A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

  Illustration for the EAPH combined reprint of Song of Lawino/Song of Ocol  by Frank Horley "The royal councillors were stunned at this answer, and stood in amazed silence, convinced she had known this by some supernatural power. For them, it was a miracle, and something to be taken seriously. Father Bernardo appeared less impressed and continued his questioning. 'Who are you?" he asked her. She replied gravely, as if every word were a serious matter, and slowly, as if carefully considering each remark, 'I am Saint Anthony, come from Heaven.'" - John K. Thornton's  The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706 BOOKPOSTING IS BACK !! I've always loved this style of blogpost and now I have a blog to participate with. Helps that it's kinda low-intensity on a day like Ashura. Pour (a non-alcoholic) one out for Husayn, y'all. 1. “To Awaken the Soul’s Water”: Shared Systems of Communal Recollection in t...

Supporters of the  Malagasy Uprising are forced to annul their pledges to the rebel cause in a cattle sacrifice staged by the French military, 1948 "Any fool can get into an ocean/But - - it takes a Goddess/To get out of one."   Hello, I hope everyone's doing ok. Mostly alright myself, though these past few days have been pretty rough at times. Kinda feel like it might help to write about my feelings here before I get to the post proper. Skip down to the next bold heading to avoid hearing about some intense stuff.  One of my cousins is missing - the serious kind of missing, not just the habitual itinerancy and spotty communication you come to expect from migrant family abroad. This isn't the first time it's happened to us, losing people to dangers of the road or the Med itself, but it is the first time that I've been old enough to be brought in on the news  (the modern clan network - mark of adulthood to be entered into your subsubtribe's Whatsapp groupch...

Probably some way to embed this, but the best I can do rn is a link Was recently reminded of a painful conversation where the other party misinterpreted my use of the word "fetish" - channeling the emotions positively. The other entries in this sporadically updated series are NOT lectures and I get that watching a dude talk for two hours (it's mostly conversation, the lecture portion is maybe 30 mins) is not as fun as a doc or ballet but I feel guilty about spending so much time on Thornton in the last post. Most famous as "the other old white guy who does a lot of Kongo stuff," Wyatt MacGaffey is a titanic figure in West-Central Africana; much of what we currently believe about early colonial spiritual systems and magical practice is built on his research in some way. MacGaffey hasn't received nearly as much love bc he:  a) was open about his disdain for universities as an institution before it was sexy to talk about le decolonizing b) wound up being pigeon...

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 lo...