An Empty Africa - PF2E's The Mwangi Expanse and the strange career of Black Atlanticism

is Négritude too on the nose? - Papa Ibra Tall's La semeuse d’étoiles

"Added to this is the question of whether Africa serves merely as a mirror that refracts the image of the United States, thereby enabling the ‘returnee’ to explore issues of home and identity with a measure of contemplative distance." - Saidiya Hartman, The Time of Slavery

In the grand tradition of reading games as texts + inflammatory titles, this is a (hopefully concise!) discussion of some issues I have with the celebrated Pathfinder 2E supplement The Mwangi Expanse. For people who haven’t been keeping up with Paizo’s releases, TME is a revamp of Golarion's Notfrica (oldheads might recall the Expanse from Heart of the Jungle, Sargava: The Lost Colony, and the Serpent's Skull adventure path in the last gen) for PF2E; it's served as a launching pad for other stuff that's come out focusing on the Expanse, like the Strength of Thousands AP or The Slithering. There's a lot to love about TME and it improves on its predecessors in many ways. I got a hard copy as a gift for my birthday and the art is gorgeous, still makes me happy when I flip through it. The intro from Jabari Weathers has some rock-solid advice. It's not a bad product, y'know? Certainly laps anything comparable from Lizards of the Toast. I'd even say it's the best African-inspired setting book put out by a mainstream tabletop corp to date. That being said...I'm not sure I can call it a good setting book.

Mean people say this shit all the time, but any criticism here is genuinely coming from a place of love. Like many of the people who worked on TME, I’m ferociously proud to be Black and I hope that pride in weird beautiful multifaceted Blackness comes out in the rest of the post; hope it comes out in this blog overall, really. I've tried to be especially careful in taking the theoretical underpinnings of TME's Black Atlanticism seriously, so I’m not just talking down from a mountain of reified Africanity. If anything, I strongly suggest (in concert with the inimitable Zedeck Siew, who was a huge help in sharpening my own thinking around this topic) that we should all be a little more sus of folks like me, especially when they claim sweeping knowledge of a motherland through diasporic identity or are living in the Global South but seem reluctant to talk about their own privileges within postcolonial systems. My type of African emigre (that blend of colonial-"traditional" and postcolonial elite who can marshal enough in the way of resources and/or connections to anchor themselves comfortably in the West) is certainly part of the problem. There's a whole cottage industry of freaks relying on the fact that the average Western reader-player is woefully ignorant of capitalist dynamics Back Home or Within the Diaspora to peddle their wares, so stay sharp. If anyone needed an African guy to tell them this for it to land - here you go.

You can always trust me, ofc. >_>

Slavery in the Expanse

The original draft of this blogpost had a couple other parts - looking at a particularly Western vision of ecoconsciousness vs. a survey of Cent./West Cent. African engagements with land, TME’s Magaambya and systems of instruction, and a too personal bit about Walkena and how THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY to use African frameworks for thinking about sacred kingship (or """sacred kingship""" if you’ve already read Gordon’s (Dis)embodying Sovereignty) was RIGHT FUCKING THERE…but I really do mean it when I say that the intent here is not to be a ding! bad history! dude. Instead, we’re just going to look at slavery - the ways it's dealt with in the Expanse vs. the long long historiographical tradition trying to understand African involvements with slave trading. Slavery is a uniquely sensitive barometer for gauging which perspectives are being centered, so the question of representing the slave trade serves as synecdoche for a host of related issues.

Setting aside the kholo/gnolls, the evil monkeymen, and the other nonhumans for now (some of the closest brushes with greatness in the book are contained in throwaway lore for humanoids so we'll be back), there are three places where slavery figures into the new Expanse: the Bekyar, the Aspis Consortium, and Vidrian/Sargava:

• The Bekyar people were also the designated slaver Notfricans in PF1E. Their proclivity for slave-raiding definitely isn't new, since the closest thing we get to an etiological story (featuring Mephistopheles) strongly implies a deep time origin. It is especially notable that they are the ONLY Mwangi natives currently connected to the slave trade; even the Swahiliesque Bonuwat, the Caldaru port city of Senghor, and the primarily-Zenji despotic theocracy of Mzali are free of the slaver's taint. Kinda hilarious how on-brand all the Bekyar people are in TME; good luck finding a single Bekyar NPC who dislikes slavery.

• The Aspis Consortium, an organization of grasping merchants and ruthless imperialists willing to go anywhere or do anything to turn a profit. Their main function in Golarion is to serve as a foil to the champions of knowledge/daring adventurers in the Pathfinder Society: explorers of the unknown in the colonial mold but, like, nice about it.

• Vidrian, aka The Nation Formerly Known As Sargava. The Mwangi Expanse's very own fantasy apartheid state (this was always an insane choice) has been overthrown in 2E. Vidrian is dealing with the aftermath of its revolution in ways that directly parallel the histories of real world Southern African independence movements, mostly South Africa's ANC/SACP (and maybe a dash of Zimbabwe's ZAPU/ZANU/ZANU-PF?) from what I can tell. This is the exception which proves the rule, hold on for this one. The Lirgeni people of Jaha, who are wrestling with their history of iruxi/lizardfolk enslavement, have the same plot but worse.

I cannot presume to know what was going through the minds of the designers while they were working on the supplement, but in practice, their vision of slavery presents an Africa where there is a Slaver Culture (perhaps more familiar as the Slave-Selling King), a Transatlantic Trader with yawning berths awaiting human cargo, and Victims all fixed in their roles. This is a familiar fantasy, one rooted in diasporic attempts to reckon with the shadow cast by the Middle Passage over Black life, and it has been used to poignant effect in Afrodiasporic fiction. In a book intended to rectify unfair depictions of the Continent, though? From authors that claim to bring "research on western and middle Africa" to the table? It's a reckless decision at best and one that undercuts the entire purpose of releasing a new supplement by displaying the same profound disinterest in African realities that defined PF1E's Heart of the Jungle.

"Where Men serve as Monies"

While the initial establishment of the early Atlantic slave trade was undoubtedly influenced by pre-existing African cultural and economic frameworks, it is noteworthy that within a relatively brief period, the demand-driven aspects of the Atlantic economy began to significantly alter defensive strategies, alliances, social structures, even the very nature of slavery within African communities. Here contemporary academic literature aligns with the argument first put forth by Walter Rodney over four decades ago, where he contended that the early Atlantic trade exerted a profound impact on cycles of unrest and the nature of enslavement in Western/West-Central Africa (and Eastern/East-Central Africa - see Macola's The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics for a summary and bibliography) - what he described as an "increasing helplessness in the face of economic blackmail" that culminated in a grim ultimatum: "sell or be sold...a vicious circle." Participation itself reshaped Africans engaged in the trade and this is absolutely crucial to understand.

The legendary Africanist John K. Thornton - a scholar of West-Central African history who launched the first modern investigations of African Atlantic belonging years before Gilroy's book - grappled with "the giant paradox" of the intensifying Atlantic slave trade in his A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 and concluded that the only satisfying answer was the emergence of a particular form of fiscal-military state. Toby Green's magisterial A Fistful of Shells: West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (a book that I highly highly recommend if you have any interest in Africana since I'm hypercondensing it here and skipping the fun examples/case studies - 650+ pages and very concerned with economics, but it's the best single volume available on African experiences of the Atlantic slave trade) asks a deceptively simple question: where does the dominance of the West African fiscal-military state model come from? While noting the precolonial "expansion of credit and market institutions in West Africa" which set the stage for the early Atlantic trade (oh god does he note it), Green sees the question as one that hinges on "[understanding] how enslaved persons could be seen as money." Locating the shifts in 1500s Angola and Greater Senegambia, he argues that "this view of captives as currency is best explained through the place of credit as both a moral and an economic category." Here, Green focuses on Luanda as an example:

"Slave traders working between Salvador in Brazil and Luanda in Angola would usually obtain credit from five or six different people, who paid half up front and the rest later once the trader had returned to Brazil with enslaved persons, who thus acted as the ‘collateral’ for credit. In Angola, obtaining credit was a costly business, since Luanda had become the most expensive city in the Iberian imperial world...What was it, then, that made Angola so costly? In part, it was that almost all the daily necessaries had to be imported. As one 1653 letter, from the royal judge of Luanda, noted, ‘everything is bought on credit.’ This financial credit was for long periods of time, but, more importantly, from the Angolan perspective, it could only be ‘cashed out’ through the violence associated with enslavement. How this worked in practice was made clear in the will of Sebastião Pinheiro, who died in Luanda in 1665, and was owed thirteen slaves by Cosme Carvalho, a resident of the Portuguese fortress in the interior called Massangano, ‘on whose account I gave two boxes of goods from the sea, and a barrel of soap, which he took on account’; these goods on credit could be paid back by Carvalho only with the thirteen slaves...enslaved persons had become a form of currency that could be transferred out into the Atlantic economy."

This change, the "fundamental interconnection of the development of modern systems of financial credit and the violence involved in the enslavement of human beings," essentially sets up the rest of the shifts that generate the incredibly violent fiscal-military states of Peak Slaving. While there'd been other sophisticated credit systems prior - thinking about contemporary institutions in the Mali Empire and the Hanseatic League as ancestors on either end - the distance and scale involved in the Atlantic trade certainly seems to have spurred the intensification that generates their modern forms if nothing else. More importantly for our purposes, there's an accompanying "accumulation of credit and capital outside the African continent" which drives the processes that Walter Rodney described earlier in the post. Green's account has the benefit of building on decades of research concerning the trade and the societies involved, but I don't think Rodney would disagree with his reading here:

"Atlantic traders were, by the mid-seventeenth century, developing significant capital and credit frameworks. Their access to credit networks allowed them to increase demand, which had its own consequences in many African societies; and the fact that financial credit always flowed from the imperial centres of Europe to the African coast, and thence from the coast inland, reflected the growth of the capital market in Europe, and how African societies were becoming locked into a cycle of indebtedness and political violence. Finally, once the proffered credit had been ‘cashed out’ through the violence exacted on human beings, enslaved persons could then be ‘converted’ into capital in the Americas following the Middle Passage. The stored value of their future labour meant that they more than repaid the economic credit that had been ‘paid down’ for them, and this was why the capital value of the captive grew in the eighteenth century. This was a process that, in its turn, increased external demand to accelerate the processes of violent enslavement and capital extraction from the African continent."

This, ofc, has profound effects on the nature of African relationships with unfree labor. While the moral dimension of credit was well-established and intimately connected to systems of subjugation already present on the Continent, Green insists that "something new was afoot" with the evolution of the Atlantic system, particularly where "the relationship between the actual inciting of enslavement and credit" was concerned. Unlike the networks of dependence (and the degrees of autonomy) that characterized slavery in European and African states alike prior to the Atlantic encounter, "the new system saw the stripping away of such autonomy, as enslaved persons became chattels, convertible ‘currency’ for the Atlantic system." It's easy to follow the development of the fiscal-miltary states Thornton was so interested in from here: the process of expanding slave raiding operations required the mobilization of larger armies, which itself necessitated an increased financial burden in the form of escalated tax levies to sustain the expansion of military forces. When the fiscal demands grew, a corresponding need arose for the establishment of a robust administrative apparatus to effectively manage and oversee the taxation system. The authority and influence of the state expands alongside the scope and complexity of its administrative infrastructure. This development was accompanied by the gradual destruction or incorporation of local rivals, with ad-hoc centralizations of power (that typically repurporsed existing hierarchies) becoming increasingly institutionalized in what Africanists often call the "predator states." It all reminds me of Geoffrey Parker's revisions to the Military Revolution Thesis; incidentally, that would make the emergence of the modern fiscal-military state a roughly contemporaneous process in Africa and Europe. The birth of a chattel slavery was self-reinforcing and explosive; by the turn of the century in 1700, all the major players had been or were in the process of being supplanted by rivals more attuned to the new logic of spiralling violence and human currency. Kongo descends into civil war after serious losses to Portuguese-led armies, Jolof and Kasamansa are overtaken by an array of competitors in Senegambia like Waalo and Kaabu, the slave-selling Asante creep up on the Akwamu and their gold trade, Central Africa sees the rise of Chokwe gun nobility and the birth of the vast Lunda Commonwealth, and the Slave Coast suffered through the Hueda conquest of Allada before their own defeat at the hands of even more rapacious Dahomeyans. It's not unrelated that the 1700s would represent the height of the trade; over half of all enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic were taken over the course of the 18th century.

I can not stress enough how important it is that none of this exists, even by way of implication, in The Mwangi Expanse. The Bekyar people simply are the way they are, there's no historicizing depth or internal logic to their relationship with slavery besides an ancient story about a devil pact. They're just slavers, the Bad Africans. The insane thing is that the evil monkeybois, the charau-ka, kinda do it better. Or at least there's an argument for them - they are explicitly warped by their affiliation with the demonic (as opposed to the incredibly weak recourse to ancient pragmatism w/the Bekyar) but can't stop bc it produces interminable cycles of violence. That same violence makes it reasonable to fall in under well-armed strongmen who are successful at working the system (the Gorilla Kings) and everything goes to hell when their power is broken bc charau-ka social structures have been irrevocably altered to support the machinery of the predator state Usaro. Maybe a little hotter, but I think the Aspis Consortium should have grown into its role as well, like European traders did irl. I doubt the Mwangi Expanse crew even had the power to make sweeping changes of that nature but I can dream. It really reads like a /his/ post about le African kings selling their own people, with the neighborhood history knower stepping on the scene immediately after and replying "well they're all different tribes and not 'African' so it makes sense." It's a bad take, TME.

Africa Excised

"Far from evolving in isolation from one another," Green writes, "transnational connections made transformations within Africa and Europe ever more closely intertwined and parallel." A paradoxical effect of TME's diasporic orientation is that the Mwangi Expanse is more parochial than any iteration of our world's Africa ever was. Events in the Expanse do not meaningfully change the broader Inner Sea region (even the introduction contains some of this spirit, what with its focus on autochthony + the Outside Coming In) and its take on the slave trade is perhaps the starkest example for the sheer scale of removal. The late Cedric Robinson, grand old man of Black radicalism, critically challenged the "objective" conception that the historical development of world capitalism occurred independent of race and racializing systems. Robinson posited that racialization and nationalism, considering their social, psychological, and cultural origins, not only preceded capitalism but also played an integral role in shaping its organization of production and exchange - a role where the slave trade served as a furious engine of reassembly. In African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, Herman Bennett presents an alternative perspective on the early encounters between Africans and Europeans, countering what he reads as a primarily emphasize slave trading and racial distinctions. According to Bennett, these interactions were multifaceted, involving trade partnerships, diplomatic exchanges, and other forms of engagement. The emergence of the concept of "race" in its contemporary sense was deeply influenced by the slave trade but was not the sole focus of these early encounters - a history occluded by presentist bias:

"Throughout this study, I have insisted that representation of power pertaining to the entanglement of early modern Atlantic history and the African diaspora lacks historicity, scope, and nuance. Four centuries of slaving, as a result, have been rendered as a singular phenomenon mediated through liberalism’s nineteenth-century prism. Market relations, despite having a history, appear as a transcendent feature of the human experience. The naturalization of commodification and trade nurtures the impression that all societies and their inhabitants’ lives revolve around these universals...From the liberal vantage point, African rulers appeared as despots who fueled a morally repugnant and subsequently illicit trade in humans. They embodied the illiberal experience defined by tyranny, despotism, and the absence of freedom...In our hands, a secular conception of European expansion overshadows a more complex history featuring competing interests among theologians, merchants, and courtiers. Such histories project the idea of a monolithic Europe in which the making of the West, state formation, and the history of capital transpired well beyond the confines of the Atlantic and the African presence."

Using dissenting Spanish writing from the early period of African encounter as an inroad, Bennett argues against characterizing the participants as early abolitionists, suggesting instead that their primary concern was questions of sovereignty; the absolute authority of masters over slaves undermined the absolute power of Iberian kings over their subjects. Their critiques centered on the commodification and privatization of power as the African slave trade unfolded, rather than being directed against absolutism or slavery per se. The whole book is worth reading, but the relevant point is that even beyond wars over territory or the economics of the matter, the early European slave trade from Africa played a pivotal role in shaping conceptions of sovereign power and political identity. Cedric Robinson would have certainly agreed with Bennet's claim that "Catholicism, Africa, and the slave trade were instrumental in the formation of early Western modernity."

None of this, ofc, can happen in the Mwangi Expanse because our players in the drama are completely empty. The foreign slaver springs from the head of White Zeus fully formed and Africa is stripped of its agency as a participant in forming the modern experience. The Mwangi does not touch the civilized world; its consolation prize is getting to perform the ol' "we're secretly also super-civilized in ways that are understandable to you!!" trick with the Magaambya rejoining the wider world. Zooming out and looking at the setting overall, the "war over slavery" in Golarion's Inner Sea fought primarily between Andoran and Cheliax almost completely elides Notfrica. Even the not-Arab merchant-slavers (ain't touching that) of Katapesh - engaging in forms of unfree labor much closer to the 1800s Omani Empire than the 900s Abbasids - have no Zanzibar, no Tippu Tip. There's almost, almost something with the stuff about halfling slaves brought from Cheliax to what was once Sargava and their collective escape into the Expanse's local halfling communities. That's fucking awesome!! Even the name for it rules: "the Big Slip." I love that idea + it gels well with Golarion's broader throughline of halfling enslavement fueled by Asmodeus-lovin' Cheliax. The door this presents into explorations of maroonage, transoceanic networks of resilience (perhaps tying in the Bellflower slave resistance in Cheliax itself,) or just the culture around slave transport is left wholly unopened - the brief descriptions of the Slip simply end with a mention of mixed-looking Mwangi halflings and lore about how Sargavans stopped importing Cheliaxian halfling slaves. What a bummer. It's almost eerie reading TME with the understanding that this is diasporic fantasy, since the contingent aftershocks of the African Atlantic/Indian experience are everywhere without its actual presence: a discomfiting sense of lack.

The Question of Liberation

Most depressingly, there's little way to account for African stories of liberation and abolition within the boundaries The Mwangi Expanse erects for itself. Paul Lovejoy has convincingly argued for the existence of a West African Age of Revolutions, one that saw popular movements against elites topple warrior-trader aristocracies from Senegambia to Angola and led to the abrupt end of the Atlantic slave trade in large areas where it was once endemic. It's also interesting from an economic perspective, as "the pattern of revolt is, on a close look, related very heavily to the patterns of rising inequality." The speed at which places began to see serious revolt can be attributed to factors linked to the extensive historical involvement of these areas in long-distance trading networks. You can see this in the case of Segu, which emerged from within the context of the former Songhay Empire that had established connections to the trans-Saharan trade. Similarly, the region of Kongo, characterized by its longstanding Atlantic connections, also experienced the early emergence of revolts challenging power structures built on merchant capital. Within the broader region of Greater Senegambia, various states that had wielded considerable influence in 1500 had disappeared within a relatively short span of slightly over a century. None of that in Paizo's Africa, not even maroonage or other related New World strategies of resistance. There's more than a few deities with lines about opposition to slavery, but the section on Kibwe is where we get our biggest look on counterslaving in the Expanse and it's straight up just voting in abolition through the work of activists. It all feels very Anglo-American to my mind. Even Senghor's slaver-hunting naval patrols are much closer to the work of the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron than any responses on the African end of slaving's demise. Aside: following the "minor bits on humanoids are the best parts of the book" pattern, the gnoll priestess Gold Beetle - who couples her call for a return to ancestral kholo religion with resistance to slavery - is far and away the most Continentally rooted of TME's would-be liberators.

The one place where we do see African experiences driving the game is Vidrian, the fantasy postapartheid country I called an exception which proves the rule further up. It's also the strongest full writeup in the book, juicy politicking abounds and the young nation's growing pains are reflective of the issues around identity + reconciliation in our world's South Africa. There's a reason why the diasporic perspective has this SA-shaped chink in its armor, though: Neville Choonoo's Black Modernity and the Negotiation of Black Space: Black South African Writers and the African American Literary Tradition spends most of its allotted space arguing the relationship between South Africa and Black America in the 20th century can be characterized as an "interplay" or "kinship" based on the idea that the two shared a "unique" bond of "common Black experience," one where South Africa serves as a "microcosm of international racial politics." Dominique Haensell expands on this fixation in her recent discussion of Afropolitan lit (we'll come back to this topic in another post for sure) Making Black History: Diasporic Fiction in the Moment of Afropolitanism - here in reference to the work of Afropessimist philosopher Frank Wilderson: 

"The crucial difference between South Africa and Nigeria is, of course, the former’s history of Apartheid and settler colonialism, but I would argue that this circumstance also profoundly implicates the semantics of slavery and Blackness transmitted within this exchange. Here, slavery is much more than a historical fact or experience. It actually represents the same system or effect of white supremacy that is implemented by Apartheid. And in this sense, American Blackness comes to be defined as a product or response to this racist order and is able to travel outside of its national framework…Perhaps it is unsurprising then, that Frank Wilderson has little to no use for Africa in his theorizations, except for South Africa, where he spent five years as one of only two American ANC members and about which he extensively wrote in his memoir Incognegro. In the case of South Africa, Afrodiasporic thinking is able to extend its Middle Passage Epistemology through an understanding of apartheid as a mutation and extension of the logic of enslavement."

It goes without saying that this a diasporic logic of enslavement, haHA. If anything, TME is even more explicit about this connection than any real-world writing; the Vidric people are very directly modeled on diasporic blending in the wake of slave trading, not South Africa's history of colonial ethnogenesis. Anyways, even without everything above, it was probably already obvious that The Mwangi Expanse is a decidedly Black Atlantic product, which makes sense when you consider the folks who contributed. TBC, there's nothing wrong with that. In the meet the writers post I just linked, Allie Bustion says that she “put a lot of the joyful parts of being Black from [her] childhood” into the Song’o halflings and it shows! I genuinely love the Song’o and knowing which diasporic experiences animated their creation deepens my ability to connect with them. It becomes a problem when you elide the differences between Afrodiasporic concerns and African ones, frame your work as a conversation when only one set of voices matter; there's a violence inherent in the reduction of the Continent to Losthomeland wallpaper in work ostensibly aimed at recentering Africa in a deeply Western hobby. This isn't a theoretical exercise, we've just seen how The Mwangi Expanse robbed itself of the chance to say something meaningful about enslavement and liberation in Africa for exactly this reason. Perhaps the most damning indictment of the new book is that its treatment of slavery only differs from PF1E's Heart of the Jungle in ways relevant to diasporic audiences - Vidrian, the Lirgeni of Jaha, and Black Atlanticesque abolitionism. The Bekyar/Aspis Consortium dynamic which forms its core is entirely unchanged. One is distinctly reminded of Chinua Achebe's famous critical essay An Image of Africa, where he wearily asks if"nobody [sees] the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props." While Heart of the Jungle is considerably nearer to the outright racism Achebe criticized in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, his central issue with "Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor" is shared by both versions of the Mwangi Expanse. This is not to say that they are equally bad, obviously; any sane reader would prefer TME over HotJ's Darkest Africa colonial-pulp adventure. The writers of TME are, I think, themselves victims of a broader set of problems with the ways Afrodiasporic people in the Anglophone world interact with the Continent.

Troubled Waters

One very interesting thing about The Black Atlantic, and here I mean the Paul Gilroy book, is that it ultimately emerges out of an academic debate surrounding the "Africanness" of African American culture. American readers who have taken a Black Studies course or two are probably familiar with Sydney Mintz and Richard Price’s scholarship on creolization. Writing in the wake of the titanic debate over African cultural retentions, primarily fought by Melville Herskovits (pro-retentions) and E. Franklin Frazier (pro-evolutions), Mintz and Price presented a paper titled The Birth of African-American Culture - later expanded and printed under the same name - in 1972. Arguing that the retention-evolution debate had "polarized AfroAmericanist scholarship into a flatly 'for or 'against' position in regard to African cultural retentions," Mintz and Price's essay represented a pivotal moment in the discipline, signaling the coming departure from the quest for "rooted origin" and redirecting scholarly attention toward the processes involved in cultural transformation and generation. Their analytical framework for comprehending the intricacies of cultural production was eventually called "creolization," borrowed from linguistics. Early critiques of creolization theory come largely from two corners: cultural theorists and African historians. The earliest is possibly Stuart Hall's Cultural Identity and Diaspora, depending on how you want to parse it, but David Scott's That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World and Andrew Apter's Herskovits's Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora in the journal Diaspora are the first clear attempts to think past the creolization consensus I'm aware of. As an insufferable loser, my favorite products of this 90s wave are John Thornton's Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context, but the most influential was definitely Gilroy's The Black Atlantic.

I'm not gonna try to explain the impact of this book here; suffice to say that Gilroy's attempt to “construct an intercultural and anti-ethnocentric account of modern black history and political culture” was, in many ways, a gigantic triumph that ushered in a whole new world of thinking about history and identity. It's also deeply focused on a small subset of Afro-Atlantic experiences - Haensell summed up the feelings of Africanist dissenters when she argued that "the limited framework of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (and the singular focus on South African similarities) have, despite their productivity, done little to complicate the reductionist role that Africa often plays in the diasporic imaginary." The ever-perceptive Simon Gikandi was the first to open criticism along this front in a special edition of Research in African Literatures he edited, "prompted by the theoretical possibilities raised by Paul Gilroy's book...and a sense of disenchantment with the series of paradigms, cartographies, and histories (or their absences) on which the main argument of the book depended." Explaining his motivations in the intro, Gikandi writes that:

"...a good deal of the disenchantment with Gilroy's book is not generated by his central claim that the modern black subject was produced by - and was a key constitutive element in - the cultural formation he calls the black Atlantic. What many of the writers and reviewers represent here seem to question are the terms of the marriage between blackness and modernity. There is, in short, some uneasiness about the haunting shadow of Africa in the making of modern culture, a feeling that the continent is both within the grand narrative of modernity but outside it. Gilroy of course is not responsible for the ambiguous location of Africa in modernity: the continent (and blackness in general) occupies an ambivalent and fractal role in the cultural formation that we have come to characterize as modern...It is, indeed, difficult to read Gilroy's recuperation of Hegel without a sense of irony. For even as Gilroy invites us to take Hegel as our "point of entry into the discourse of modernity", he fails to remind us that it was the same philosopher who insisted on the nature of the black as a subject of lack and of Africa as a place without history. Such omissions are crucial because while none of the essays contained here seem to question Gilroy's genealogy of modernity, many seem to take issue with his desire to detour historicity as he tries to transcend both European rationalism and its anti-humanism."

Revisiting what she calls "Gikandi's...Africanist critique of Gilroy’s bracketing of Africa from the vibrant discussions about the black Atlantic" in her own retrospective Africa and the Black Atlantic, Yogita Goyal notes that "while Gilroy rightly critiques Afrocentric frameworks of return to Africa, he fails to provide any alternative way of thinking about Africa and offers little guidance as to how to extend his particular model to Africa." She sees the problem as one that has only deepened following uncritical adoptions of Gilroy's analysis in the decades since its release. "Rendering Africa similarly static in otherwise fluid models," Goyal writes, "many scholars in black diaspora studies replicate this omission and continue to read the Atlantic as primarily referring to the movement of ideas, peoples, and objects between Britain and the United States." Natasha Barnes' Black Atlantic-Black America is maybe the most cutting:

"The unannounced America-centeredness of The Black Atlantic is a tad surprising coming from a cultural commentator of Paul Gilroy's ilk. Not only does this move do little to challenge the historiography that already places modernity in the landscape identified as the industrial West, but it raises more serious doubts about efficacy of the "global perspective" and its revisionist claims. Certainly the explosion of cultural studies in British and American academies has taught us nothing if not to beware of totalizing agendas and to insist on the particularization of homogenizing categories. It seems uncharacteristic of Gilroy - no mere practitioner of this school of thought, but one of its high priests - to construct a new theoretical geography speaking to the theme of migration, exile, and transnationalism in modern black life that simply underscores the primacy and hegemony of the African American experience."

Even Saidiya Hartman, imo the most adept of the Middle Passage epistemologists and a scholar who has objectively remade Black Studies in her image, problematizes any easy notions of connection while reflecting on her visit to Elmina (an experience that she would later use as foundational material for her gorgeous/brilliant book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route) in The Time of Slavery . I quoted this earlier but the whole essay is helpful here. After rejecting narratives of homecoming to the Africa That Was - "returning home is not possible" - Hartman seems similarly troubled by claims of engagement with the Africa That Is. "Nor is this an encounter with Africa in its contemporaneity," she writes, as"the present is eclipsed by an earlier moment—the event of captivity and the experience of enslavement in the Americas"; this effect is what the historian of precolonial Slave Coast societies Robin Law describes as a tendency for Africa to "[figure] as an object of retrospective rediscovery, rather than as an active agent.” Hartman's skepticism stems from her observation that "character and consequences of an identification with Africa are mediated by way of the experience of enslavement, and perhaps, even more important, by way of a backward glance at U.S. history." In such circumstances, "identification with Africa is always already after the break."

All of this is to say that there are serious problems with some very influential frameworks for thinking about Afrodiasporic relationships with the Continent, even on the level of theory. God knows that The Mwangi Expanse isn't the only place where this trickles down into media. Tbh the loss of serious Pan-Africanist energy has been devastating, because we aren't even putting our money where our mouths are w/r/t treating Blackness as a global phenomenon. And before you ask, I don't think the answer for issues of perspective lies in "hiring more Africans," tho that's not at all a bad thing to do on its own. Honestly, I don't have an answer I'm sure of, but what I do (as a diasporic African who grew up in the Great State of Texas) is never never never assume I can just "get it" or draw from my own experience when it comes to working on Afrogames focused on the history + myth of the Continent itself, even that of my parents' homeland. If it feels easy, I'm probably fucking up. Do your research and then do more. Narrow your scope, get into the weeds. Treat yourself like a foreign observer because you are. We share the experiential referent of (a form of) Blackness but that's NOT ENOUGH. If that's too much to take on, and that's a valid conclusion, Afrodiasporic games are themselves sorely needed...but we have to be honest about what they are! Anything else risks abetting the emptying-out of African stories under the guise of solidarity, our own little contributions to the force behind Achille Mbembe's description of the Continent as "the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being,’ of identity and difference, of negativeness – in short, of nothingness.”