appendix n for VOLCANO CITY SOUKOUS

 

ayoh kré Duchâtelet, Ornaments and Crimes



Wanted to do a last post before the twin scourges of term papers and grading take me out of commission - a couple folks have expressed interest in my NooFutra campaign set in the Eastern DR Congo, so I thought it would be cool to write up a quick survey of some stuff I read (still reading in some cases) to prepare for this game. 



Housekeeping

A new friend, UnFuturism/Rachel, asked me if I plan to make Volcano City Soukous into a setting guide or the like when the campaign is done. I honestly don't know. Not fully comfortable trying to codify stuff for this game. It's easy to read a bunch of books in prep; the real trick is being able to encode all that background reading + general knowledge in a text meant to be played. I'm also unsure of the boundaries: my position has long been that Afrodiasporic people don't have carte blanche to speak about the Continent without putting in work just by virtue of having another shared experiential referent (Blackness here) and I constantly worry about clearing the necessary bar. The bundle of wounds that make up VCS are still very raw and require special care to navigate. Not even sure that I'd want to transform it into text, tbh. Spent a lot of time feeling like my tendency to have personal settings that exist only at my table was a failing, largely thanks to the literary affectations popular in the hobby, and I've been trying to unlearn that + find other ways to share my love of games on/about the Continent (like this blog!)


Disclaimer!

Much of Shadowrun's African lore is bad and some of it is remarkably bad, like god fucking awful. It includes a handful of the most genuinely disgusting things I've seen printed in a major RPG. Even the "ok" stuff on Central Africa sucks: super-disease and a magically wild rainforest (which covers all of the DR Congo now) has turned the region into an almost literal heart of darkness called the Congo Tribal Lands/Zone. I had to keep even less of the classic theming than SP did in her work, because most of it was useless racist trash entirely unrelated to Congolese experience. There are some echoes - a forest resurgent around the old timber concessions does still appear in greatly mutated form and the concept of talislegging is present relatively unchanged. No great loss, I think, but worth explaining. 


A Congopunk Library

Splitting these arbitrarily into capitalism and culture sections. The distinction is artificial and many should be in both. Not including the scattershot reading I've done on the scientific side, since it's mostly just stuff about Lake Kivu and Mount Nyiragongo (the eponymous volcano of Volcano City Soukous.) Goes without saying that I am deeply indebted to all of the authors here, even the ones I disagree with. To paraphrase our elder V. Y. Mudimbe, bow and grin but bow all the same. 


Capitalism -

  • Hendriks' Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession and Smith's The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo were the first non-fiction books I'd read expressly for the purpose of campaign prep. They are demonically good, just the right kind of anthropologically-minded analysis of regional capitalism that you'd need to embark on a project like this. Both also spend time on the possibilities for transcendence generated by Congolese people within these systems, a genuine rarity in this sort of book. They're also excellent from an academic perspective, rigorous and theoretically competent. Eyes of the World wipes the other recent book on artisinal mining in the Congo, Kara's Cobalt Red…which actually replicates many of the issues that EotW points out about writing on digital mineral mining. These two books were the skeleton of Volcano City Soukous and some player favorite factions - the Deep Forest Brotherhood and the Shacklebreakers - are almost direct borrowings from them. 
  • Lesley Nicole Braun's Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa is an even newer book and I really wish I had access to it earlier. Powerful and incisive study of musical patronage politics, (quasi-)sex work, visibility systems, and gendered identity formation in the DR Congo. Reading this deepened my engagement with many existing elements of the setting and added an entirely new dimension to the rumba/soukous angle. 
  • I was v much lukewarm on golden boy of Congolese political science Jason Stearns' Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, but his recent book The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo is considerably better. His analytical toolkit is less wedded to the conventional account that he reproduced in earlier work - likely because of the experience of the past 7-8 years - and his detailed focus on the Kivus made this helpful for my Goma-based project. Stearns' liberal allegiances are on clear display but his critique has sharpened and I thought his discussion of the perverse incentives built into the peace process was illuminating. I would still pair this with the fantastic radical counterpoint America’s War on Democracy in Rwanda and the DRC by Justin Podur, one of my favorite books on modern African politics. Podurpill yourself and you'll never read think-tank lit on E-C Africa the same way again, it's like a They Live glasses experience.  
  • On a similar note, Milli Lake's Strong NGOs and Weak States: Pursuing Gender Justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa is focused on the massive power of NGOs in the DR Congo's judicial system but largely sees this as a positive bc it leads to stronger protections for women. I have, uh, a lot of problems with this book but kinda inverted the argument forVCS - most of the modern DR Congo is openly ruled by NGOs affiliated with major hypercorp donors under the pretense of humanitarian aid and good governance. Ten points if you recognized the justification from the Free State period. A very recent book that takes aim at NGOcrats is Vogel's Conflict Minerals, Inc: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo, written for the African Arguments series. I haven't finished this one yet, so I'll reserve judgement for the moment, but it does complement EotW in some interesting ways.


Culture -

  •  I'm decently familiar with academic work on precolonial Congolese history/myth and I draw on it liberally for VCS - there's a lot of cross-pollination in the modern DR Congo. We'll go through the canon in detail for Kubalubalundaland/The Equatorial Tradition but for now I'd like to spotlight David Newbury's work on Lake Kivu, our region of interest. The Land Beyond the Mists: Essays on Identity and Authority in Precolonial Congo and Rwanda collects Newbury's most important papers on the Kivus into one volume and his modern classic Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780–1840 was an indispensable resource.
  • For the neighbors of the Havu, Shi, and Hunde to the west and east, I mostly just referenced the old standbys - Biebuyck's work on the Lega cultural complex (Hero and Chief: Epic Literature from the Banyanga, Lega Culture, and his notes on the Mubila Epic were especially helpful) and Vansina's work on Rwanda (Antecedents to Modern Rwanda remains the gold standard.)  
  • I'm sure y'all were expecting the music bullet, so I won't disappoint - the inimitable Achille Mbembe's essay on Congolese popular music was a core inspiration. Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds (cairn.info...) is the shortest thing on this list and it's so good, highly highly suggest that you read it instead of the rest of this post if you have time. To his wonderfully complete list of citations, I'd add Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire (an exploration of the [nonexclusive] revolutionary + patronage-seeking dimensions of Congolese popular music) and Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos (great for orienting neophytes.) You could do worse than just listening to a bunch of Franco, tbh. 
  • If Rainforest Capitalism and Eyes of the World formed the bones of the setting, Fiston Mwanza Mujila's novels provided the heart. Tram 83 was deeply influential, a meditation on neocolonialism, mourning, recovering Congolese time, musical encounter, the carnivalesque, and the absurdities of national identity all in a stylish package. I stole so so much from this book, up to and including surface details like the City-State and the Back-Country, "heterogenite" as a comedic term for a vague mineral wealth, the use of "tourist" to refer to corp agents (it's the local equivalent to "shadowrunner" or "edgerunner" in-game), the "foreplay is like democracy..." refrain and even the Tram 83 bar itself (lightly rebranded as Trolley 38 lmao.) I'm still reading through The River in the Belly (published by a hometown press in English) but it's been similarly impactful, especially on my framing of diaspora relationships to Volcano City and the importance of the lake itself. Sony Lab'ou Tansi's Life and a Half is a bit more remote but its blend of "magical realism" (not the right term, but that's what all the Goodreads guys say and they're clearly the reigning authorities on Tansi) and pitch-black Congolese humor has provided a ton of the city's vibe. 
  • Kimbanguism is weirdly important in VCS (the setting's Kimbanguist analogues - The Prophetic Current - were already around, but the players fixated on them in the way players tend to) so I've been doing some reading! Gampiot's Kimbanguism: An African Understanding of the Bible was a clear and hyperinformative intro, done from a dual emic/etic perspective (Gampiot is the son of a Kimbanguist cleric and was raised in the faith.) Covington-Ward's Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo was a massive help in starting to get my head around modern Congolese forms of embodied religious performance. The experience of another revolutionary Christian syncretic prophet from Central Africa - Alice Lenshina - also went into the Prophetic Current, tho I mostly took stuff from David Gordon's mentions of her in Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History . 





enjoying Franco makes you a better person 

Comments

  1. Got that jazz album queued up :)!

    Thanks for this appendix-n, especially all of the non-fiction. Really appreciate these perspectives.

    > It's easy to read a bunch of books in prep; the real trick is being able to encode all that background reading + general knowledge in a text meant to be played.

    I think about this often. TTRPGs are necessarily bespoke; no matter what is written or what random generators and tables and such are utilized, it all comes down to how it is being brought to the table.

    Most often it seems that TTRPG creators and afficionados want to just decrease the load on that synthesis by using pre-made materials and randomization tools, and don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with that and obviously some of those can be made with absolute brilliance and intentionality.

    But I wish there were more people trying to make really novel settings, that don't just conform to preconceived notions, where rather than trying to decrease the load, instead, they demand more from those engaging with it- demanding that they think about new things and have to learn and pursue those things.

    But even so, as you say, there is an important balance in how you go about encoding it; anything you can do to make the information and concepts more digestible will help. This reminds me of my interview with Ms. Screwhead, about the encoding and evocation power of good writing, of which you are more than capable.

    > I'm also unsure of the boundaries: my position has long been that Afrodiasporic people don't have carte blanche to speak about the Continent without putting in work just by virtue of having another shared experiential referent (Blackness here) and I constantly worry about clearing the necessary bar.

    From certain other contexts, this is something I have thought about as well. On the one hand, one's lived experience is valid no matter what, and especially if they have been marginalized in some way, there is value in them making their voice heard. On the other hand, frankly, I think some people's ideas are just not good; either not well reasoned, or not sufficiently educated (in whatever sense of the word), or morally repugnant in some way. I think people have a duty, to the extent they are able, to educate themselves and think critically, in whatever they are engaging with and however they're engaging with it (albeit again, intentionally leaving the criteria underdefined).

    That said, I am really not worried about your ability to bring a critical, educated, well-reasoned, interesting, and morally enlightening perspective on the Afrodiasporic experience into VCS!

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    Replies
    1. > Got that jazz album queued up :)!

      BASED!! Please tell me what you think - the musical dimension is one that I’ve been trying to emphasize over the course of this campaign. May have mentioned this before, but I really feel like Mbembe hit the nail on the head in his article linked above:

      “More significantly, the music at hand has demonstrated itself to be the most successful expression of serenity in the face of tragedy. At once poetry, dance and prayer, it has become a dual experience of both inner freedom and possession, of sadness, anguish and loss on the one hand and radiant happiness and emotional expressiveness on the other. As a result, far from resembling a narcotic religion which becomes more powerful as dissatisfaction with reality increases, it has emerged as a declaration of the most radical and the most immediate faith in a life which is necessarily contradictory and paradoxical.”

      > But I wish there were more people trying to make really novel settings, that don't just conform to preconceived notions, where rather than trying to decrease the load, instead, they demand more from those engaging with it - demanding that they think about new things and have to learn and pursue those things.

      The great work, right? Tbh the more I think about the conundrum - esp. thanks to conversations with Marcia B - the more I’m convinced that a lot of it falls away when you step back from a product-centered vision of engagement with the hobby. Still, the issue of being weird and challenging + fun is still present in some form or fashion.

      > That said, I am really not worried about your ability to bring a critical, educated, well-reasoned, interesting, and morally enlightening perspective on the Afrodiasporic experience into VCS!

      Appreciate the vote of confidence and your thoughtful comments, fam! At the very least, it should be entertaining.

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    2. I still haven't listened to it yet but probably later today!

      I'm not 100% sure if I understand what you mean by "a lot of it falls away when you step back from a product-centered vision of engagement with the hobby" but to the extent that I do understand correctly, I'm inclined to agree.

      In the time since I have stopped focusing as much on promoting my blog or works, I think I've had a healthier relationship with them. At the same time, I liked commissioning all of the art for MRD and making this beautiful "product", and I have/had many more ambitions for various creative works, and while the writing itself I can do, the rest of it would require the expertise of others and the ability to pay them fairly, so at least insofar as capitalism continues to exist, some of the things I would like to do are contingent on a "product-centered vision of engagement", unfortunately.

      But as I said, I've been more open to the idea of just giving up on those ambitions, having done it once to a satisfactory degree, but that is a reluctant relinquishment.

      But anyway, is this consistent with what you meant?

      In the spirit of a product-centered vision of engagement, if anyone is reading this comment and is not already familiar with me, check out Maximum Recursion Depth: The Karmapunk RPG and/or my blog Weird & Wonderful Worlds ;).

      https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/maximum-recursion-depth-pdf
      https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/

      Have not done shameless self promotion like that in a while haha.

      Delete
    3. SO SORRY i forgot to reply!! - caught in a whirlwind of deadlines -_-

      prob was unclear but for me i just meant my process of reevaluating goals, learning to love the hobbyist's angle/not feeling the need to put stuff out to be "serious" or w/e, not that it is somehow bad to put out products in and of itself (beyond the attitude of decommercializing the hobby that Marcia discussed back when.) plus the art / product distinction is a dumb one typically deployed by folks hawking their own stuff. it's worth reading Sandro's review of a review on Mausritter over at Fail Forward, i think he did a great job of making that point.

      and yeah! for anyone unfamiliar with MRD it rocks. you should totally get it, full endorsement. It’s weird in all the best ways. Keep an eye out for MRD Vol. 2! W&WW is one of my favorite blogs and Max is a very smart + probably super handsome guy.

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    4. npnp, ya seems like everyone's been busy lately.

      What you're describing seems consistent with what I thought you meant but thanks for clarifying.

      Thanks for the endorsements :). I'd say I'm like a New York 6.5 maybe lol.

      Some professional talks from the last few years if anyone wants to decide for themselves:

      https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLU0cOJD9vw3K2WdYAarynW1co5Jxprl-

      Delete

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