Speaking about Love - Lakelands PARIAH for Dungeon23

 

Medium of the ghost-god-community Mukasa, Bubembe Island

"Mediums and interpreters used metaphors of descent, of eating as power—the transformative potential of assembling to feast and debate the future—to organize ordinary people’s creative belonging with clanship…They might never encounter through possession all who had come before them, whose accomplishments and skill made different places rich and safe in the present. Yet with mobile mediums and local pythons, they could imagine the others whom they would never meet doing as they did." - David Schoenbrun, The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 

"Since he filled the glass to the brim, he had to tread softly so as not to pour the juice, so he arrived unnoticed by both the ghost and his wife. You can imagine the shock as this man watched his deceased mother-in-law singing, dancing, and cultivating while the good daughter sat around relaxing in the sun!" - The Tale of Njabala the Beautiful, from The Oral Tradition of the Baganda

"When people in Buganda thought about power, they spoke about love." - Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda

Working through my (game) issues (for games)

It's no secret that I love Pariah. Tbh that may be an understatement - I have an "it's my hole! it was made for me!!' relationship with Pariah. While I have yet to convince my usual gang to try it out (life is suffering) and my play exp. has been limited to solo games with various oracles, pieces of Pariah have found their way into every single game I've run for the past year or so. I think it gets the anthropological contours of premodern belief and ritual in a way that few other things do. Including non-gaming stuff, honestly.  The supplemental magic system ANIMA is a good short example of the rooted quality that's common across the project; "Holy wisdom is not thin and clear like water, but thick and dark like blood." I have a proper review of the book in the works but for now it's enough to say that I feel like it's particularly well-suited to the sorts of games I enjoy. 

Another thing I love is the history of precolonial Lakelands E. Africa: drum personalities, banana farming, genderwork, ancestor worship, North Nyanza Bantu linguistics, boat design, even milhist which I typically can't stand. It was a marriage of convenience, I guess - it's largely due to the crisis in Cent. African academic history that I wound up getting so invested in the Great Lakes to start with. Premodern African history departments went through a collapse period following the golden age of the terminal colonial/early post-colonial. Funding dried up in the West and socio-political issues strangled many fledgling Continental programs with great promise while they were still in the crib. Some places weathered the hard times better than others; Nigeria's universities took a beating during the civil war and South Africa's had to deal with the legacy of apartheid, but both have been able to maintain something approaching the previous levels of intellectual production where regional history is concerned. Kind of. Others never recovered. I talked about this a bit with John B of The Retired Adventurer (who I learned has an impressive command of African phil! true renaissance man - check out his buda gnolls for some African-inspired game stuff that doesn't suck) and I'll just post that:

As Jan Shetler noted in her review of Reid's Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Economy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century:

"The Kingdom of Buganda is one of the few pre-colonial polities in Sub-Saharan Africa that can boast substantial academic scholarship reaching back forty years and written primary sources (both Ganda and western) from before the end of the nineteenth century. It is thus a place where scholarly debate, rather than the reconstruction of basic knowledge, is now possible."

That’s how it started for me, an attempt to fill the void where Cent. Africana should be, but I v. quickly came to admire Great Lakes studies for its own merit. There’s so much vitality! People building on each other's insights, junior scholars re-evaluating the work of the subject’s elders, even honest to god works of genius. Historians and archeologists like Schoenbrun, Hanson, Kodesh, Stephens, Amin, and Kafumbe use the techniques and frameworks they developed for thinking about Great Lakes Africa to push the limits of premodern research, much like how  Vansina, Roberts, Biebuyck and De Heusch used insights gained from work in and on Central Africa to lay foundations for the modern discipline. I know I'm just describing the rudiments of a functioning field, but that's a hard-won victory considering the conditions, one earned at times with literal blood. 

For a long while now, I've had a lot of trouble actually putting pen to paper for this game. And it's because of love. The Great Lakes are so rich and so beautiful and so important to the whole enterprise of African history that I felt like it would be particularly awful do to it what's been done to the continent at large in the scene, turned into cheap costuming divorced of real context for entirely unrelated stories. I just didn't trust myself with doing a good enough job. Didn't help that I've had some bad experiences trying to talk about exactly that problem in spaces meant for Black folks. My older sister, who is very wise, replied that "nobody gives a fuck" so I "should just do whatever [I] want to do" when I asked her about this. She is correct, ofc, but you can know that intellectually and still not really internalize it. Also she should make a blog instead of slinking around LIKE SHE IS RIGHT NOW and nothing she says has any worth until she does. 

I once told Blackout that my metric for Afrogames is crazy simple - all it takes is evident passion and vision to win a place in my heart. Thinking about it now, I would also add "honesty" or "self-knowledge" to my checklist; it's why Crawford's Spears of the Dawn succeeds where many fail. This is not an aim at Marcia B's call for a more rigorous game criticism, which is entirely reasonable and well-founded. I like a lot of things that I wouldn't really say are good, y'know. It's also a reflection of the state of Afrogaming, at least as I see it; I could count the number of games, completed or not, that meet my rather low standard on one hand and still have fingers left over. This is what I'm gonna do: I'll try to judge my efforts next year by my own yardstick. I know I have the passion and I think I have the vision, so it's a matter of whether it can come out in my work for this challenge. The first real benefit of Dungeon23 for me rn is getting over this weird mental block that's been messing with my ability to write about this thing I really want to write about. 

For anyone with real-world ties to the Mother of Spirits, I hope that you’ll consider any mistakes and misrepresentations to be the product of simple ignorance, not carelessness - omukwano gutta bingi. 

Kawuugulu living drumbeats to paddle/fish to

What this is not:

• A genericized five-culture Africa or even E. Africa - PYTHON is based specifically on Victoria Nyanza/the Inland Sea's northern littoral circa 1000 CE or so, though it has some (purposeful) anachronisms stretching as far out as the 1700s. 
• Encyclopedic? I'd like just enough to contextualize the dungeon for now, I think. 
• Afrodiasporic allegory: all Black art doesn't have to revolve around diasporic concerns. I'm also not lying when I say that to trojan-horse you into more first world bs, which is apparently a winning strategy, because I'm not a fucking hack. I'll let you if/when I do.

The Old Way...

Life around the Mother Lake dramatically changed centuries ago with the sacred gift of the banana tree. The frequent plot-shifting and flat social structures that characterized the yam farming days were replaced by large chunks of territory and wealth created by banana garden abundance. Roots grew deep and old in the permanent villages that formed around banana gardens, altering the rhythms of Lakelands society; the ancestor ghosts who watched over their residents were similarly altered by the experience. 

The first of the ghost-chieftains, human dead equivalent in soul to the local spirits of forest-spring-hill, found their strength after long meditation and initiation in ossuaries lovingly maintained by their descendants. Friendlier to human concerns than the somewhat-to-very alien spirits, health and prosperity flowed towards the ossuary-shrines that served as a ghost-chief's seat. People made communities of the living (called hearthstone clans after the homely symbol of the cooking fire) by orienting themselves around the empowered dead - the bulk of these new groupings did not consist of the ghost-chief's living relatives, though fictive kinship ties were a strong way to bind clanmates together, and hearthstone membership chiefly depended on residence and ritual ties to the clan ossuary. 

Knots of sovereignty formed around these wealthy villages, with the power of the emerging royals based on their ability to adjudicate disputes between freeholders and maintain ties with the clan ancestors. Despite this power, tracts of deep forest or papyrus-choked watercourses still separated these new long-term mainland settlements. Paths through the forest, fords, and wooden bridges crossing papyrus swamps were weak links in the networks connecting communities because they were narrow and that very narrowness made their controllers strong, further reinforcing the granularity of settlement.  

...and the New

Change has come again to the Lakelands, this time at the hands of the forgotten fisherfolk who live on the islands of the Mother. Their development of the great sewn canoes - boats of startling complexity - collapsed distance between peoples formerly limited to coast-hopping dugouts. The spatial reach of sewn canoes, compared to the well-defined blocs of territory carved out by bananaland, created shapeshifting networks of intercommunicating areas; with water as a border, people shed or added connections with ease. Littoral societies had many more “neighbors” than those who lived inland and the fisherfolk enjoyed a monopoly on the choice to allocate their support to whomsoever they deemed responsive to it.  As ties deepened between the lakemen, their collaboration birthed new miracles that hauled in fortune for the shore communities - the reengineered sieve net quintupled catches, the sprat-charts marked out the richest fish zones. Perhaps the sleeping Mother sent her devotees among men these gifts, inspiring them in shared dreams. 

Connecting them all is the symbol of the python and the priestesses who live inside its name.  No one knows who the first python cultist was for sure, though every cult has its own story. The potential was always there, of course. What can feast like Offering-Swallower*, She of the Yawning Jaw? Who knows the ways of the lake better than Hundred-Home-Never-Rest, slithering spirit of the Mother's undercurrents? Do the crawling and weeping things below the earth not bow before the crushing muscles of Sacred-Patterned-Scholar? Still...nothing may have come of this truth if some bold soul hadn't asked a python spirit to teach them. 

The greatest secret given to the mediums by the python spirits was the ability to open themselves up to possession, allowing souls to wrap around each other and merging the two in a whole greater than its parts. Just as the sewn-canoe collapsed the distance between peoples, the Coiling Art collapses the space between spirits and men. Once mediums learned the trick of opening their souls to ghosts like they could for spirits, the Lake began singing the death-song for the kings of land. These practices, built upon the trances used by the salt-selling prophets of the west who came to buy fish, untether worshippers from the clan ossuary - every priestess is her own living shrine and she takes the ancestors with her wherever she goes. She reshapes her partners as they reshape her; the ossuaries of the past elevated ancestral ghosts to powerful landed chieftains among the dead, the medium frees her spirits to become true ghost-gods with the potential to one day match the Mother. Communities stretch and grow with them, pouring out of territorial boundaries as the low and clanless reorient themselves towards these fledgling ghost-gods. Python mediums consume the former clan taboos of those who come to them, breaking metaphysical shackles that chain them to unwanted lives.  These newborn cults are eventually run out of mainland clan territories, finding refuge from the wrath of the mighty among fisherfolk. Youth return to their Mother for comfort, it is known!

Storms gather back on the mainland. Bananalands finally brush up against each other and territorial skirmishes become more intense. Ruling knots can no longer ensure the boundless growth that their peaceful dominion depended on. Some unsouled courts hit upon a cursed solution: wars waged for the sake of captives provide enough slaves to keep the ritually-invested clanmembers from suffering during the shift. Existing slaves, previously treated like overgrown children by freemen, are now openly despised as owned things. The war captives are thrown into hastily-formed regiments and told to capture three more to earn freedom for their families. It is a cascading nightmare; the collapse of Lakelands society has not come yet but it is on the horizon. Some of the ghost-chiefs, who once reined in badly behaving rulers, have become myopic and hardhearted in their extreme old age. Focused so intensely on their hearthstone clan and its territory, they've stopped caring about anyone outside their authority. Horror and liberation are the twin currents of the age. 

You Are:

Fisherfolk, mediums, war orphans, itinerant storytellers, pottergirls, conquered dynasts, escaped slaves, drum messengers, fifth wives - anyone willing to shed their skin and jump in a canoe. You're part of a small python cult, the seed of a new people on an island of the Mother. You don't have much, not yet at least, but there are two great treasures in your keeping that a Smoking Mountains prince would kill thousands to possess: the tutelage of a python spirit and, wonder of wonders, a young ghost-god allied to your cause. Travel and discovery strengthen your souls and those of your deific partners, feasting and ritual observance nourish your community. 

Eat and wander and grow wise, lakechild. Soon - so very soon - you will devour the kings of grain. 

The actual dungeon is just a big fish

The Mother’s Daughter has returned! A gigantic spirit cichlid, the eldest child of the Lake, resurfaces after generations of silence. The last time She was here, an entire island vanished with Her! Or that’s what the ancestors say, it happened a really long time ago. Maybe She ate it? Many have set out to seek Her wisdom or plead a case for aid, for She is ancient of days and those who were sharp enough to heed Her counsel in the old fingerharp epics became powerful beyond measure - more than a few of the great ghost-chieftains on the mainland were once men and women advised by the Daughter. She’s said to keep some of the wondrous treasures they offered in thanks and sacrifice stored in her liver. Lakelander python cults and ruling knots, masters of cattle from the salt roads, and even haughty deadly nobles of the Smoking Mountains have come to pay homage to the fish-goddess in hopes of receiving some holy guidance…but the Daughter refuses to respond! The only thing She does is open her vast mouth and wait. Does She want us to go in? Who knows! Some people been doing it anyways, but nobody's come out yet. Also there’s a sleeping sickness plague brewing but that’s probably unrelated.   

Extremely shortened source list

• The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 by David L. Schoenbrun

• The Archaeology of the Sesse Islands and Their Contribution to the Understanding of Great Lakes Ceramics by Scheherazade Amin

• Tuning the Kingdom: Kawuugulu Musical Performance, Politics, and Storytelling in Buganda by Damascus Kafumbe

• A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century by David Schoenbrun

• Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda by Holly Hanson

• Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda by Neil Kodesh

• A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 by Rhiannon Stephens

• The Early History of Kitara in Western Uganda: Process Models of Religious and Political Change by Renee Louise Tantala

• Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Economy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century by Richard Reid

• The Power of Feasts: From Prehistory to the Present by Brian Hayden

• Baakisimba: Gender in the Music and Dance of the Baganda People of Uganda by Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza

• Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa, edited by Henri Medard and Shane Doyle

• Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings: Island Shrine Practice in Uganda’s Long Eighteenth Century by David Schoenbrun

BONUS SOURCES: I would be remiss if I did not mention the immense influence of Mother Stole Fire on this. It's almost shocking how well it went with my conventional sourcelist. This is maybe the third time MSF's come up here in only 15 posts. Dan D. does it like nobody else. Max Cantor's micro-settings also influenced PYTHON a good deal, but I'll let y'all guess which one in particular it was.

* Blog lore: Ènziramire means "offering-swallower"; it's a Ganda word for python.