as hunting or riding horses. I have seen a couple of illustrations of fencing manuals with women in them too.

We, as a culture, especially in the US, have a very bad habit of using the British Regency/Victorian era as the gold standard for how women all over the world were treated throughout history. And the truth is, it ain’t that way. It never was, because women in this exact era used to duel each other in other parts of Europe and often did it topless.

Yes, this is real. We have records of it.

Was it all women, all the time? No. Was it often enough to mention? Yes.

There’s a really good article by Kameron Hurley, “Women Have Always Fought” that goes over the history of women warriors and the laziness of specular fiction in detail. This is a particularly great few paragraphs from the article that covers where our popular conception that women don’t fight comes from.

“Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”

I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women’s History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.

Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Check out some of these real women below.

Empress Maude, the daughter of the English King, Henry I, was named her father’s heir after her brother died. While her cousin Stephen stole the throne after her father’s death, she raised an army and took the country into a civil war to take it back. They fought it out for the decade it took for her son to reach adulthood, and laid the groundwork for Henry II to become king. There’s a great novel by Sharon Kay Penman, When Christ and His Saints Slept which chronicles the civil war. If you’re interested in medieval history, I recommend reading it. Her daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, also led an interesting life. (It should be said, real history got to the denied female heir fights for her throne before George R.R. Martin.)

There’s great videos from Xiran Jay Zhao discussing the Chinese warrior queen Fu Hao of the Shang Dynasty and Wu Zetian, who became China’s first female emperor. (Yes, you read that right. Emperor.)

There is Khutulun, the Wrestler Princess and the great-great granddaughter of Gengis Khan, who is one source of our “defeat her in battle to marry her” tropes. She issued this challenge, “defeat her in wrestling, she’ll marry.” She scammed would be suitors out of 10,000 horses. Western male authors are so threatened by Khutulun, they’ve kept trying to rewrite her history by making her fall victim to the power of love. (No, seriously.)

There’s also Hojo Masako, the Buddhist nun who deposed her own son when he proved incompetent and ruled Japan as Shogun. Here’s her wiki entry too.

The Amazons of Greek Myth were real in that they were actual Scythian women who went to war. (As Scythian women did, just like their men.) They terrified and terrorized the Greeks so much, they became immortalized in their mythology. Don’t believe me? Here’s an article from National Geographic and this one from Live Science.

There’s stories like this all throughout history from big events to small ones. (You can find more over at Rejected Princesses if you’re interested.) There are female warriors, female generals, noblewomen who took command of their husbands’ forces, widows who took to the sea to get revenge on those who wronged them, women who rode with their husbands to battle, female assassins, female leaders of rebellions, etc. The women of the Japanese samurai class were trained to fight, and fight they did. Women warriors, queens, and politicians are all over mythology too. You’ll often see these women come out of the upper echelons of society because money creates options, but they are there. Many of those stories are lost to history, in some cases purposefully, and there was a long trend among archeologists that assumed because a person was buried with male grave goods, the body had to be male. We’re now finding out that isn’t true. There’s a significant portion of warrior corpses that have turned out to be female. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla chose to post a notice about it in response to these exact criticisms you’re questioning.

Those people you see complaining online? They’re clinging to a version of history that doesn’t exist. More, we know it doesn’t, because popular culture is hungry to the point of desperate for aggressive, confident, and competent female characters. If they were truly a lie, they wouldn’t ring true for so many people.

The history we’re taught today largely downplays women’s achievements, contributions, and successes while uplifting those of men. It’s a fact. Go look at famous female figures anywhere, you’ll find the same story at play over and over. Historically, fantasy as a genre largely portrays a world that is, in fact, fantasy, but that fantasy has nothing to do with women doing things they’re not “supposed” to. There’s no clubhouse. There’s nothing unrealistic in imagining your female character is a kickass queen who defeats overconfident men in wrestling competitions and robs them of all their horses. It’s not unrealistic to come up with an ending that doesn’t conclude in tragedy, violent deaths, them “learning their place,” or even locked within the bonds of an unhappy marriage. (Shocker!) Some did, but the truth isn’t universal. It’s not even unrealistic to imagine they might have supportive male family members, love interests, and followers who happily (gasp) assist them in these endeavors. Maude, for reference, had bastard half-brothers who helped her instead of trying to take the throne for themselves.

History got here before fantasy authors. There’s nothing unrealistic about reality. Popular conceptions and common knowledge fed to us by the majority male dominated culture isn’t always the truth. Reality is, it’s the stories we see normalized across the media spectrum that are wrong. The ones that insist women are objects, who commodify their pain, and reframe their stories to ensure the focus remains on men. While this is changing, women are still often treated as the NPCs of male driven stories.

The people you hear complaining? They want storytelling traditions to stay that way, for the Great Man values countless narratives have reinforced to remain unchallenged. Funny as it sounds, they’re threatened by the very existence of narratives that countermand that centralized focus on men being superior, that there is a stratified gender hierarchy, and men taking their place as the sole, worshipful focus of a woman’s existence, much less these female characters being important in their own narratives. If these people weren’t threatened by female characters being people, they wouldn’t say anything. They’d just move on in apathy.

Reality is people are complicated. There’s room for all stripes in all colors and contexts. It’s no secret that history has suppressed and erased countless stories that don’t support the ruling narrative of the dominant culture. These same people forget there’s plenty of storytelling traditions that include women taking their place as warriors in cultures outside America. For all the sexism and misogyny, women fighting is not an alien concept, it’s not even foreign to other Western European traditions.

Believe what your own research is showing you, not what a bunch of idiots who can’t tell their ass from their elbow are whining about. They can’t handle someone who isn’t straight, male, and (most often) white being the central focus. Really, they can’t handle these characters as even a side focus. That’s their loss, it doesn’t have to be yours.

-Michi

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#Michi answers #how to fight write #writing advice #writing reference #writing tips #history

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the-final-sif · 1 year

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So! Some good news regarding the tribal mob mod situation on the QSMP!

I got in contact with the mod's creator and against my expectations, they were actually very open to hearing feedback and didn't realize that people still saw their mobs as native stereotypes. They were upset and remorseful that the mobs were being refereed to as natives, as that wasn't their intention. Apparently, the original idea was a specific creature from Zulu mythology, that they then attempted to expand out into it's own thing without realizing how it looked to someone not approaching it from that context.

Once I explained to them what the issue was and how it was coming across to people, they saw the problem and realized that they didn't want people to think that about the their mod pack nor did they want to hurt people by invoking racist stereotypes.

We talked for awhile about the problem and various ways to fix it, and they actually really do seem to care about the problem and want to do better. They're going to work with their team to redo the mob design/mechanisms to fix the situation and will get better feedback and work to avoid doing anything like this in the future. I'm actually pretty impressed by how open they were to feedback and how willing they were to want to do better once they were told that people were being hurt by the portrayal in their mod.

Time will tell exactly what will happen there, but for now, they are aware of the issue, they're sorry, and they're going to work on fixing it. So there's that to be hopeful about.

#sif speaks #qsmp #minecraft modded #minecraft mods #honestly was shocked by how open they were to hear the issues #I literally think nobody has ever told them that current portrayal did not fix the issue #I don't know how that happened #but they were legitimately open to my feedback and did actually realize the core issue #and want to fix it even if it means scrapping something they worked hard on

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evilwizard · 1 year

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The concept of goblins are inherently antisemitic. 💔

The concept of goblins has traditionally, for quite a long while, been associated with antisemitism. But not all goblins in folklore, especially pre-Christian folklore, are antisemitic. There was in fact a fairly-lengthy stretch of time in human history during which a “goblin” (from the Old French gobelin, itself from the Ancient Greek kobalos, meaning imp or rogue), would have been considered by most to be a particular subset of fae creature, akin to dwarves (the pre-Tolkien kind which forged weapons for the gods), gnomes, or elves (again, pre-Tolkien). Similar creatures can be found in folklore from around the world, including from Korea, Bangladesh, the Zulu people of Southern Africa, Russia, and the indigenous American Wampanoag people.

It is extremely unfortunate that, in large part due to Christian, European, and white antisemitism over the years, goblins have come to be known as purely an antisemitic stereotype. We have something of a chicken-and-the-egg situation here: early goblins didn’t have “hook-noses” and weren’t generally “greedy” so much as mischievous and otherworldly. Some of the antisemitic traits now attributed to goblins were definitely added over the years—but some, such as general ugliness (at least to a human eye) and smallness of stature, existed long before antisemitism had a chance to warp our perception of the purely-mythological creature.

We are left with a conundrum: are goblins “redeemable” in fantasy/mythological stories? If not, what do we replace them with? Attempts have certainly been made: take Kobolds, for instance. Taken from the Ancient Greek kobalos, the same root from which goblin comes, Kobolds are in part an attempt to separate earlier goblin-lore from later antisemitic additions. But do we have to change the word we use when we do this? Certainly, use of the word “goblin” has to a large extent been usurped by antisemites, but this is in part because it is one of the primary words used in modern times to refer to the group of creatures that goblins represent. Is it right, or ethically correct, to abandon this mythological concept altogether? Is the word so purely associated with antisemitic tropes now that it is impossible to ever redeem it? Can updated mythological retellings by Jewish authors be used to reclaim/respond to these prevalent antisemitic tropes?

These are all good questions, and I truly do not have the answers. I’m not an expert on this subject, and I’m not a Jew. But speaking as a person who has read/studied a lot of mythology, I would advise caution when it comes to a trope like this. Pretending antisemitism doesn’t exist here would be wrong and stupid—but pretending we can, or should, wash our hands of goblin-folklore entirely could be even more dangerous. Antisemitism in these tales are a symptom of real-world hatred and evil… but I don’t personally believe that is all this particular archetype has to offer.

I would love if we could make this post a place for careful consideration and discussion on this topic, and one where Jewish voices in particular have a place to be heard.

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harpagornis · 10 months

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Kizazi Moto review

Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is an anthology of animated shorts from studios all over Africa, with the theme of afrofuturism and science fantasy (mixing frequently indigenous spiritual beliefs with the tech, and many shorts are actually about gods or spiritual beings). It's a shame that the project is attached to Disney, because this is one of the best anthologies I've seen in a long while.

So let's review the individual shorts.

Herderboy

By Uganda's Raymond Malinga, this portrays the story of a boy trying to join a band of herders, which harvest kyber crystals from cyborg cows and are under constant attack by spirits (read dark side hyenas). It's a good start to the anthology; the CGI is bright and makes good use of color, and it has a nice twist at the end.

7/10

Mkhuzi the Spirit Racer

By South Africa's Simangaliso Sibaya and Malcolm Wopé, this one bears a bright and joyous 2D animation. It features a half-human half-something boy who struggles with his Zulu identity, and that all comes crashing down in a race against gentrification. It's a delightful short with beautiful visuals and actual incorporation of cultural themes into the narrative.

9/10

Moremi

By Nigeria’s Shofela Coker, this is a pretty bleak looking CGI short not out of place in Love, Death & Robots. Long ago, soul stealing giants forced a woman to construct magical machines by giving her son's heart to the gods; this is about the summary you're gonna get without getting into heavy spoilers. A delight if you're into mythology as there's quite a few allusions to Nigeria's folklore, but I can see people getting a bit confused and the visuals can be grating at times.

6/10

Surf Sagoma

By South Africa’s Nthato Mokgata and Catherine Green, in a future where sea levels rose and mutant octopi lurk in the depths a boy is peer pressured into surfing in dangerous waters. I have to say, while this has a happy ending it is rather bleak and the CGI visuals are not particularly pleasing.

5/10

First Totem Problems

By South Africa’s Tshepo Moche, we're back to 2D, this time more Disney-esque. If I had to describe this, it'd be like a mixture of the first half of Brother Bear and Coco. It's pretty fun, though a bit lacking in substance and the family feuds can get grating.

7/10

Mukudzei

By Zimbabwe’s Pious Nyenyewa and Tafadzwa Hove, an influencer desecrates Great Zimbabwe, only to be taken to a timeline where it never fell to colonialism and became basically Wakanda. The concept alone is amazing, though the story itself is rather generic.

8/10

Hatima

By South Africa’s Terence Maluleke and Isaac Mogajane, this is by far my favourite of the shorts, it features the tragic conflict between merfolk and humans, with a Black Panther 2 reveal at the end. With stellar 2D animation and allusions to Dogon mythology, as well as a good solid plot where the reveal has just the right amount of foreshadowing without becoming obvious.

10/10

Stardust

By Egypt's Ahmed Teilab, I had the highest expectations for this one, being the only Middle Eastern short in the mix. It's an alright story, I really loved the science fantasy twist on astrology by just being handed a "destiny" in a tube with stars inside. The protagonist naturally choses her own fate over the manufactured ones... though getting there is quite spoilerific.

8/10

You Give My Heart

By South Africa’s Lesego Vorster, this is another return to 2D animation and the second one about influencers amusingly enough. The plot kicks off in a competition in which the human contestants can ascend to godhood. Godhood is very much treated like being an influencer, and amusingly one of the previous contestants was demoted by typing in all caps. Overall pretty fun and the animation is gorgeous, though the characters designs can get a bit ugly.

9/10

Enkai

By Kenya’s Ng’endo Mukii, the final short is done in a CGI mimicking stop motion, which combined with the stellar coloration and lighting makes for a stunning visual experience. This too deals with the divine, this time the young Enkai seeking to become a creator deity like her mother. There is a big plot twist that I will not spoil, and recontextualises the whole short.

9/10

Conclusion

I give the overall anthology 9/10; barring a few hiccups, these are wonderful stories from Africa's many creative voices. Again, pity Disney has a grasp on this.

#kizazi moto #kizazi moto: generation fire #review #animation #afrofuturism #representation

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feralandknotted · 3 months

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@lostxndbroken Zulu and Dean Winchester.

The middle east coastal waters has been a dangerous place this summer with deaths happening every few days. Not shark attacks, but something more supernatural. A sea serpent from the deep, child of jormungandr the world eater from norse mythology, come to the surface feast on humans. In the same waters had been merfolk, but since the danger came they had mostly fled to safer waters. Save for one. Zulu Nightshade had never been close to his school and thus being a loner he was left behind to fend for himself.

It was nothing new. He was no fighter but he was a fast swimmer, confidant he could get away if the serpent targeted him. In the meantime the merman stayed close to shore to try and help the humans that swam from becoming seafood for this nasty creature. They seemed to have become aware of the danger and most stopped coming into the water. But there was a boat he thought was a fishing vessel, it had a big net but a human was swimming around the boat. It also smelled like blood was in the water. Was the man injured and couldn't make it onto the vessel? He had to hurry before the sea serpent was drawn to the blood. Zulu quickly swam up from the shadowy depths to help what he thought was an injured human back onto their boat.

#lostxndbroken #{zulu nightshade}

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racefortheironthrone · 11 months

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Since we're on a Viking bent at the moment, how did they come to be badasses within popular culture?

This is an excellent question!

I think Western pop culture has a weakness for historical warrior cultures in general - there was a big fad for samurai starting in the 70s thanks to Kurosawa films becoming crossover hits, there was a big moment for Spartans after Zack Snyder's film in 2006, there was another one for Romans between the HBO show in 2005 and the Starz Spartacus shows in the early 2010s - for complicated cultural reasons that keep historians like Bret Devereaux busy.

Vikingers had been around as a thing in pop culture off and on for decades - there was The Vikings in 1958 with Kirk Douglas and or the 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas in 1999 - but it tended to be hit-or-miss one-offs rather than a general pop cultural trend until relatively recently. Sustained interest in Vikingers really does kind of trace back to the huge success of the History Channel show which ran from 2013-2020 - which is funny, because originally it was a pretty naked attempt to find something that would tap into the Game of Thrones audience, for all that Hirst hates the comparison- which prompted others to tap into the same audience with Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and The Last Kingdom and God of War, and so on. It's rare that one show hits big enough to cause a trend, but I do think you have to hand it to them in this case.

So why did Vikingers hit so big?

Part of it is that they come pre-packaged with visual iconography (the dragon-ships, the distinctive helmets and shields and axes, the rather inaccurate hairstyles, etc.) and mythology (Norse mythology has the virtue of being decently well-known enough that people recognize who the gods are, but not well-known enough that people complain if you make shit up that wasn't in the Eddas), so a lot of the "branding" has already been done for the creators.

I think another big part of it is that Vikingers kind of act as a cultural Rorschach test that allows people to see what they want - you can go all the way along the spectrum from right-wing Neo-Nazis seeing them as Aryan supermen destroying Western decadence through the will to power to left-wingers thinking that the Vikingers were progressive because they were relatively gender-egalitarian and didn't like Christians very much.

And finally, I think that Vikingers have the benefit of being far enough back in history and niche enough a historical subject that it disarms a lot of people's critical faculties. Here's what I mean -thanks to decades of historical research and activism, more recent and prominent examples of slavery and/or colonialism no longer make for protagonist fodder in pop culture. There's a reason why Benioff and Weiss' "Confederates Win" tv show got canned before it started, and there's a reason why something like Zulu could not get made today (and that's a good thing). But just like the Spartans after 300, the Vikingers are seen as "ancient history" and because their oppression was visited on white people rather than POC, you can show them raiding Lindisfarne and colonizing a third of England (although you'll notice showrunners generally leave out the trans-continental slave trade) without anyone asking if this is problematic.

#history #pop culture #cultural history #vikings #vikingers

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wot-tidbits · 2 months

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Wheel of Time plagiarized from Dune

With the coming of the new part of the awesome Dune movies, we again witness several people and fans to speculate on the similarities between Dune and WoT. There are many who even step further and claim that Robert Jordan was “inspired” (plagiarized) from Herbert. In that light, I want to bring back to your attention that Robert Jordan has spoken on that topic and he completely denies it.

INTERVIEW: May 19th, 2004 Rome Signing Report - Raven (Translated) ROBERT JORDAN Someone else asked if while writing the Aiel he got his inspiration from Herbert (re: the native inhabitants of Dune [the Fremen people]); he answered that it was not that, that the real source of inspiration is the Cheyenne people, originally shepherds and forced to became warriors and to flee into the desert when the white man came.

INTERVIEW: Nov 11th, 1998 MSN eFriends Interview (Verbatim) TIJAMILISM I love all the similarities between Frank Herbert's Dune and WOT. Was this intended? If so, are you a fan of his? ROBERT JORDAN No, there was no intention to make any similarities between Dune and my writings. And I am certainly a big fan of the original Dune novel. Although I doubt if I've read it since it first came out!

SOURCE.

The fast answer to these two quotes is “But of course he is obviously lying!”. To this day we still have no example of Robert Jordan lying to his fans. Moreover Robert Jordan publicly stated about using Tolkien in his writing and had no problem to admit it. Why he will admit about Tolkien but won’t do the same for Herbert? I do not see any reason to not believe Robert Jordan except the obvious “but it must be a lie”.

For first time we also can finally use RJ’s notes as proof that the similarity is coincidental.

ORIGINS OF |THE WHEEL OF TIME by Michael Livingston Aiel. The idea of people living in a harsh desert landscape beside a great chain of mountains is one that came to Jordan early: Altaii has a similar concept, and the Aiel are present in some of the earliest Wheel of Time notes: “They are infantry, in many ways like a cross between the Apache and the Zulu, with touches of Cheyenne. Physically, most are tall, with blonde or reddish hair and blue or blue-gray eyes most common.” To this he added elements of the culture of the Bedouins and the Irish—the latter, he said, at least initially intended as a joking comment against the tendency of novelists to all have the same kind of desert people (see Tuatha’an). Indeed, it’s nevertheless been commented upon that Jordan’s Aiel are strikingly similar to the Fremen from Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). That similarity, however, is almost entirely the result of Herbert and Jordan using the same source materials of the real world: in particular, the ancient Israelites who wandered in the desert while awaiting their entry into what they believed was their Promised Land. Rand al’Thor plays a role akin to both Moses and, at least within Christian mythology, Jesus (as the Messiah who both splits and saves the Jews). Other notable Jewish parallels include the Aiel Tribes and, somewhat obviously, their name: Aiel derives from Israel. Their connections to Native Americans (particularly Plains Indians) should not be forgotten, however: from their rituals to their clan names, Jordan made frequent recourse to them.

#wheel of time #dune #robert jordan #tidbits

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bestiarium · 2 years

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U Tikoloshe [South African folktales]

Though the origin of the Tikoloshe lies in Xhosa mythology (a Ngunti ethnic group native to South-Africa), the version of the tale that is most often told is that of Zulu mythology. The Tikoloshe, sometimes called Tokoloshe or Thikoloshe, is a small hairy humanoid creature that is a very common reoccurring character in South-African folktales. He is no higher than a man’s knee, and his face is covered in fur. His face is also often compared to that of a baboon. Associated with water and ponds, it makes its home between the reeds of deep pools.

The Tikoloshe is a malicious prankster character who delights in annoying pranks. For example, he often releases peoples’ cows from their stables and he also steals their milk. Supernatural creatures that steal milk from cows at night are a common theme in myths around the world, such as the Romanian Moroi, the Tatzelwurm in some Alpine villages and the Icelandic Tilberi.

Unlike those creatures, however, the Tikoloshe is very fond of women. These beings have enormous penises that are so long, they carry them over their shoulders. Curiously, they only have a single buttock. In many stories, evil witches and sorcerers have a Tikoloshe as their familiar, to carry out their bidding.

In 2000, students from a school in South-Africa claimed to have seen a Tikoloshe in the building. Supposed eyewitnesses claimed the creature resembled a ghost, but it was wearing a hat and a red sweater. When the creature was spotted, students reportedly ran out of their classroom in fear, and when they came back, three mysterious fingerprints were seen on the window. But that story sounds like an urban legend to me. Regardless, the influence of Christianity on the local Zulu folklore can be seen in the fact that supposedly, shouting “Jesus!” will repel the creature.

Source: Fordred-Green, F., 2000, “Tokoloshe Tales: Reflections on the Cultural Politics of Journalism in South Africa”, Current Anthropology, 41(5), 701-712. (image source 1: Brandon Ellis on Artstation) (image source 2: Agung Wulandana on Artstation)

#African mythology #Zulu mythology #monsters #mythical creatures #urban legends #creatures #bestiary #mythology #myths

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barbiegirldream · 1 year

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Anywayssss reminder that Goblin a European creature meant to depict the grotesque charictures of Jewish people because of the hatred for us from the Christians.

The Tokoloshes are a creature from South African Folklore they’d describe as a water sprite. The Zulu people in a few interviews with Journalists have said they learned about the Tokoloshes from the Xosha. Word of mouth transference of culture and spiritual practices is very common in Africa and until Journalists and Anthropologists become committed to taking down their history in respectful good faith the ones of the past burned any and all literature.

Taking something spiritual that the Zulu truly believe in and writing it off as mythology because it does not align with Christian or Atheistic values is a very tried and true method of cultural genocide. Don’t do this. Their beliefs are not in anyway affecting your life.

Anyways the Tokoloshes are malevolent creatures who wreak havoc and can cause storms as well is used as a way to frighten children into behaving. Original Xosha descriptions of the Tokoloshes describe them as short hairy all over men like a baboon but squished. In Zulu tradition it is described more like an apparition or ghost like creature.

They have evil powers such as calling storms as in 2000 journalists were told Tokoloshes summoned the tornado that wrecked a neighborhood. And many say looking into their eyes in a mark for death. The Tokoloshe are an evil spirit that must be banished to protect people.

In 1933 a man became so frightened of what he was convinced was a Tokoloshe he killed his young cousin he mistook for the Tokoloshe. The high courts argued in defense that he had a mistake of fact his cousin for the creature but the courts argued it must be a mistake a reasonable man could make. However determining he was not a reasonable man they took his sentence from death to impriosonment. This was of course during apartheid and any cultural beliefs were written off as fantasy and myth where as belief in God was absolute. The racist split between myth and religion.

I tell these stories to make it clear that the Tokoloshe are a very real creature in Xosha and Zulu cultures. And there are lots of modern accurate and apartheid inaccurate accounts of them. If you wanted to depict them as a creature who comes to wreak havoc I imagine it would be possible to do so in a respectful way. But that would require respect for these spiritual beliefs to be there in the first place which in most cases I trust it is not.

Sources:

The Tikoloshe and the Reasonable Man: Transgressing South African Legal Fictions by Patrick Lenta

Tokoloshe Tales: Reflections on the Cultural Politics of Journalism in South Africa by Leslie Fonda Green

These two are sources I double checked today there are other bits I remember from actively learning in my pre colonial africa class. And if you look there are likely more modern pieces as well

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dteamain · 1 year

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i see posts going around about the creator of the mod pack that has the barakoa mobs here is the creators response:

the creator claims that they meant to model the mobs after tokoloshes from zulu mythology. here is why i don't believe this for one second:

here is what tokoloshe are typically modelled as:

goblins. they are goblins. tokoloshe are mischievous goblins that are said to take lifes while you sleep.

here is the original mobs that the creator made:

these look and act nothing like tokoloshe. the creator mentions that they changed the skin to green and added pointy ears to better represent their idea:

the fact is the only thing these mobs have in common with the tokoloshe is the green skin and pointy ears that were added only after people pointed out the racist connotations that these mobs held.

these mobs hunt in tribes and even have a 'chief' they wear masks and other traditionally indigenous attire. they have body paint and they will become passive only if you kill them and wear their masks. nothing i just mentioned is anyway related to tokoloshe.

the masks might be the biggest red flag considering the tokoloshe do not wear them in any form yet the mob name 'barakoa' literally means mask so clearly this is something the creator felt was important to the mobs design

i will not give a white person the benefit of the doubt especially a white person with the worlds shakiest excuse.

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missmayhemvr · 1 month

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How Europe underdeveloped Africa and its legacy

first and formost before i break this down, this is not a post for white people to express their guilt, or savoir complex or love of historical revisionism. you'll not just be blocked, you'll go on a block list on this post, don't do it to yourself, i wont even have to be the one to do it. secondly this is a covering of the broad themes, lessons, and understanding within the book and what we should learn from it. third, i will often talk from my own perspective from which i will round to a larger context.

part 1- history and anthropology

As someone who has grown up black in the us, i grew up with a particular understanding or idea of Africa, the slave trade and the way America and Europe came about. you hear about tribal or ethnic disputes in the context of modern Africa and hear quite a lot of blatantly racist things about Africans. which caused me to get very into history, to which you learn when it comes to Africa there's not a lot of great places to start. this is something quite similar to the various indigenous peoples of the Americas as well. this has always been presented to me as a fault of Africans for not having history and is a long standing idea of white intellectuals from the 1800s to the Joe every man of today. the truth is Africa has history, there's no land, that has no history and Europe just devalues histories not associated with itself. there's a absolute glut of kingdoms, empires, languages, historical traditions, governing styles, cultural roles, trade networks etc etc. the fact of the matter is, that there's just very little Europeans want to learn about Africa that isn't to colonial ends, even today.

This is something Walter covers in great detail, to such a point that even as someone that has been purposely elbows deep into listening to everything i can find on African history i still had to go look up various pre-colonial kingdoms and figures. there is not a region of Africa that he doesn't take time to address in at least some detail, from Oyo and Ashanti on the west African coast, to the north of the Maghreb with Morocco and Algeria, east to the great lakes region, the horn of africa and south to the Zulus, koi koi, and Nguni peoples and kingdoms. The extensiveness to which he covers material forms of production, trade, and methods of historical preservation of culture, the types and breath of items, created and traded all through like cloth, glass, iron working, artistic ventures like bronze sculptures of benin and food production and cultization and the formations of various styles of rule, early democracy, and other such information put to bed nearly all of the non-nonsensical ideas that africa was a grand continent without progress, innovation, or skills and everything great, large, or more complex than rubbing to sticks together came from europe or arabs.

The book delves quite deep into the mythology of intense african slavery and violence which would be later used by europeans to justify colonization of africa to each other, said colonization, i will swing around back to much as the book does.

The middle passage, the triangle trade, the atlantic slave trade, these are all names for the event that was one of the chief reason to the economic and scientific take off of europe that would lead to industrialism, with the other being the colonization of the americans. stolen land and labor pushed the european world from not much a concern to anyone but those who had to deal with the crusades to the paramount power that controlled nearly all the sea trade, and held large swaths of territories of the world. we all know most of that, but walter ask the question on the other side of that coin. what did the slave trade do to africa? and why did they participate? the short answer is it changed the entire way african economies functioned and lessened the possibility of growth not just of kingdoms over territories, but of production and developement of sectors such as iron working, glass making, and agriculture. and in a very literal sense was one of the earliest forms of the phenomenon known today as brain drain and depopulation. we quite literally will never know the amount of people stolen or killed for slavery, we only know that as the rest of the world experienced high population growth africa and the americas started to experience intense depopulation. these phenomena weren't incidental they were known, and admitted as purposeful by figures qouted in the book. The african leaders at the time how ever were stuck between a rock and a hard place, many noted not just the importance of guns, but also recognized the importance of population growth at the onset. the game however being rigged from the start would have taken a miracle to over come. japan was the one country to escape colonialism in most meaningful senses, and that was because the dutch taught them how to produce guns and would trade with them "almost" as equals. these are also things addressed by rodney, the sale of arms was often highly lopsided, with Portugal and dutch traders only being willing to trade badly produced or broken guns, low quality powder and shot for slaves. this would not change until europeans would learn of other african products that they could make us of in their markets as raw materials such as ivory or kola nuts, this change would not happen for quite a while and mainly after the Europeans had already built their industrial bases and had taken total control of trade routes and begun to flood African markets with "cheap" products. the combinations of factors both purposeful and accidental shifted the African economies into a near total reliance on Europe economically and militarily but not yet politically. these are all expertly researched and explained to a point it is nearly impossible to refute any points. This points are all also something i can confirm from nearly every single source that ive looked into on African history.

part 2 -colonial "development"

This is a portion of history ill admit to doing my best to stay away from, generally much of my knowledge on it till this book has been on what happened with various kingdoms that fell in the late 1800s and early 1900s or by the various oral and 3rd hand accounts of what peoples familes, parents and even political elites went through. ill be frank, i did not go into the depth of the horrors of what happened with slavery, slave raiding, and its secondary effects, for this section and the next ill have to go through quite a lot. ill try to tone it down as best as i can, but on some of it even the implied parts are going to be horrid. I believe it is however important to face those head on, to truly understand the so called "white mans burden" or the reality of what that meant was.

colonialism meant making the final step, taking africa politically and physically. europe made the leap whole heartly to take all of africa, land, people, and any potential valuables, resources and to exploit everything they could get their hands on to the fullest extent possible. i do not use anything in the prior sentence lightly. Europeans like to play word games and often, the idea that they ended slavery in any meaningful sense is false, and ill come back to that in the final section. during the period of colonial control europeans destroyed just about anything of the prior rulers they could, and stole anything they could. theres a likelihood in my mind that theres many and african sculpture, painting, and cloth or glass work that sits in the home of a collector that got rich off the stolen plunder of africa. these includes many villages, cities, and palaces and shires and places of worship and places of craft. whole cities were destroyed such as kumasi, taking with it histories, architectural stylings and methods of production.

during this period was the final shift from internal political and economic growth to purely serving the empires to which ones lands belonged. no longer would rulers push for education reforms or challenges on religious bodies to strengthen any part of the nation, it was a total transformation into a form of state slavery. this is as metaphorical as literal, europeans would begin to change agriculture to be primarily centered around cash crops and mining labor to which labor was forced. people were made to pay taxes in the modern sense through the wages made through said labor. these taxes were in turn used primarily to fund the upkeep of oppressive forces and funding the check books of colonial governors, an insanely tiny portion of these funds were used for anything besides extracting wealth and resources.

the various governments put little to no money, research, or development into anything but cash crops and pulling things out the ground. the only times they put money into schools, training or even medical resources for people in African, it was for better wealth extraction and always the bare minimum. i believe (don't have the book in front of me rn) west Africa (from west of chad and south of Algeria) only had one university until the late 50s. the industrial sector of Africa was near completely killed, Africans in settler areas were not allowed to own even small scale industrial machinery such as cotton gins or fruit oil extraction machines, in non-settler state areas generally only peoples brought into Africa for the purpose of being a separated class of petite boug representatives for the colonizers were allowed to own industrial machinery. electricity was mostly for those same classes of individuals, hospital access, education access, pretty much anything you need for a community to survive esp in the modern era was highly restricted from Africans. To say that Europe "developed" Africa in any sense is beyond a bold faced lie, and it was something ,Rodney points out, that Europeans were quite proud of until they started to face push back for the level of humanity and exploitation they were facing. Once they started to get pushed out they changed their tune to the lie of African development and modernization. just like the lie of ending slavery for moral reasons and invading Africa to end slavery. Speaking of ending slavery in Africa, Rodney points to several figures who openly gloated about how they ran their colonial post or corporate holdings as slave plantations. king Leopold is one of the more famous examples of it, but far from the only one, many took delight in their cruelty. famine became endemic in regions that were the origins of many foods and cultivates crops, as all the agricultural process that could be shifted to cash crops were. Roads and trains ran from the mines and plantations to the seas and very little else. Various things needed to export raw materials were built with slave labor, like a airport in Kenya built by hand, no machinery via forced labor of Kikuyu peoples

Europe's only goal in Africa was land and profits, the same as in the Americas. genocide, slavery, starvation campaigns were common tools of colonizers in Africa all the way up to today, which i will re-address in part 4.

part 3 - education, traditional and political

Education is a very clear and important part of modern life, but also for building a nation, and self dependence, so it is of no wonder than colonizers thought that it should be restricted in Africa in regards to Africans. The various quotes and framing that Europeans used to dismiss the idea that Africans should have access to any form of formal education sounds exactly like quotes pulled from the most vicious of slavers of the prior centuries in the US and Haiti. One of the most prominent ideas that was education would "spoil" Africans, was a sentiment was also expressed by slavers. this section of the book is very much facts and figures on just how little access to education there was, how little funding went into it vs the amount of profits coming out of the various regions as well as how this was over come. two of the prime ways that was done according to the book and much of what Ive heard prior, was through the use of missionary schools or independent schools. These schools were primarily funded not by the colonial governments but by the peoples seeking education, their families, and so on, with the expectation that those educated would teach the rest of the family. education how ever was shown to not really pull people out of poverty nor to really give African peoples the possibility of positions of power or influence. this was such a near universally a rule, Amilcar Cabral, revolutionary leader and agricultural engineer even spoke to his personal experiences with being educated far beyond the man in charge of him yet having zero say in his job, his boss was renownly a dumb man. This was not an uncommon thing. Rodney goes well into it, and this just exemplifies how Europeans only saw Africans as a source of cheap and "unskilled labor". Access to education even if funded by the peoples seeking education themselves was clamped down on sharply once revolution was on the wind. Those who know the patterns of history though would have known that the clamping down made that worse, it simply accelerated the wants for education, as well as for independence.

part 4 - modern Africa and modern euro/america

When the cards started to fold on empire they took many different routes to lessen the fall for power, France tried blowing thing up and killing cattle and destroying things needed for civil life, a all call for genocide against Algerians. Britian, Portugal, most of them tried the same things, but they were pushed out in some ways, and when that became obvious they turned to the small group of political insiders they rapidly trained to take over in their stead. for those that weren't under the control of the colonizers they turned to the coup and military dictatorship. very few of the revolutionary leaders of africa were able to stay in power, many turned toward methods some would call authoritarian. without the context of what was going on and how unstable the situation was for these leaders and just how quickly and violently these revolutions could be overturned, it would be easy to take these figures as just becoming despots without reason, some of them really did become despots who just started functioning as neocolonial cops. This brings us to the modern era, and the current method of colonialism not just in africa but much of the world, Neocolonialism, or as i like to call it "home rule".

European nations were not ready to give up control, but they decided they would be willing to give up the appearance of direct rule. economic decisions, the political direction of countries, borders, very little of the modern africans situation was not directly decided on by europeans or americans. financial institutions such as the world bank and IMF lend these governments that had to try and start building actual nations with functioning economies loans with interest rates they would not be able to pay back in time, with conditions that made it even hard to meet the internal goals or pay back the loans and additional conditions of economic control by the IMF for failure to pay these loans. colonial governments such as France forced nations like Mali to pay taxes till recently, and nearly all the colonial powers set the trade rules between them and their "former" colonies in Africa. very few leaders were able to chart much of a path for progress or development that met the needs of the people before these various things snatched much of the independence back away from the people, pushing Africa away from shifting toward an agricultural sector that feed the people and an industrial sector capable of growing the economies or a scientific sector able to make adjustments or provide notable push in any direction. Fifa has more say in policy when they decide to host in a country than the people or even large segments of the governments of Africa. Nkrumah and Rodney both in their respective titles showcase this well, however neither would live to see much past the end of overt colonial rule.

Today there is a larger push against neocolonial rule and economic control than prior, organizations such as BRICS, china's one belt one road policy, and smaller grass roots works and various coups have shifted us to a different situation in Africa than what it has been in for the last 80+ years. However this is not a wholly different situation to that my grandmother would have heard of. much of the continent is still very much under euroamerican influence, the us of slave labor or near slave labor conditions is still a significant factor in the economic relationship between Africa and its former colonizers, which is seen very strongly in the Congo and in coco production. Africa is still yet to industrialize in a manner that matches its needs and this is generally at the behest of its colonizers, and in the majority of the continent the colonial capitalist ventures still own land and resources they stole and murdered their way into, settler property relations have also been solidified in places like south Africa. i would believe that Rodney would say that say that Africa still has a long way to go if he was still around.

The themes of the book were quite complex, and it was refreshing in many ways to be presented with such a sober look into Africa. Read the book, understand what its saying and try to use a similar level of consciousness, nuance, and thought in your day to day analysis of the world around you, and we may have a chance at fixing this ship.

To depart from the contents of the book, i would like to address the white man in the room. Europe, its role in history and its modern role in history, like I've said at the top, not time or place for white people tears. I'm going to be brutally honest, and I'm going to combine the thoughts and finding of not just Nkrumah and Rodney, but also figures like Fanon, Malcom X, Kwame Ture,Rev Martin Luther king Jr and many others of the course of Africana histories and philosophies.

Europe, more particularly Western Europe, has spent the last few hundred years visiting horror on horror on the world, when it comes to the modern era, they simply have not stopped. the damage Europe as a bloc has done, much like the amount of people who were enslaved or killed for the slave trade, will never be full accounted for and that tab just keeps growing. There is no sign of it slowing or stopping. Empires don't like to stop existing, this is something those interested in history know very well. The problem is that Europe cannot be honest nor up front about this, be it the League of nations or the EU and America, or even in the face of the UN, Europe and its Settler states it spawned is just as addicted to domination and profit seeking at all cost as it was 100 years ago which was no different when the slave trade began. Europeans/ White people as a whole as still strongly in the belief that they have a moral high ground to speak to the rest of the world when the truth of the matter is for nearly 500 years, white peoples flying European flags have been histories biggest villains. even in the 21st century, Europe's role on the world stage has been that of a vampire. sucking the life from others to sustain itself. it is still violently racist and xenophobic, which is ironic for peoples who have literally invaded the vast majority of the world, nor is it any more moral or upright today than on the eve of colonialism in the Americas or Africa or any other portion of the world. the EU can barely come together today to denounce blatant acts of genocide and white people are finger waging about anti-LGBT laws in places they couldn't point to on a map (im not happy about anti-lgbt shit, im trans bi and poly this shit actually tears me up). Europeans and their settler offshoots boast about the safety of their cities while actively being the cause of the violence elsewhere. This is all to say Europes fucking evil ya'll, which we should all know at this point, but to further it, they aren't really going to stop as that's what its designed to be. these nations aren't going to suddenly produce radical leaders who are going grow morals or empathy and compassion and move us closer to a just world and fight climate change and help develop the global south or anything like that unless some extreme changes happen, not just among the ruling classes, but the everyday person because like i noted, its policies are racist and colonial and imperialistic, but that really only last not just because people aren't willing to guillotine people over it, but because a substantial enough portion of the populace that they care about are happy to be that way or are passive about the suffering of black or brown people or poor people. they will accept the idea the x group of brown people are homophobic or terrorist( never questioning what terrorist even means) and accept that they should constantly be bombed or killed or have their land and resources stolen, which if people cant see the parallels to the largest slaving nations going and invading under the guises of ending slavery and the nations the mainstreamed homophobia across the world and did acts of political terror across the globe going and claiming those are valid reasons to do what they do idk how to help you. your average white American or European is truly no more curious or wanting to actually learn and have dialog about African cultures than isrealis are about Arab culture, nor are they any less willing to throw white supremacist ideas about these peoples onto them. Those last things are not problems i really know how to solve because we are constantly shown even in internet spaces the white supremacist notions of the "other" will animate people into heinous actions, harassment, doxing campaigns, etc without POC even having to say a word against people. Unless White people yes in the monolithic have a substantial cultural and economic shift, you'll keep producing hitlers and leopolds, guilt will not push you, your nations, or your friends and families into a more positive role.

if it could, slavery would have done it, colonialism would have done it, the holocaust etc. you guys have to change, you must . Peace.

#black liberation #colonization #indigenous liberation #world of the oppressed #pan african #the colonized #politics #save for later #how europe underdeveloped africa #walter rodney #liberal hypocrisy #fascisim #scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds

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