A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

Resume your flesh and form XI , Beatrice Wanjiku "My forefather told me that the quagmire known as Mr. Death was worshipped by a king. He offered a sacrifice of nine cows, nine goats, sheep, and servants, and nine chickens...When they reached him, Nakabale said 'Here are the offerings from the king to you. If anything has angered you, let this calm your majesty.'"  - Sir Apollo Kaggwa,  The Customs of the Baganda Mostly Ghostly is a prestige IP in my heart A thing I've been asking myself while working on the Lakelands setting is where the lines are between an average ancestor ghost, a ghost-chief that protects a hearthstone clan*, and a ghost-god of the python cults should be drawn. I'm fine with looser definitions for the spirits of wood-spring-hill, who are much like their North Nyanza inspirations in being both remarkably undifferentiated and vaguely alien, but the distinctions between ghosts directly impact the politics of the setting. While banana culti...

Luba anthropomorphic headrest from the 1800s, produced by the workshop of the anonymous artist called The Master of the Cascade Headdress by art historians. Steal it from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels for a unique Valentine's gift that your imperial prince/ess will adore. Hello, everyone! Taking a break from thinking about the Lakelands for Dungeon23 (I just figured out a thing for the setting that was vexing me, thanks to  Sandro's fantastic recent blogpost , so I'll prob break my own rule and post about that + some favorite bits from these past 20 days soonish) by doing some more writing. This one is set in my Kubalubalundaland Cent. African fantasy world like the fauxtales from last time, but it's more conventional in form.  Four Kids in a House  Rivers of rain slid down the leaf-and-sapling roofs of the house, becoming waterfalls when they reached the eaves and made a six-foot drop to the ground. Despite the weight of water it was carrying, only a...

Happy New Year, guys! Hope everyone enjoyed the day. I've been the good kind of busy, showing my cousins from across the Atlantic around the great state of Texas and prepping my classroom for the kids! Visited the DMA for maybe the fifth time, but they've recently improved their Central African collections, so I was pleasantly surprised.  Lots of Kuba and Songye cultural products. The Keir Collection exhibition is still goated, I enjoyed revisiting the Bamana mud cloth display , and the  Octavio Medellín retrospective kicked ass. <Discord loser voice> Minor mythohistory mistake. Mbidi Kiluwe was the father of the first Luba mulopwe, Kalala Ilunga. He was royalty ofc and represented sacral kingship in opposition to Kalala's uncle Nkongolo/Rainbow, but the Rainbow probably has a better claim to being the imperial founder over Kalala (as the dude who first conquered the bulk of the Upemba Depression) than Mbidi does. All the important stuff is correct, though. Should r...