Kindred of the
Yes, we're really doing this.
Fucking seriously?
That's really in there? Well... fuck.
Africa is underrepresented in media, and in Role Playing Games even more so. Heck, even black people are underrepresented in role playing games, and they are a major demographic group in North America and Europe. Rectifying that is something that game companies should do. But it's hard. It's really hard to write things “about black people” in a way that isn't terribly offensive, in a way that it's not hard to write about Norwegians or Italians. That's not because there's something inherently racist about describing black people as black, but because you're always walking on the knife's edge of racism whenever you talk about a demographic group directly – it's just that no one gives a shit if you happen to say something racist about the British or the Dutch. Those people have power and privilege, and no one is worried that you saying racist things about Belgians is going to lead to real Flems and Walonians being deprived of their voting rights or lynched. Racist stereotypes are often repeated because there is an element of truth to them. Racist jokes are funny. But racism that is directed against powerless minorities can be very hurtful. In extreme cases, it can cause the deaths of millions of people.
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom is a 203 page book dedicated to expanding Vampire: the Masquerade into Africa. That is a noble goal, and something which White Wolf honestly should have done nearly ten years earlier, rather than pooping it out in 2003 right before closing up shop on the World of Darkness and walking away. But it's also obviously a mine field. We are talking about a book which by its very nature is discussing stereotypes about some of the most disadvantaged people on Earth, and it would take a book of great craft and subtlety to walk that line without veering into the realm of the profoundly insulting. And it may not surprise you that this is not such a book.
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom was at least inspired by Kindred of the East, but without the anime flavoring; the results are pretty much the same, with some notable exceptions. You see, neither of these Juanny-come-lately Kindred books were the first effort to write anything about Asia or Africa, but whereas Kindred of the East retconned all the terrible vaguely-racist gobbledygook about the "mystical Far East" with brand new vaguely-racist crap, Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom tried, in a small way, to incorporate the material that had been written on Africa in oWoD to this point - which is to say, not much, and not well.
The main issue was probably the Laibon in Vampire: the Dark Ages. This was supposed to be a single bloodline which basically covered all sub-Saharan vampires from Africa. This sounds a little complicated because obviously they already had the Assamites and Followers of Set and Children of Osiris, so that essentially covered Middle Eastern/Egyptian/North African/Islamic vampires; different sourcebooks here or there talked about various European vampires with interests in Africa, like the Ghiberti family of the Giovanni clan...
...terrible aside here; despite being a massively huge continent with the greatest diversity of physical types among humanity and many different cultures, in oWoD the entire continent had a single afterlife called the Bush of Ghosts or Dark Kingdom of Ivory (while Egypt got two); the major distinguishing characteristics of the Bush of Ghosts are that the local wraiths had quadripartite souls that were funky to manipulate with Necromancy, and of course when animals died there they left talking wraiths too. Which is just weird. But I digress.
No, seriously, the Japanese did it first.
The main take-away here is that Africa is a big place. Huge. It's culturally and ethnically diverse, and pretty much the only thing Americans learn about it is that brown people come from there, and it was exploited by Europeans for a couple of centuries in terms of setting up colonies and taking slaves from there and everything. It's also probably the cradle of the human race, since the Out of Africa theory is still pretty current. So you could plausibly have a lot of weird supernatural shit happening in Africa, and you could make a lot out of that just based on native beliefs.
But then, vampires - classical vampires - Dracula, basically - is a European concept. And attempts to marry the classical European vampire myth with Africa has traditionally not been anything less than exploitative...
...and this would be no different.
(Ironically, when Anne Rice finally included a token black vampire in her novels, she made him cool and with a kind of golden glow. But then the Queen of the Damned burnt him to a crisp. But they got Ayesha to play the Queen in...y'know what, this is not a constructive strain of thought. So, moving on.)
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom has nine people writing in it. Six of them are credited as having “written” this book, while the other three produced “additional material.” Now, we see some repeat offenders and known chucklefucks like Ari Marmell and Justin Achilli on this list, but I don't think any of these people are black. Now, I am definitely not saying that you have to be black to write about black people. I also don't think you have to be named Sven to write about vikings or have an epicanthal fold to write about kung fu. But let's be real here: white people say offensive shit about black people all the time, and for a project this large and having this many white people contributing, it really would have been nice to pass everything in front of a genuine black person so that he or she could say “Are you out of your damned mind?!” from time to time to try to put a hard cap on how offensive the final product was. I don't think anything like that happened. Now, at least one of the white people on this project has apparently lived in Africa in real life. But considering the other white people I met while I was living in Africa, I can say with confidence that this is not any particular indicator of racial sensitivity (or lack thereof, to be fair).
It's important to remember that the ugly history of oppression of black people is a long and convoluted story with many horrible episodes in it, so there are things you can say about black people that are true or even seemingly complementary that have enough grim echoes to crimes of the past that it's still deeply insulting and offensive. Black people really do like fried chicken and watermelon. Because fried chicken and watermelon are delicious. But actually talking about black people and watermelon is right up there with talking about how Jews are good with money. It has to do with minstrel shows in the 1870s, and it's still offensive because the treatment of black people in that era was bad enough that we haven't forgotten.
Believe me when I tell you this is not a google search you want to do. It goes to very dark corners of the internet.
It also needs be said that this is an American product developed primarily for an American audience, and Americans are a bit more race-conscious about the whole thing than some other countries. Which isn't to say Black British people or Black Germans or Beurs or whatnot don't have their own issues, but in America black racism was ensconced in law for several centuries and became a high-profile civil rights issue, which we're still dealing with in places like Alabama. So we might be slightly more sensitive to some parts of this book than our European or Australian or other readers.
Context is important.
For example, the fact that the cover is purple is...uh...well, perhaps not the best choice.
Yes, purple is traditionally the color of royalty. But it's also the color of grape soda, which in the American south is traditionally associated with black people, and...look, we might overanalyze a few things here. Be aware.
Unlike most White Wolf books of the period (or any period), Ebony Kingdom doesn't have a long rambling opening fiction piece. This is probably for the best, because those things had already gotten excessively decadent in 2003, and the last thing this book needs is another two dozen pages of some guy's King Solomon's Mines fanfic cluttering up the beginning. Instead we jump right in, with just 3 pages spared on a title page, a credits page, and a table of contents, we jump into chapter 1 on page 4. Well, that's what the ToC says anyway. Actually page 4 is a picture of a lady who is using hyena powers on some dude's floating feet. Or something. Chapter 1 really begins on page 5. Now, there are still some multi-page stories in illegible fonts, but they are later in the book. The first such doesn't happen until page 34, when there's a 4 page story in ALL CAPS that I can't read because it is too loud.
The entire book is 203 pages, and this isn't bullshit like Mummy, where a bunch of those pages are just black or something stupid. That's pretty much 203 pages filled with what is nominally content. We're well into White Wolf's shovelware phase, so the merit of some of that content is certainly up for debate. But it does exist. The book has 7 chapters and an appendix, so we're going to try to do it in four posts. But I'm guessing that we're going to end up doing it in five or six because there's a lot to be angry about.
Just to get this out of the way, yet the trimming and incidental art and fonts and whatnot are "tribal," like everybody in Africa lives in villages and hunts zebras for a living and shit.
...so, yeah, this book by and large passes up vampires as elegant and cultured predators of the night.
Chapter 1: The Ebony Kingdom
That explains so much.
So the first page of the first chapter is a little disclaimer about how the author is an unreliable narrator because go fuck yourself. It's supposed to sound deep and edgy about how the author doesn't give out the whole truth because truth is precious and shit, but it kind of comes across as “black people are untrustworthy” and that's a bit unfortunate. After some books like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand were... poorly received, White Wolf often attempted to give themselves an easy out to retcon away new setting materials in case they went over with the fans like weaponized ebola, and this piece is a bit hamhanded even in that context.
This is the leadup to explaining that your narrator actually spent his formative years as a slave in the Americas and was turned into a creature of the night by an English vampire, and if this all seems like a fairly strange POV character to choose for a book that is nominally about Africa and not America or Europe, then um... yeah. It really does. There's no second shoe to drop here, the narrator explains that he doesn't really understand Africa and this book has put way more effort into setting up an eventual disavowal of all or part of this book than it has into hooking the reader. Our narrator is of course part of one of the African bloodlines, despite being not from Africa, and the explanation we get is: no explanation. I assume it has to do with different authors writing in different voices and then a half-assed story being written in at the beginning to explain how they were all really the same dude. I have no idea why they didn't use the framing technique of having the book be written by multiple people. It's so fucking obvious.
Instead we kind of end up with the implication that all Blackulas are Blackulas regardless of background.
Box text in this book is handled with this horrible thing that I think is supposed to look like chalk on slate or something. The background of the box text is black with gray grainy shit in it to make it kinda look like rock or something. And then the text is white. It's horrible. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because sometimes this book presents half a page or even an entire page of box text, because the typesetter doesn't know what box text is for. The entire page of page 6 is “boxed text” and it is fucking illegible. It's where they present you the information for “How to Use This Book,” which is probably the most ironic part of the book they possibly could have hidden inside a visual cypher.
There's a lot that doesn't get said in this section, so here's the gist:
1) Vampires in Africa are of the same kind as European Kindred, they're not like the Kuei-Jin of Kindred of the East or anything like that.
2) The African Vampires have their own clans/bloodlines called Legacies, which are related to/derived from the European clans, but most of which don't remember the connection because they've been developing differently for thousands of years.
Also, and this is worth mentioning, the implicit idea is that all vampires really do come from Caine, and so the European-based clans came first, and wandered into Africa later. This is emphasized by the fact that the average African vampire is supposed to be of higher generation than the average starting V:tM vampire. It really is marginalizing Africa's importance, and emphasizing the pro-Christian-origin-of-all-vampires deal.
3) The "Laibon" that wandered into Europe during the Dark Ages weren't a bloodline, they were just sub-Saharan African vampires, who use the term "laibon" to refer to themselves (but not white people vampires). (The word laibon is itself a Maasai word, so it makes practically no sense in this context.)
4) "The Ebony Kingdom" is what the African vampires cause Africa, which is sort of unfortunate, but is obviously inspired by the afterlife being called the "Dark Kingdom of Ivory." Ebony and ivory. Hilarious.
Like with many White Wolf books, there is no indication given as to why the author is writing this book or their intended audience.
Chapter 1 is forty pages long, and is in a “jumble of random stuff” format. There's an essay about a group, then there's a story, then there's some wiki facts, then there's another essay about a different group, and so on for the whole chapter. There's just one page given for stats on various African countries, and they are on one of those illegible box text backgrounds this book uses – and you literally only get the numbers off the charts they presumably copied out of wikipedia or some old book, not the all important explanation of what the numbers mean. By simple division I was able to figure out that the GDP per capita numbers were 1,000,000 times different than the Gross Domestic Product numbers (for the handful that I checked), but I still have no idea if those numbers are supposed to be in nominal dollars, purchase price parity dollars, local currencies, or IMF
SpDRs. Area and density are in miles rather than kilometers according to the text. The chart is in no way useful, which itself has a disclaimer:
Run on sentences aside, this is not a bad sentiment to have. Although in this case I can't help feeling that the authors are using it as a shield to hide behind while tacitly admitting that many of them didn't do any real research at all for this book and are basically talking out of their asses.Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom wrote:What This Book Is and Isn't
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom doesn't pretend to be a travelogue or history of Africa. Rather, it is an expansion of the Vampire setting into a portion of the world that has remained unexamined thus far. Such being the case, you're going to want to do some research of your own when planning ot playing a Vampire chronicle set in Africa. We have only so many pages to use in this book, and we're not ashamed to say we're not going to devote too many of them to reprinting material you would be able to find elsewhere. Take a trip to the library, hit a search engine on the Web or talk to an expert to round out your African experience, or even as a preface, to see what ideas inspire you or resonate with you the most. This book will be here both before and after, so you'll be able to see how your newfound knowledge fits with the continent's vampiric population.
Very little effort was used to make the different essays look like they weren't written separately by different authors. So... basically it looks like the first chapter is “all the stuff that didn't fit in the other chapters,” which is not a good sign considering this book also has a fucking appendix for that sort of thing.
Laibon society is predicated on illiteracy and lack of communication. That sounds terrible, and it is. The idea is that in any given location the eldest vampire is usually in charge, because they're the oldest, wisest, and most powerful; if you travel, you meet a bunch of strange people that don't know you and they won't believe you if you tell them how old and powerful you are. So Laibon society tends to have very little social or physical mobility.
This is interesting on a fucked-up kind of level. It's the kind of thing which only makes sense if disparate groups of vampires in the same legacy don't keep in contact and don't really have means or desire to keep in contact. I mean fuck, you could send off runners or something to carry messages. Use ghouls if you have to. Even if you keep most history to oral traditions, you'd think the appropriately old vampires would flex their supernatural muscles and prove who is boss.
There's also a weird rant where Laibon don't believe in pseudo-family structures like the V:tM Clans, but something closer to the cultural ties of Covenants in V:tR. I don't think it was intended to be a dry run, I think it was just meant to be another way in which Laibon were "alien" from other Cainites.
Eddie Murphy doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about, he just wants to have fun.
Much of the first chapter is about giving new names to standard Vampire concepts. Because what Vampire really needed was more terminology confusion. So Bloodlines are called Legacies, Princes are called Magaji, Traditions are called Tenets, and so on. Domains are, thankfully, still called Domains. Terms are introduced out of order, where for example it tells you that historically a local Guruhi used to nominate all Magaji many pages before the Guruhi essay or even the entry in the lexicon where it unhelpfully tells you that Guruhi are “A legacy of vampires named after an evil Gambian god.”
Of course, World of Darkness already had a flavor of Vampires who are from Africa: the Followers of Set. I mean, they are from Egypt, which we classify as part of the Middle East or the Mediterranean, but it is physically on the African continent. Apparently the authors didn't notice that the back story of the Brujah says they are from Carthage, or perhaps they just happen to not know that Carthage is also in Africa. Regardless, the authors have figured out that Egypt is in Africa and thus feel compelled to talk about the church of Set. Here, the Setites are portrayed as being dedicated to rebuilding the great temple of Set in its original location to fulfill their prophecies and issue in a thousand years of darkness.
Thanks, Morbo.
To be fair, this was one of the Setite plotlines from the old Setite Clanbook. It's just... it's never been a major plotline and it doesn't actually fit very well. Rebuilding the temple in its original location in order to fulfill prophecies and issue in a thousand years of darkness is actually a Christian plan. Yes, really. Just remember that when it comes to conservative Christians, everything is projection. They want to destroy the world by rebuilding their temple to fulfill prophecies to issue in a thousand years of darkness, so they kind of assume everyone else wants to do basically that as well. It's kind of weird. This book also contains eight new legacies, but they are not explained well here and the next chapter is devoted entirely to giving each legacy a whole lot more text and also some pictures and stuff, so we'll talk about the different legacies when we get there.
If it makes you feel any better, after this book the various writers on oWoD continued to cram in random groups and bloodlines into Africa with no consideration for Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom whatsoever.
I have the sneaking suspicion that a lot of the thought put into this background on the society of Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom came out of a couple planning meetings that basically equated to Why the fuck haven't we heard of any of these vampires yet? Which is why the Laibon society is designed to be insular and largely immobile, with individual vampires tied to specific domains for fairly poor reasons and staying there in rigid undead hierarchies where high-generation vampires are the low men on the pyramid. Unlike in Europe where vampires moved between cities and different massive groups like the Camarilla and the Sabbat came together, in Africa...uh...things have pretty much been like they are for thousands of years, with domains growing and breaking apart, everything kept very internal, with only the rare Laibon wandering into Europe.
Which is unfortunate because it kind of reinforces the popular conceit that Africa failed to develop. Like all base beliefs there is a bit of truth in it - Africa didn't have an industrial revolution before Europe, and had a very different political and economic development. This doesn't mean Sub-Saharan Africa was undeveloped, but technologically it was behind Europe in weapons and transportation, and so faced some serious issues when White People arrived with cannons and rifles and big-ass ships.
I think I've mentioned it, but just to reiterate: the book borrows terminology left-and-right-handedly from cultures from all over Africa, with the typical White Wolf blindness to culture and context. So, zombies are "Zombu." Yeah.
I take it back, bring back the vampire one-world culture.
The Ebony Kingdom has their own “Tenets” which work exactly like the Traditions of the Camarilla, but are written up differently. There's a lot of text here, but it's pretty much the same crap about keeping the masquerade and sires being responsible for their offspring and so on and so on. Maybe people who wrote for Vampire for a long time really wanted to be able to rewrite the Tradition list, or maybe they wanted to pretend that Blackula was a standalone game and felt they had to rehash all the argle bargle from the beginning of Masquerade. But I'm guessing the bottom line is that despite their earlier protestations that they have limited space, this is actually a paint-by-numbers shovelware project, and if they can fill nearly seven full pages with just a shallow rehash of the Traditions writeup from the basic book, they were going to do that. It seems like every time these things get repeated they get longer, but this isn't because there's more being said. It basically covered the same fucking ground in less wordcount back in Nightlife.
We also get a thing on the War of Ages, which is the Jyhad in Masquerade-speak. The thing is, this was a central theme in the original Masquerade, but never managed to be a thing that people who were actually playing the game really cared about. The slow motion war between the generations was of course, originally in there because Anne Rice, but they never gave any good reason for it to occur until nWoD (when they introduced the idea of Vampires with high enough blood potency having to feed on weaker Vampires because human blood no longer cut the mustard), but of course nWoD also failed to have a metaplot at all, so that never went anywhere either. But here we see Achilli giving another stab at presenting a writeup to make you care about the Jyhad. Spoiler: you do not care about the Jyhad.
If you were feeling extraordinarily charitable to the authors of this book, you might say that you were looking at the work of people who really loved Vampire and were trying to expand it into a new setting while keeping all the stuff in it that they loved. But... I really don't see it that way. This is shovelware regurgitation. Pieces from Masquerade are repeated not out of homage, evolution, or parody, but out of simple rote repetition. This is a cargo cult World of Darkness product. If Rein • Hagen had photocopied his butt on page 17 of Masquerade, we'd have a picture of Justin Achilli's taint in here.
There are nine Legacies in Africa. Which doesn't count any of the white-people clans, except when it does, and there's no talk of bloodlines or any of that crap. But the long story short is that one way or another all of the vampire clans have some presence on the Dark Continent. They probably could have squeezed the Kuei-Jin in through Indian immigrants in South Africa or something, but chose not to go that route.
Anyway, the major legacies are:
The Akunanse (based on Anansi, the spider trickster, related to the Gangrel).
The Followers of Set. Same as in the rest of the world.
The Guruhi. Act like the Ventrue, based on the Nosferatu.
The Ishtarri. Based on the Middle Eastern goddess Ishtar, so what the fuck are they doing in Africa? Based on the Toreador. Fuck, we're four clans in and they've stopped trying.
The Kinyonyi. Act like the Tremere, actually Ravnos. Not sure how any of these are even still alive since the clan is supposed to have eaten itself during the Week of Nightmares.
The Naglopers, based on some African legendary critter of the same name, basically the Tzimisce. If Prince Mamuwalde did exist, these would be his people.
The Osebo. Brujah, basically.
The Shango. Based off a West African warrior orija. Basically the Assamites. Which is weird, because you'd think that if the Followers of Set are the same clan, the same would go for the Assamites. Whatever.
The Xi Dundu. Reskinned Lasombra.
As you can see, some of these guys they flipped around traditional roles, and we'll talk about minor legacies and weaknesses and crap later, but for a lot of these they didn't even try to do anything interesting. Probably to emphasize that point, we're given the multi-page story of "How Cagn Earned the Wrath of the White Lion," which is basically how Cagn (intended to be Caine) became vulnerable to sunlight.
Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom wrote:Africa is a continent populated by several billion people.
The section on Animism is extremely weird. The authors apparently believe that animism binds the lives of people throughout Africa in a way that nothing else does. This is basically incomprehensible because all traditional African faiths combined are only ten to twenty percent of the population of Africa, and not all traditional African religions are animist. I can't tell if this is incredibly racist or if the authors just lost tracks of zeroes somewhere and vastly overestimated the impact that animism has in Africa. Certainly, the section opens by mis-stating the population of Africa by about half the population of the entire fucking planet, so anything is possible.Google wrote:Population of Africa in 2013: 1.111 Billion.
And then of course it starts talking about how different people live in Africa, and it looks like it was taken from a colonialist manifesto from the 1820s. Discusses “the bush” and “the savages” who live in it. It's... wow. I mean, it's really bad. It's the kind of thing that you really needed to pass this by a real live black person so they could say:
Lots of subtle racist shit would still get through I suppose, but really crazy crap like this rant about animism and traditional living would go into the circular file. So basically we got several layers to white people explaining Africa. You got shit like how there's a piece of box text that tells you about South African cudgels, except that it never tells you that you're talking about a Afrikaner word for a specifically South African object – just that it's an “African” word for an object used “in Africa.” Because I guess the country of South Africa is all of Africa, or at least close enough. So there's that sort of “Africa is not a country” type racist generalization. Like, a lot of it. But then there's this whole other level where it talks about Africans as if they were all jungle dwelling primitives with bones through their noses. It's embarrassing is what it is.
Seriously, read this bit and see if you can get through it without wincing:
In recent history, stone buildings have replaced much of the jungles, but the kine still display a ferociousness to rival the animals.
Most of this crap focuses on West Africa, which is the part that Americans are most familiar with because that's where we got our slaves, and where Vodun and Santeria and Obeah get their African links from. Pygmies are mentioned. A long, weird rant is given over to how the creeping tide of civilization is taking over the villages and roads are ruining the traditional way of life of hunting game and keeping cows and dying from snake bite and malaria. For no explicable reason, a sidebar pops up giving us the stats for a kerrie a walking stick which is supposedly ubiquitous and traditional in Africa and can be used as a weapon. Why? It's a mystery.
Okay, so the LOOMING THREAT to the Laibon way of life isn't even the terror of roads, it's...Western vampires! Well, at least for a sentence or two. Then it goes right back to internal power struggles of old African vampires vs. young African vampires.
The final bit is a rant about how the Guruhi are the old power and are in a generational struggle with the Xi Dundu for control of various domains across Africa. This is probably an attempt to duplicate the relative success of the Ventrue and Brujah conflict in the original Masquerade book. The thing to note however is that this whole “young bloods versus ancient lords” thing is not a terribly good fit because all of these guys are Vampires. If you play a Xi Dundu, you play a recently turned Xi Dundu; and if you play a Guruhi, you play a a recently turned Guruhi. On the other side, if the Prince Magaji (or any other Storyteller penis extension character) is a Guruhi they will be hundreds of years old, and if they are a Xi Dundu... they will also be hundreds of years old. The metaphor of old bloodlines and inheritance and crap doesn't really hold up when the people involved don't actually die and it's just one dude holding on to power and wealth for however many decades or centuries. Every magaji is a usurper, because it's fucking Vampires.
But I guess we'll get into that a bit more next chapter when we start in on the Legacies.
I want to take a minute to talk about this thing:
I don't know what this is. I know it is intended to be a symbol of the game, much like the ankh was long a symbol for vampire, since the ankh is an ancient and well-recognized symbol for life, and handily is somewhat dagger-shaped in certain incarnations.
The source of many poorly-thought out tattoos.
The Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom thing is...I don't know. What the fuck IS that? It's meaningless, but kind of cross-shaped, but doesn't really look like anything except maybe the hunga munga from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.
It's just indicative of the issues this book has, and we're only through Chapter 1 so far. What the fuck is the point? What is going on? For fuck's sake, who thought this was a good idea?