Firstly, I am not sure things are ever going to quiet down at the national level, because Republicans now actively oppose democracy and I’m not really sure what the next steps are if one political party just all the time tries to stop democracy from happening.

And B of all, it is never not a good time to learn about African history, and I am determined to continue my global education. Admittedly I did not manage to read four African history books this year, as I intended, and I do not think I can make up the difference in the 14 days of the year that remain. But next year, I am going to do it. I have picked out four books and two back-ups for 2019. The learning train is leaving Hiatus Station, my friends.

For my next Africa learning project, I chose Benin, because I have been really neglecting the Gulf of Guinea up until now. I admit that I sometimes get resentful of how much shine everyone gives to Ghana and Nigeria, when Namibia is out there doing such an amazing job without getting half the credit. But this is no reason to neglect a whole region in one’s African history reading. I was fortunate to pick up Edna Bay’s Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. It bangs. As usual, reading one book about a given African country has engendered in me a thirst to read twelve more books about that country, because Dahomey is fascinating.

At the risk of playing to the cheap seats, I will begin by saying that Dahomey had armies of women soldiers. And women spies. And women doing intrigue in the palace. I mention this because I think it’s important to identify which African countries that I read about most heavily influenced the 2018 (!!!! HOW!) film Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler). By the 1800s, Benin/Dahomey had Dora Milaje, basically. European visitors to Dahomey were particularly impressed with what they called razor women, soldiers wielding three-foot-long straight razors that snapped into wooden carrying cases.

Armies consisting of more than one gender were not the only thing Dahomey warfare had going for it. A major source of strength for them lay in their network of spies, or agbajigbeto. Bay gets into a fascinating difference between how European and Dahomeyan sources described such spies. According to European sources, the agbajigbeto would be sent into enemy lands to masquerade as merchant traders. Their true purpose, however, was to send word back to the Dahomeyan king of the enemy’s number of troops, types of fortification, etc. Dahomeyan sources say that the spies were principally sent out to discover and destroy enemy kingdoms’ source of supernatural power, and only secondarily to report on their fitness for battle. Moreover, Dahomeyan sources claim that these spies were people from the enemy lands, whose oaths of loyalty to the Dahomeyan king were so transformative that when they returned to the land of their origin, even their own families could not recognize them.

If there is a flaw in my African history reading project, it’s that reading one single book about a country often gives me tantalizing glimpses into the historiography of that country that I do not have time to follow up. Wives of the Leopard does not always lay out the chronology of Dahomeyan history in ways that I recognize. At times I was struggling to understand which kings happened when and why they stopped happening. Please take this next bit, therefore, with a grain of salt.

I loved the section where Bay talks about the assassination of the king Agonglo in 1797. European sources argue that Agonglo was killed because he was considering a conversion to Christianity. On the face of it, this might sound like Europeans fishing for martyr stories to report from pulpits back home. But Bay argues that Agonglo’s friendliness to Christianity may have represented a real threat to vodun religious practices of the time. Dahomey tended to be amenable to the influences of other faiths, and their appear to have recognized the Christian god as one among many. But well-meaning missionaries had translated the Christian God’s name variously as Mawu and Lisa, the names of supreme deities in the Fon pantheon. Followers of these gods, therefore — several of whom were prominent in the conspiracy to assassinate Agonglo — may have believed that Christianity had the potential to supplant their religious practices, and acted to prevent that from happening.

One of Agonglo’s wives supported him in this succession dispute, and was sold into slavery by the supporters of his successor, Adandozan. When Adandozan was himself deposed, by one of the most popular and successful monarchs of Dahomey, that king sent two missions out to search for this lost wife of Agonglo, to restore her to power. Records vary on whether she was found and redeemed from slavery. However, the kpojito, or reign-mate, of Gezo was a woman who took a name that meant, in full, the monkey has returned from the land of the whites and is now in a field of pineapples. That fucking rocks. You can draw your  own conclusions on whether it implies that she was this same sold-into-slavery-then-redeemed queen. What I am saying for sure is that American book publishing has been sleeping on a damn fine historical adventure novel about this lady.

There is a ton more good content in Wives of the Leopard, but I ran out of page flags. I also got sad when European powers started pushing harder for power in Dahomey, such that the kingdom eventually became a French protectorate. This is a complicated thing to feel sad about, because Dahomey’s decline in power corresponded with the decline of the slave trade, which had been a major source of funds and power for the Dahomeyan kings. Palm-oil plantations just weren’t as lucrative.

And that’s about all I have on Dahomey, which is now part of modern-day Benin. I would love to read another book that deals in more depth with Benin’s colonization and eventual independence. If you have any recommendations for such a book, please leave it in the comments!

If you’d like to track my progress on the Great African History Reading Project, you can check out the landing page for it here.

The post Not a Dumb American: Benin Edition appeared first on Reading the End.

One thing that struck me about South African history is the role that economics plays in how colonialism ends up working. In the early-to-mid 1800s, England had a presence in South Africa, right? And they came into conflict with the descendants of the Dutch settlers (the Afrikaners) because they wanted to impose a system of government that gave equal rights to black and white citizens. However, while the British found it all well and good to give nominal rights to black folks at a time and in a place where their economic interests were not engaged–

Actually, before I finish that clause, a sidebar: One of the huge reasons that England was able to pride itself on its relatively humane treatment of its colonies in this era (early to mid-1800s) is that it had massive massive economic control. By the middle of the Victorian era, Britain controlled close to a majority of world trade in manufactured goods. They were in a unique economic situation that enabled them to be a little less horrible to small, economically unimportant outposts like South Africa. End sidebar.

–they massively changed their tune once it became clear that South Africa had valuable mineral resources. The Afrikaners (descendants of the Dutch colonizers) were prone to kidnapping African children as “apprentices” (but actually slaves) to work on their farm land — among other things — so it would seem as though the British government, taking over after the Boer War, would be a step up.

Because the British still didn’t want to be bothered governing a colony, they largely let the Afrikaners continue to run things. Mining companies cut wages, tightened pass laws to keep black laborers from traveling freely within the country, and brought in scabs from China any time the labor force balked at the treatment they were receiving and tried to strike.

I also learned a brand new thing about the way apartheid government functioned, which I not only didn’t know before but had not even the faintest inkling had ever existed. Apparently, the apartheid government in South Africa created these places called “Homelands,” which were small rural territories to which black South Africans were given citizenship to prevent them from living in urban areas. And the government was like “See? We have granted independence to our black citizens, just like all the Europeans wanted us to!”

The actual effect of these Homelands was not to provide any measure of self-determination to the indigenous populations but the exact opposite. Unless white-run businesses wanted the cheap labor, black South Africans were not permitted to live in “white” areas and would be resettled (forcibly, if necessary) into one of the designated Homelands. This also (surprise!) had the effect of curtailing the amount of land that black folks could occupy or own. The various Homelands were separated from each other by swathes of white-controlled territory, and “citizens” couldn’t leave their designated Homelands without specific permission, which of course made it very hard for black South Africans to put together an organized resistance.

They did, though. In spite of government brutality and limited resources and the reluctance of Thatcher-led Britain and Reagan-led America to impose sanctions on the apartheid government, the country’s majority of black people continued to resist, first by the nonviolent means advocated by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, then with something closer to guerrilla warfare.

One of my big takeaways was that the country was deeply lucky to have Nelson Mandela (yes yes I know this is the HOTTEST OF TAKES), who fought tirelessly for freedom under apartheid and then worked like hell to make peace a possibility in a deeply, deeply divided country. The tricky bit is that his popularity gave extraordinary power to his party, the ANC, which remains overwhelmingly dominant in South African politics. If you are a student of history you will note that dominance by a single party is not a recipe for longterm national stability. WHICH IS WHY GERRYMANDERING IS A FUCKING AWFUL IDEA, AMERICA.

This has been yr humble narrator learning more things about African countries, one by one. Some day soon I’ll know everything about everything, so stand by for that plausible, non-distant day. If you want to check out the main page for this reading project, it’s here. If you want to suggest a country for me to learn about next, hit me up in the comments!

The post Not a Dumb American: South Africa Edition appeared first on Reading the End.