Dmitry Pruss wrote me in regard to the perplexing etymologies of Ghanaian royal titles:
“Zosimli Naa” is a title bestowed on outsiders who play such an honorary role in Ghanaian societies that the local tribal hierarchy steps in to elevate them to chiefs aka royals.
Traditionally “Zosimli Naa” were American educators in African studies programs. Dr. George Lee Johnson Jr., the acting chair of South Carolina State University’s Department of Education, is Zosimli Naa of Madina, and earlier on, Dr. Susan J. Herlin (University of Louisville) was Zosimli Naa of Tamale. After her death, Tamale enskinned (the North Ghanaian equivalent of anointing done with precious skins rather than myrrh) a travel agent from Detroit who runs a popular immersion-in-ancestral-West-Africa travel program (since her story involved DNA testing in search of ancestral African cultures, it came up in my feed). This lady, Kennedy Johnson, actually lives in her royal mansion in Tamale now!
But what is Zosimli Naa?
One source says that it means “Born on Saturday” but metaphorically, “one who brings people together” (presumably American and Ghanaian peoples). Another says that it means “Friendship Queen” but by extension, head of department of development. And Wikipedia says that Naa translates as King or Chief while Zosimli means: Cooperation, Alliance, Accord, Collaboration and Friendships, with the whole title meaning liaison for foreign cooperation (they apparently have separate chiefs for America and Europe).
Dmitry and I await Hattic enlightenment!
Easy: Dagbani zɔsimdi “friendship” and naa “chief.”
It’s an age-old title to honour visiting Americans. (It’s not any sort of royal title, of course.) “Enskinning” is the northern Ghanaian equivalent of Akan “enstooling”: enthroning, basically. No anointing is involved.
It’s a pleasant change to see a generic “Ghanaian” used to mean something other than “Akan”, at least. Baby steps …
I don’t know enough Dagbani to know if zɔsimdi has quite the same nuance as the Kusaal equivalent zuosim, which is “befriending”, from the derived verb zuos “make a friend of”; “friend” itself is Dagbani zo, Kusaal zua. “Friendship” in Kusaal is zuod, from the same root as “friend” but with a different class suffix.
I had a feeling you’d know; thanks for that satisfying response!
Compare Kwame and its variants, of course.
Ah, so the South Carolina story might have conflated two of Dr. Johnson’s distinctions – being born on a special day AND being a foreign dignitary in Northern Ghana?
Now it starts to make sense… and it’s great to know a community of people for whom it takes mere seconds to unravel it!
The “born on Saturday” stuff was presumably just made up by the journalist, who perhaps had some confused memory that Akan personal names are based on the day of the week you were born on and reckoned that this would explain any random Ghanaian name or title, because Africa is all one single culture, apparently.
The journo also evidently doesn’t know that it’s called “enskinning” because northern cbiefs er, do in fact sit on animal skins as a sign of their office. Hence the waffle about “presentation of specific animal skins.” Who knows, maybe they did do that, given that this is nothing to do with actual chieftainship.
Ghanaians are very good at managing well-meaning foreign workers in positions of authority: I can vouch for this personally (it took me a while before I quite understood that this was happening.) And good luck to them, too!
>It’s not any sort of royal title, of course.
I believe you, but the Zosimli Naa of Tamale (and Louisville, KY) seems to think differently:
“I am Her Royal Majesty Zosimli Naa II Ife Bell Tipagya of the Dagbon Kingdom in Northern Ghana, with my palace in the cities of Tamale and Louisville, KY.”
It also looks a good functional translation into American English would be Sister Cities Coordinator.
> just made up by the journalist, who perhaps had some confused memory that Akan personal names are based on the day of the week you were born on and reckoned that this would explain any random Ghanaian name or title
I very much doubt this particular bit of anti-journalist prejudice is accurate. It would an utterly random insertion, since there’s no one named Kwame and not even anyone with an African name to be explained. There’s nothing about the article that looks like the writer is bringing outside information into it. I’d bet the subject of the story offered this tidbit. Whether he mentioned knowing someone named Kwame, and the journalist crossed that up, or whether he himself somehow got that confused is impossible to know.
I’m curious how a Zosimli Naa living in Orangeburg, South Carolina would sit on a skin if he wasn’t given it. Did the bestower of the title come to Orangeburg and install the skin seat?
The Dakpema of Tamale, who is stated to have carried out this enskinning, is actually not a chief but a tindana, a title usually rendered “earth-priest”, Kusaal tendaan. Tendaannam are the traditional “owners” of the land, dating from the period before the Mamprussi conquered the region and created chieftaincies. AFAIK they have no authority to create chiefs of any sort, though I must admit I am hardly up to speed on Dagomba politics. Perhaps the Tamale tindana has been coopted.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41406735
(In the traditional chiefly scheme of things, Tamale is actually a pretty no-account place. It owed its bigging up by the Brits to the fact that at the critical time, Yendi, the seat of the actual Dagomba king, was in German Togoland.)
Whoever conducted the ceremony, she states that her authority derives from the Yaa-Naa, “the reigning King of the Dagbon people”
>Created by the Yaa-Naa over 30 years ago and first appointed to my predecessor, Dr. Susan Herlin of Louisville, KY, the title was created to strengthen the bond between Tamale and Louisville as Sister Cities.
She asserts that the Dagbon system of chieftainship consists of 5 levels, the first four of which would seem to be princes of the blood, and the fifth, in which hers falls, “made up of court elders, each responsible for specific tasks.”
She also says shes “an authentic storyteller with a kaleidoscope of lived experiences”, so who knows. Maybe it’s all just a story.
The home page of her website says her office has an annual budget of $5 million. I wonder whether that’s coming from the Ghanaian government, the king’s budget or fundraising. It’s not clear from the website what it’s spent on, though the costs of pursuing her doctorate in order to amplify her influence as a global thought leader may be part of it.
The Dagomba are in no way the second largest ethnic group in Africa or even remotely close. The Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms do not date back to the eleventh century. Tamale was a mere village before 1908. This is fantasy-Africa, as beloved by Americans. It is a pleasant change to see the fantasy applied to Dagbon rather than Ashanti for once, though.
If you believe wikipedia, His Majesty Bukali II, present king of Dagbon or perhaps Dagbɔŋ, “was ordained by the kingmakers of Dagbon as the 41st Yaa Naa on January 18, 2019, following a chieftaincy dispute that left the Yendi skins vacant for 16 years.” He was enskinned, if that’s the right word, in the traditional capital of Yendi rather than the arriviste/social-climbing Tamale.
Incidentally, though one of these sources says that the place name “Tamale” is of unknown origin, it is said locally to be from tama yili “house of shea nuts” (= Kusaal ta’ama yir.) Seems fairly plausible, at any rate.
@JWB:
Yup, “enskinned” is right. Yendi is indeed the only place where a Ya Na can be enskinned. Dagbɔŋ is the Dagbani word, but the Dagomba kingdom is usually called Dagbon in English.
BTW, the Ya Na is (in principle) subordinate to the Nayiri, the Mamprussi king in Nalerigu, as is the Moro Naba, king of the Mossi. The Nayiri is the heir of Gbewa, founder of the Mamrussi kingdom of which the Mossi and Dagomba are cadet branches. The original capital was Pusiga, in Kusaasi territory, but had to be located after the Kusaasi and Bisa ungratefully successfully rebelled against their new overlords.
I hadn’t realised before that there has been a very long-standing power struggle in Tamale between the actual chief and the tindana, apparently going all the way back to British misunderstanding of what the traditional pre-colonial power structure actually was, when they came to set up their beloved “indirect rule” system.
https://www.myjoyonline.com/dakpema-palace-shooting-traditional-council-must-resolve-dispute-regional-minister/
The Brits screwed up similarly in Bawku, with results that have led to decades of intermittent conflict, exacerbated by post-independence politicians favouring one side or the other. In Bawku it’s worse; because the tendaan is Kusaasi (the only possible choice) and the chiefs were traditionally Mamprussi, though more recently this has been finessed by political marriages with tendaan families. Presumably in Tamale all parties at least regard themselves as Dagomba.
It does make you wonder (I hope, baselessly) whether there might be more going on with a tindana appointing a “chief” than is immediately apparent. It doesn’t strike me as a situation where it would be unproblematic for foreigners to be going round claiming to be traditional chiefs, no matter how sincerely they believe it and how much one side encourages them to do so.
Hopefully, the locals are not in fact taking this quite as seriously as the Americans suppose …
> This is fantasy-Africa, as beloved by Americans.
It’s true we lack the subtlety and discernment of the inhabitants of Benny Hill Island.
Still, I think you’re overlooking the role authentic storytelling plays in global thought leadership.
After all, she’s got $5 million resting on her retweets of the myths her Dagonba hosts like to tell. Thought leadership isn’t cheap.
The inhabitants of Benny Hill Island are indeed also fantasists, but the approved fantasies are of plucky totally unaided resistance to the Nazis, preceded by wholly altruistic spreading of Civilisation to now-mysteriously-ungrateful Indians and Africans. We also invented Democracy and (especially) Fair Play and Queueing. Also Humour.
However, our fantasies do not involve Disney versions of various manifestations of the Old Country, though a few North British of the old school do seem to inhabit Brigadoonia. There is possibly just a touch of insouciance about historical fact in the National Eisteddfod ceremonial, too …
However, our fantasies do not involve Disney versions of various manifestations of the Old Country
Of course, that could change if Pixar releases a heartwarming tale about a plucky teen heroine learning to be true to herself in Dark Age Jutland. I think the Comic Relief Animal Companion would probably be an aurochs.
> However, our fantasies do not involve Disney versions of various manifestations of the Old Country
Mr Eddyshaw, may I introduce you to young Mr Pendragon? Or for that matter, to a man I’d address as Mr Windsor if I was ever forced to meet him. You live on an island dedicated at its core to a Disney version of the old country. Millions of your neighbors turned out irl to take part. They hounded some poor former Evanston woman for having the gall to try to join by marrying in, not that I’d have advised her to.
You help fund it.
Reminds me of the time my nephew snickered at Jesus’s miracles and resurrection from the high ground of Judaism. “I guess you didn’t draw the Elisha/Elijah stories for your Bar Mitzvah Torah portion? Never asked yourself why your grandfather sets a plate aside at the High Holidays?
Meanwhile, our true national myth is the Adventures of Huck Finn, whose theme is that the critical rite of passage for a young man entering adulthood is learning to lie and deceive.
The Zosimli Naa of Tamale is a straight-A student of Tom Sawyer and Jim.
Although I think Huck was wiser. He was like fuck the deception, I’m out of here.
I’m not actually disagreeing with you on this, as my comments just prior to your last should have made clear. The only difference is that our national fantasies are in situ, rather than overlaid on a real place elsewhere.
Of course, many American national fantasies are also in situ, and the geographically displaced ones are on the whole the least likely to lead to real-world harm (though Irish-American funding of terrorists in the UK was significant at one time, and other examples do come to mind.)
I perhaps should say that I am personally opposed to all national fantasies, as I am sure you are too.
our true national myth is the Adventures of Huck Finn
I think you could do a lot worse. There’s a lot to like about that myth.
Alas an offensive word has pretty much ruined it. Understandably. I think people mistake what Twain was doing with his tale of a tender father son relationship between two class-outcasts, not just the slave but also the son of a drunken Irishman. Using the ugly stereotypes to make their humanity stand out. But I wouldn’t want to teach a book with the n-word all over it to HS students either. Jim’s lie is the subtlest, after all. Making him by some reckonings the fullest man of the tale. I can’t remember at this remove whether the boys eventually figure it out on their own or whether Jim tells them. The one flaw in the novel is that the Mississippi flows south. The last place Jim needed to go was Cairo. He should have been up the Missouri aiming for Alton. But the Missouri isn’t iconic and Clemens didn’t grow up in Jeff City.
Are displaced myths less dangerous? I’m not sure but I do tend to side with you. With Michael Stipe’s view of in situ fantasies — Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb, what’s the price of heroes?
USPTO 97808438.
Oh, Dear.
The trademark is registered to “People of Excellence, LLC”, apparently a sole ownership of one Nerferife “Ife” Bell, whose LinkedIn profile lists her as ‘Her Royal Majesty Zosimli Naa™ of Dagbon Royal Leader-Kingdom of Dagbon, Ghana “Connecting Life & Leadership” Speaker, Coach, Trainer | Louisville, KY | Tamale, Ghana’.
It’s literally the Duke and Dauphin chapter from Huck Finn. She’ll sell a lot of tickets before the Tamaleans see what’s up and tar, feather and run her out of town.
I seriously want to know where the $5 million comes from. And where it goes. I bet part of it cycles back to the personal accounts of theYaa-Naa. Or possibly the Tindana. Or both.
Wow, the original commercial genetic testing “to connect with the African roots” at the start of the Tamale adventure already had the hallmarks of affinity fraud, and the etymologies seems suspect / embellished but this… Duke and Dauphin meets Everything is Illuminated?? While perpetuated old divide-and-conquer tactics of British colonialism? 🙁
I seriously want to know where the $5 million comes from.
Perhaps the alleged $5 million is part of the fantasy?
Ghanaians are not stupid, nor much given to fantasy of this particular kind themselves (despite Nkrumah’s chutzpah in naming the entire country after an unrelated ancient West African empire hundred of miles away); I doubt whether anyone in Ghana is funding this. Ghanaians also tend to be an order of magnitude poorer than even quite ordinary Americans.
I also doubt if the Ya Na would approve, given that he has been at some pains to declare that the Dakpema is not a chief at all.
(Dakpema is literally “elder”, though etymology is not meaning, of course, and it is evidently a long-standing Tamale office, even if not a chiefly one. A previous Dakpema actually seems to have been involved in lobbying the Brits to make Tamale their northern capital in the first place.)
Ghana has seen the commercial potential in Black American tourism for a good while now. I used to meet a few such tourists when I was down in the south sometimes. They seemed to see what they were expecting to see, so everybody won. Ashanti, on the one hand, and the old slaver forts on the coast, were the highlights. They didn’t get up to Dagbon in those days (I don’t imagine that many do now, though one can’t criticise the Dagomba for trying. But there really isn’t a lot for the sight-seer in Tamale. The real attraction of northern Ghana is the cultures and languages, and you can’t really appreciate that meaningfully as a tourist.)
Ghana has seen the commercial potential in Black American tourism for a good while now.
From the 1920s to the 1960s Ireland’s tourist industry was almost entirely geared to Irish Americans visiting the old country. The Office of the Chief Herald was kept open despite official republicanism because Yanks paying for coats of arms was too lucrative. They had to stop selling Chiefs of the Name certificates after a forgery scandal.
Ghana is well placed for this in a lot of ways. Easily the least threatening of the officially-Angophone West African countries. You can wander round at night at least as safely in Ghanaian cities as in UK cities. Ghanaians’ self-image is of being welcoming to strangers, with the happy result that they really are welcoming to strangers, on the whole. The slave forts are genuinely worth seeing, and Ashanti culture really is vibrant and interesting and very much alive.
Nigeria would be a better bet for an American genuinely interested in where their forebears might have come from, but Nigeria is somewhat resistant to the Disney treatment.
The real money in tourism lies (I am told) in appealing to Germans, and Ghana has in fact tried this. A good part of what is now Ghana used to be German in colonial times (including half of the Kusaasi and Dagomba areas) and a surprising number of Ghanaians actually know German. The trouble was (I gather) that German tourists expect everything to go in accordance with the schedule and everything to work without problems, expectations which tend to be hard to fulfil in West Africa, land of the successful Plan B, implemented by ingenious improvisers.
@mollymooly:
That link is to something quite uncannily parallel to all this. It makes you wonder if Ghana is missing a trick in leaving this sort of thing to individual entrepreneurs.
(In reality, in a polity where chiefs still have actual power, are jealous of their privileges, and have potentially violent supporters keen to enforce those privileges, this might be something of a non-starter.)
Jim’s lie is the subtlest, after all. Making him by some reckonings the fullest man of the tale.
I am very much looking forward to reading Percival Everett’s James: A Novel.
Looking at Naden’s Dagbani dictionary, I see that the language does in fact have the exact cognate of Kusaal zuod in zɔri “friendship.” It’s not a great dictionary for nuances, but the example sentence for zɔsimdi does support “befriending” as the precise sense:
Ninvuɣ’ so ŋun garigi bɔhigu ni yɛlimaŋli nyɛla ninvuɣ’ so ŋun bɔri zɔsimdi.
person Indef who answer question with truth is person Indef who want.Imperf befriending
“The person who gives a true answer to a question is someone who wants to be a good friend.”
Can any of the Russophile/Cinephile Hattics comment on the quality of the Soviet film version of the Huck Finn saga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopelessly_Lost ?
Jim (Джим) is said to be played by an actor named Феликс Имокуэде, who does not have his own Russian wikipedia page and perhaps did not have much of a prior or subsequent acting career. I’m guessing Имокуэде corresponds to the surname frequently spelled “Imoukhuede” in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora.
I’m guessing Имокуэде corresponds to the surname frequently spelled “Imoukhuede” in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora.
It does indeed; e.g., here he’s called Felix Imoukhuede. (I have not seen the movie.)
Note FWIW in light of the discussion above that the wikibio of the American (likely Nigerian-American) scientist Professor Princess Ivezbua Imoukhuede specifies that “Her first name is ‘Princess’ and she holds no royal title or position in any capacity.” Perhaps any false claim of that sort might attract particularly negative reaction in segments of the West African diaspora? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Imoukhuede
Imoukhuede
Interesting name. Edoid, apparently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owan
There are some very well-connected ones, I see. Quite a lot of West Africans you meet in Europe or America actually are from chiefly/royal families. Commoners don’t have the resources to get educated abroad. (I notice, incidentally, that the reason our own dear Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK was because her family were rich enough to send her mother to a Britain private maternity hospital to give birth.)
There’s an Emai grammar in the Mouton Grammar Library.
The one flaw in the novel is that the Mississippi flows south. The last place Jim needed to go was Cairo. He should have been up the Missouri aiming for Alton.
Yeah, that kinda got me confused too; I couldn’t quite figure out how the protagonists were going from the South to the North on a river that flows south. From what I recall they did start out on the Missouri and then didn’t manage to find a good place to land on the Illinois side before they floated right past Cairo (overnight) and ended up on the Mississippi, which is how they figured out that their whole quest kinda got messed up.
I don’t think they were on the kind of a boat that could go upstream. But then it’s been ages since I’ve read that part.
[EDIT: looking it up, what I thought was the Missouri was actually the Mississippi, and what I thought was the Mississippi was actually the Ohio. I agree that the plot would have made much more sense on the actual Missouri. They did apparently land on the Illinois side a few times, and presumably never realized that; I don’t recall if any adaptations ever pointed that out.]
[EDIT 2: I did find a study that pointed out how the simple “land in Illinois” plan wouldn’t have worked out anyway because Illinois police actively enforced returning presumed runaway slaves, and described their presumed actual plan, namely going up the Ohio to Cincinnati. I’m not sure how realistic it would actually have been even if they did end up in Cairo.
The study didn’t at any point mention Indiana; I’m not sure why.]
Prof Princess Imoukhuede’s middle name is actually Izevbua, where vb is a digraph for a voiced bilabial approximant /β/. Edoid names all seem to mean something in the relevant language, like Yoruba names, but I don’t know anything about Owan names. The Mouton Emai grammar has nothing about personal names, and indeed almost nothing about Emai culture, despite being very long and based on proper fieldwork, and one of the authors being an actual L1 speaker. Weird. Maybe it was all too sensitive a topic, for some reason. That happens sometimes.
They were drifting on a flatboat, so going up the Ohio was out of the question. Lincoln steered a flatboat to New Orleans as a young man, sold the produce he and a friend transported, broke up the boat to sell the lumber, and returned I believe on a steamboat.
But southern Ohio didn’t offer better prospects than Illinois, even southern Illinois. Both were settled out of the slave states of Virginia and Kentucky. Cincinnati would not have been a friendly place for African American refugees.
I don’t believe there were police (let alone slave patrols) in Illinois in the antebellum period. There were people that would have assisted Jim, and people that would have turned him in. Sheriffs’ opinions would have varied the same way, and running into one was unlikely. I assume Twain’s general thought would have been that Huck could say Jim belonged to him (as Huck and Tom did when they got to Arkansas) till they found someone sympathetic.
Much of Illinois was outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act, and overturning it was a key plank that led to Lincoln’s election. Slaves who managed to free themselves routinely did it by going to Illinois, and in particular, getting beyond the southern part of Illinois. Hannibal is more or less across the river from an Illinois county settled by New Englanders and named for the premier anti-slavery family of the first 4 score years, so to speak, of the nation’s history — Adams County. Getting to the kind of country that was right across the river from him was really Jim’s best bet. The idea of drifting hundreds of miles on a flatboat rather than walking a couple miles upriver and finding a canoe is pretty ridiculous.
Adams Co., Ill. was not necessarily a hotbed of hardcore Yankee abolitionist sentiment. It voted for Buchanan over Fremont in 1856 and Douglas over Lincoln in 1860 and did not become reliably Republican until the realigning election of 1896. OTOH, it was apparently at some point in there part of the “German Catholic immigrants” part of the Democratic coalition of those years rather than the “slavery tolerators whose ancestors moved west from Virginia and Kentucky” part. You would have wanted to go two counties further upstream to Henderson County before you would have solidly been in the Yankee abolitionist part of Illinois. Although by then you would just have crossed from Missouri into Iowa if you’d stayed on the river’s western bank.
Hannibal/St. Petersburg is/was in Marion Co., Mo., which in the antebellum era was a reliably Whig-favoring county until the Whigs collapsed because of their inability to finesse the slavery issue, after which it went for Fillmore in 1856 and Bell in 1860.
The aforementioned Alton was downstream and one of the more abolitionist-friendly parts of downstate Illinois in those days (for complicated reasons probably having to do with proximity to St. Louis), so would have been a plausible goal but maybe not far enough downstream to allow enough time for the narrative to develop?
The idea of drifting hundreds of miles on a flatboat rather than walking a couple miles upriver and finding a canoe is pretty ridiculous.
…especially as they started out on an island in the middle of the river (or possibly even nearer to the Illinois shore?) in the first place.
In retrospect I do vaguely recall having seen an (animated) adaptation that pretty much straight-up said “you actually landed in Illinois several times, you just didn’t notice because it looked the same as Missouri and not like a magical free country”.
If the African American-run DNA ancestry company uses some Tamale area samples as reference, then it would make perfect sense for the linked legacy travel agents to send their customers there…
Adams Co. as a whole was more mixed than abolitionist, but there was an abolitionist-oriented seminary in Quincy.
I am very much looking forward to reading Percival Everett’s James: A Novel.
i found it fascinating – and especially so in how everett deals with language! i’m excited to hear what you think of it.
and on cairo, IL (in whose vicinity i happened to spend most of a week last spring, eclipse-chasing) and its vicinity:
the area’s semiformal name, “little egypt” has a few possible (to my eye, mutually reinforcing) sources. one is the various cahokian settlement sites around the confluence, with their characteristic earthworks (european settlers being unable to see even a mildly tapering construction without instantly thinking “is this… a pyramid?”). another is land-speculation advertising campaigns for settlers, labeling the area as “the land of goshen” to add the appeal of biblical plenty to the river valley location (and perhaps downplaying the Constant Flooding part of the experience).
a third, however, is probably most relevant to james & huck’s experience: another biblical reference, but to the land of bondage rather than of goshen – naming the part of illinois most tied to the slaveholding south, both because of grandfathered-in plantations that still depended on enslaved workers and because of active political alliances (including a key center of the Knights of the Golden Circle, for example). this seems to have been the dominant reference for the nickname by the mid-1800s (there are quips recorded from both lincoln and douglas).
twain would, of course, have known all about that, and would have expected a reasonably well-informed reader to know as well. i don’t know much of anything about the political situation in western kentucky at that point, but it could well have been a safer place to connect with an underground railroad conductor than anywhere in Little Egypt.
Talking of Cahokia, I just read Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, which did not disappoint, even though I’m not a great fan of alternative-history stories usually.
In the alternative history in question, North American Indians were not decimated by smallpox, and have largely survived to form their own states: the Cahokia in question is a thriving, Indian-dominated city.
It’s of Hattic interest in that the Indians (and other characters in the city, too) speak “Anopa”, with numerous examples given. I thought Spufford had dropped the ball on this initially: the rulers of the city claim Aztec roots, but I recognised several Choctaw words in his “Anopa.” However, Spufford was actually way ahead of me: Anopa is based on Mobilian Jargon, now long since creolised, and Spufford has actually read the relevant linguistiic literature on it. Of course that actually makes a lot of sense geographically, too. Impressive.
And the Aztec thing is an actual plot point.
Oh, and Alfred Kroeber turns up as a side character (it’s set in the 1920’s.) The book is dedicated to the memory of his famous daughter.
thanks, DE, for reminding me about that book! it’d fallen off my radar.
i do wonder, after reading The Dawn of Everything, how spufford handles the significant changes to the indigenous political and social landscapes of the whole region (and the area’s history) that would be involved in the cahokian state surviving. graeber and wengrove make a pretty solid case that much of the character of indigenous polities in southeastern north america is shaped by a widespread rejection of the state form that emerged from the experience of cahokia as a model of state-ness. i guess i’ll read the book and find out!
Indiana has been called “the middle finger of the South”…
Awesome.
@rozele:
It’s no great ethnographic study, more of an exuberant what-if. It’s basically a noir-ish police procedural, a bit reminiscent of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
It’s well done and respectful though.
If the African American-run DNA ancestry company uses some Tamale area samples as reference, then it would make perfect sense for the linked legacy travel agents to send their customers there…
Hardly scientific evidence, but perhaps worth mentioning …
Ghanaians can usually tell just by looking at someone if they come from the north or south of the country, and there are indeed enough typical differences that even I could tell fairly well after a couple of years living there.
Several northerners told me they thought that Black Americans tended to look more like northerners than southerners. This would make sense up to a point: the Ashanti were active slavers, and often raided northwards for victims.
I’m not sold on this myself, though. For one thing, I don’t think (what is now) Ghana was anything like the main hub of slavery; for another, the African-language elements of the Atlantic creoles seem to be overwhelmingly from southern languages like Fon and Akan and Yoruba, not from “Gur” languages or even Hausa.
I suspect it may be more to do with the fact that so many Black Americans have significant European ancestry. Northern Ghanaians are typically darker-skinned than southerners, but they otherwise tend to look less like what Europeans imagine as a typical West African. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century authors, with their half-baked racial categories, actually didn’t classify the northerners as proper “negroes.”
I very much doubt if these commercial DNA databases can establish anything much at all in this case. The whole idea of an African “race” is ludicrous. Africa is where almost all human diversity is. Everyone else is descended from about twelve misfits who couldn’t hack it in the mother country.
Hey, it’s hard to hack with a hand-ax.
True. I’ve no doubt that my ancestors were charming in their (flint) flaky way. They did, after all, persuade some women to come along. Not all our genes are Neanderthal. Probably the women thought that they could reform them. Their descendants have often shared this belief. Just as well, or there would be no people outside Africa.
Can any of the Russophile/Cinephile Hattics comment on the quality of the Soviet film version of the Huck Finn saga
The whole film is available on YouTube, like most Soviet films. No English subtitles, but you can probably get an idea. The material is treated as a comedy for intelligent children, with some clear Soviet pedagogical lessons (e.g. religion is bad, racism is bad) that probably make the film less palatable to the current Russian regime. Seems well done if you like Soviet comedies of that era, and can ignore how incredibly Russian everyone looks, especially Roman Madyanov playing “Gek” Finn and the immortal Evgenii Leonov as The King. It also seems obvious that Imoukhuede’s dialogue is dubbed in by a native Russian, but Russian Wikipedia doesn’t mention that.
https://youtu.be/wlzUJVMvnuQ?si=I2ffH75id5M7uzsn
that much of the character of indigenous polities in southeastern north america is shaped by a widespread rejection of the state form that emerged from the experience of cahokia as a model of state-ness
And, we’re back with Egypt and Israel.
Speaking of which, Little Egypt contains, not only a Cairo, but several other Nile-derived placenames, arranged upside down mapwise.
…because the Mississippi, like the Euphrates, flows the wrong way.
Supposedly 25% on average.
Cause or effect of the name “Egypt”?
I think that during my years in grad school in Urbana, I only heard the southern tip of Illinois referred to as “Egypt”, without “Little”, but I didn’t hear it referred to often at all, so my evidence isn’t worth much.
25% on average
Not quite that high. The averages depend on the state but typically hover between 15% and 20%. But of course it’s only averages; there is a lot of individual variability.
And shape-of-face genetics leaves room for even more individual variability, at least in the groups where it was thoroughly studied (the most systematic study I remember was done with South American faces)
>Speaking of which, Little Egypt contains, not only a Cairo, but several other Nile-derived placenames, arranged upside down mapwise.
But rightside-up riverwise.
My family actually stayed in Dongola, IL on a trip to the Shawnee Forest area. I was surprised to realize much later (prompted by an Eastern Sudanic language thread here) that Dongola is a town on the Nile in Sudan. I wonder what made it prominent enough in the 1850s to name an Illinois town for. The story is complicated by the existence of Dongola KY, back east on the Virginia border, which seems to have been founded a few years earlier.
I don’t think there’s reason to believe Little Egypt was more pro-slavery or even as pro-slavery as western Kentucky. A bid to allow slavery failed badly in Illinois in 1824, 6 years into statehood at a point when the entire northern tier of the state consisted of just two counties. There just weren’t many settlers from northeastern states around yet. The population at that point remained dominated by emigrants from Virginia and Kentucky. The Congressional prohibition on slavery served as a sorting mechanism for settlers, so even the Virginians in southern Illinois tended to be less pro-slave than those who went to slave territories.
Western Kentucky had many slave plantations.
The other and perhaps more widely known Little Egypt came to prominence at the other end of Illinois during the great Columbian Exposition (alias World’s Fair) of 1893. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Egypt_(dancer)
Per Wikipedia, the U.S. Dongolas (Illinois, Missouri, Indiana; missing Kentucky) are all named for the city in Sudan. I could not find any explanation anywhere for the one in Ontario (NW of Peterborough).
Also, penultimate stress, unlike gondola.
Surprising: UK “Dongola Roads” and such like were evidently named after Dongola became well-known to Brits after Kitchener’s war-crimes-adorned* campaigns in Sudan; but that’s decades too late for these US places.
Maybe Americans were just better than Brits at geography in those days.
Old Dongola (further south) was the capital of the Christian mediaeval Nubian kingdom of Makuria, whose king George I seems to have successfully renegotiated the baqt with Baghdad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_I_of_Makuria
I love these demonstrations that history refuses to fit in neat boxes.
* So egregious that Winston Churchill (who was a combatant) was shocked.
The number 11 bus I used to get in Dublin had Wadelai Park as the terminus. That housing development was named after the farm(house) it was built on, in turn named after the place where Emin Pasha was holed up waiting for Stanley to save him from the Mahdi.
Also, penultimate stress, unlike gondola.
Where are you getting that? Wikipedia doesn’t give pronunciations for the US places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy5D49dHa-E
would seem to support penultimate stress, at least for trainspotters…
Thanks! I found a printed source and added the pronunciation to Wikipedia.
I got the pronunciation from R.L. Baker’s From Needmore to Prosperity: Hoosier Place Names in Folklore and History, linked to in the article on the Indiana place.
I wondered if the Dongola in Ontario might have something to do with the Underground Railroad. However, something on the name Dongola along a very different line here:
There must be more information available if one investigates along this line. Unfortunately I do not have the time now. Maybe someone else can follow up.
For those who may be unaware, South Carolina State University is a historically black institution.
Just coincidence? Two of the terms of the Baqt concluded between Makuria and the Rashidun Caliphate after the Battle of Dongola were the extradition of fugitives and the provision of 360 (some sources say 400) slaves by Makuria to Egypt.
If you want to pursue the history of surreptitious slavery and slave-catching (and put it in perspective), Xerib, I recommend Slaves, Salt, Sex and Mr Crenshaw, which focuses on a site that I might describe as a reverse underground railroad site, near the federal salt mine, a hideout where slave-catchers would bring their prey. The stress is on “underground”, because such people couldn’t act openly, even in southern Illinois.
The quote you made would seem to imply that southern Illinois was pro-slavery.
However, if you read further in the link that you provided, it shows something different.
The fact that slavers would kidnap blacks in northern states is a pretty well-recognized fact. Thus, your link stresses that the book it drew from as primary source, Freedom at Risk, “focuses generally on kidnappings in the eastern states, (and) the problem existed throughout all of the border states. Before considering Illinois cases, it is important to note the scope of kidnappings in the East, even prior to its flourishment to the west.”
This should help dispel the idea that anyone would have tried to go up the Ohio to some other border region than southern Illinois.
The various kidnapping cases in Illinois that are mentioned there are known because they prompted significant legal action from local county courts in southern Illinois. That is, locally elected county judges supported the rights of free black people. And didn’t take a hit at the polls for it.
That page is a local history site. And it’s important that people recognize the ugly undercurrents of their history.
It’s also important others recognize they were indeed undercurrents, not the main flow. While the region was more racist and relatively more friendly to slavery than other parts of Illinois, (and no doubt the Little Egypt nickname was repeated with sarcasm by abolitionists), it was not slave country.
Meanwhile, the area of Kentucky some are claiming was somehow less abolitionist than Little Egypt was actually the home of the state’s most ardent pro-secession Congressman. Paducah, across the border from Illinois, had a rabidly secessionist newspaper.
Revisionism can be fun. But most of the time, history rolls out the way you would expect. Here’s the main current of history in southern Illinois, from a different site:
>While southern Illinoisans emigrated largely from southern states, few joined the Confederacy during the Civil War.
>During the first sixteen months of the Civil War, forty percent of eligible men from southern Illinois volunteered for the Union, compared with only twenty-eight percent from the rest of the state. The largest number to volunteer for the Confederacy were thirty-four men from Marion, most of whom had been born or raised in the South.
>By the time the (36) secessionists left Marion to join the 15th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry… Ulysses Grant had already mustered a Union Army regiment of southern Illinoisans at Anna… John A. Logan made his famous August 19, 1861 recruitment speech at the Marion square to raise the 31st Illinois Volunteer Infantry.
Each of those regiments would have started with roughly 1,000 volunteers. Logan himself was from Benton, which at least today is considered part of Little Egypt. After the war, he was the longtime commander of the GAR, the Union veterans organization.
Ryan, i’m the only person besides you who mentioned kentucky. please look at what i actually said, and don’t put words in my mouth. and please don’t use the coward’s “some” when you’re talking about (a straw-man version of) a single person – everyone here can read the whole thread.
also, on the subject of revisionism, are we (you) really pretending that enlistment in the GAR was any kind of gauge of antislavery sentiment? are you going to say the north started the civil war to free the slaves next?
lincoln and douglas – two explicitly white supremacist politicians opposed to the abolition movement’s core demand (an immediate, uncompensated end to slavery) – both used the “egypt” label to point to the region as a pro-slavery stronghold. in lincoln’s case, the context was the need for military force to keep the area under Union control – wikipedia (fwiw) says that the first task of the man he charged to do that was “to cut off shipments of arms and supplies to the Confederacy” – which we can perhaps presume were not leaving Little Egypt as an expression of the local notables’ firm commitment to the Union cause.
i trust the testimony of contemporary casual references, especially ones like these that are meant to make specific points by nodding to common knowledge, over any and all contemporary fantasies about “the main current” of white public opinion, which it has long been thoroughly uncontroversial to recognize was firmly anti-abolitionist almost everywhere in the u.s.* until well after the civil war, just as it was firmly opposed to the 1950s-60s wave of african american organizing for legal equality until well after civil rights were granted on paper.
.
* that “almost” is about fairly small areas, too. it’s an imperfect measure, but the Liberty Party’s electoral record is a passable illustration: they never broke 20% of the vote in a gubernatorial race, and their most successful presidential candidate doesn’t seem to have broken 10% in any county. and that party was the project of the abolitionists most committed to mainstream palatability!
South Carolina State had a great football season this year, winning the MEAC before falling to SWAC champion Jackson State this past Saturday in the Celebration Bowl. But it’s unclear if the presence of the Zosimli Naa of Madina on campus had anything to do with that. FWIW Dr. Johnson’s university website bio seems to make no mention of his royal-adjacent status.
I had taken Xerib’s post to be in support of the idea that southern Illinois was more pro-slavery than Western Kentucky. Maybe it wasn’t.
I’ve still seen not a single piece of evidence for that position.
The Republican platform of 1860 had little but anti-slavery in it. Abolition and ending slavery are separate positions. That platform received an outright majority in most of the north. Whig southern congressmen communicated with Lincoln about saving the union if he would back off on his anti-slavery positions, but he said no.
Of course the war was fought to put slavery “on a course to extinction.” It was about saving a Union that respected the outcome of an election with an anti-slavery result, not merely about saving any old union.
It’s certainly true that many decades of southern-dominated historiography befogged the issue the war was fought over.
And yes, a big advantage in enlistment in a war does actually outweigh scattered people sending supplies south as a measure of popular sentiment.
Public opinion can shift rapidly, especially but not only during periods of war or other crisis, and what was once a radical opinion can become mainstream in only a few years as well as vice versa. Case in point: the 1860 GOP platform was against the expansion of slavery but did not claim to seek its abolition in the places where it had long been established (although slavery partisans of course had their suspicions …) whereas the 1864 GOP platform had shifted to demanding the “utter and complete extirpation” of slavery from every square inch of U.S. soil. Illinois voted for Lincoln on the 1864 platform by a greater margin than it had voted for him in 1860, although obviously Lincoln did not get a majority in every county in the state and you can see the geographical spread on the pretty map at this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1864_United_States_presidential_election_in_Illinois
Likewise, it is imho hazardous to assume that everyone (or even a clear majority) volunteering for the Union Army in 1861 or ’62 was affirmatively committed to nationwide abolition of slavery but by the time you got into 1864, a much higher percentage of Union troops were on board with that as an explicit goal of the conflict. Doesn’t mean they necessarily all had enlightened or progressive or egalitarian or what-have-you views about what exactly the legal/social/political status of the freed slaves should be. There was no strong or coherent consensus on that, and that lack of consensus led to manifold future problems.
The notion that northern white public opinion was not yet “abolitionist” in the core sense by 1865 is inconsistent with the rapid ratification of the 13th amendment by the legislatures of every free state other than (on the first go-round) New Jersey, and the lack of subsequent voter backlash against the state legislators who so voted.
Small clarification: Paducah, though in the west of Kentucky, isn’t in Western Kentucky. It’s in the Jackson Purchase, essentially Mississippi Extended.
I think Lincoln’s position on abolition prior to Antietam was pretty typical of Republican politicians, including key party figures like Seward and Fremont: a personal belief that slavery should not exist, but not supporting abolition in places where it was already established. After the war was underway, Lincoln (as he told Greely and many others) favored whatever policy on slavery would have the best chance of preserving the Union. For the first couple years of the war, he and many other Republican leaders felt that ambiguity on the issue was the best policy. However, by fall 1862, they changed to believing that partial (and later total) emancipation was the best strategy.
i was being precise when i said “abolitionist” and “anti-abolitionist”, and provided a gloss, knowing that the (generally either actively hostile or self/ancestor/nation-exculpatorily obfuscating) historiography makes one necessary. abolitionism was a specific political movement that called for an immediate, uncompensated end to slavery, and insisted on full equality for the formerly enslaved within some version of a united states of america*. again, this shit is neither controversial nor hard to learn about – look at the platform of the Liberty Party, which i mentioned up-thread, for a gauge of the rightward limit of abolitionism. and given that that crucial second part of the abolitionist position was hardly a majority stance among white u.s. citizens a hundred years later, and after a further sixty years is still opposed by the party that just won majorities in both houses of congress, the fantasy of an abolitionist majority in 1865 is pretty laughable. convenient, but laughable.
abolitionism wasn’t the only game in town: there were other political positions opposed to a national economy based on enslaved labor (some of which were also against slavery on principle). the Republican Party, for instance, was not an abolitionist endeavor. it got support from some abolitionists as part of a long-running “fusion” electoral strategy (that other abolitionists rejected), and it was attacked as abolitionist by its pro-slavery opponents, but it was abolitionist like the current Democratic Party is socialist. and as Brett hinted, prominent Republicans generally did not arrive at anything like an abolitionist position at any point, holding to a range of other approaches, including the one lincoln adhered to, which centered on the mass deportation of african americans to create a purified white republic. lincoln was quite clear that he was no abolitionist, as were his abolitionist contemporaries. we can be as honest as they were, but only if we let their words have meanings and not rewrite them to suit a more flattering version of the past.
.
* opinions within the movement differed as to whether the existing constitution could be amended sufficiently to be worth preserving; i tend to think the past 150 years have proved garrison right that it could not.
One can play Humpty-Dumpty and insist that No True Abolitionist could possibly have supported the mere abolition of slavery,* but one needs some label for the broad political (with heavy military support …) coalition that brought about the mere abolition (there’s that word) of slavery in the U.S. during the 1863-66 period, admittedly without any real consensus on what to do next. If “abolitionist” isn’t the right label for that coalition, one needs another label, and “anti-abolitionist” isn’t imho a good one. Obviously a fair historical account would explain that participants in that broad coalition had a variety of motives and rationales for coming to agree with the desirability of that specific change of national policy, not all of which involved the most enlightened views of the 21st century being retrojected into a different context and time, and many of them had indeed been unsympathetic with the more minority/factional antebellum “abolitionist” movement.
But this all considerably adrift from the what’s-wrong-with-Twain’s-plotting discussion. I frankly don’t know what the optimal escape route for a slave in northeast Missouri ought to have been at the time, and I suspect that maybe in reality “head first off directly for the locations with the highest possible percentage in their population of your more radical abolitionists” may well have been too simplistic for what was a complex situation. Perhaps there’s a historical literature on which approaches worked better than which as an empirical matter. But perhaps the optimal route wouldn’t have made a plausible story for the other characters Twain wanted to involve in the narrative.
*Perhaps some of them anticipated the so-called “impossibilist” strand of Marxism, which opposes reforms aimed at ameliorating the seeming injustices of the existing social order because such reforms will counterproductively tend to delay the Inevitable Glorious Revolution. Heighten the contradictions, Comrades!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Some of our robber-baron tech overlords are into this. One suspects, not so much from the Marxist angle, though.
It’s not even true to say Lincoln didn’t favor messing with slavery where it existed. He favored abolition where he believed the federal government had jurisdiction, including DC and the territories. It’s right there in his platform, including the magic word. It praises “our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory.”
Like Pres. Obama on gay marriage vs. domestic partnership, it seems pretty clear that he was playing a dance with what he believed was politically viable. He founded a party whose only distinction from existing parties was that they wanted to end slavery. What on earth was he on about, if he really didn’t care that much, just wanted union?
Lincoln’s support of colonization, as rozele suggests, is sometimes taken as equivalent to racism. At best, this is passing judgment without sufficient information. But there is a much more plausible way to look at it. If Garrison and Frederick Douglass knew that 60-85 years of Jim Crow and lynchings were on the way, they might have given colonization a longer look too. Once the country entered Jim Crow, many African Americans did. Lincoln was definitely a pessimist about the creation of a color-blind or blended society. He was right to be.
I’d be interested to see evidence that he supported deportation. As far as I’ve read, he naively thought freedmen would choose colonization, and dropped it once he learned differently.
Rozele is correct that everyone knows Lincoln in 1860 didn’t array himself with abolitionists. Everyone who has read the slightest about him also knows he was anti-slavery to his core, based in large part not on his belief of the need for a “purified white republic”, but based on his sympathy for enslaved people, from the time he traveled to New Orleans as a young man.
He could have had his union. He preferred to pursue anti-slavery instead. Lincoln did in fact free the slaves, and it’s pretty clear he always intended that that would happen.
To follow your understanding, rozele, that Republican intentions were a big nothing-burger, what is it those South Carolina fire-eaters were so upset about? Maybe they were just excitable people?
To answer J.W.’s question, I do think Twain a) needed a long river trip for his conception of the characters and plot, and b) still wanted to root the story in Hannibal, so he couldn’t have them on the Missouri headed for Alton.
It’s just a leap to suspend that much disbelief for me. I’m sure it matters less for every mile further a reader lives from the setting.
To one of Ryan’s points, just about a half-century after Lincoln’s assassination, Marcus Garvey came to the U.S. and established himself in Harlem, where within a few years he was promoting a glamorous modernized update of the colonization scheme. Unfortunately, while he pursued tactical alliances with all sorts of odd bedfellows he did not have good relations with the boring establishment wing of the Party of Lincoln, who uncharitably characterized his promotional activities as “mail fraud” and sent him to prison for a while until Pres. Coolidge eventually exercised his clemency powers to commute the sentence.
Ryan, you seem deeply committed to ignoring my point, which is quite simple: opposition to slavery and abolitionism were not, and should not be treated as, synonyms, in large part because the latter was based in a commitment to antiracism which many who opposed slavery did not share. and that emphatically includes lincoln: if you think that expressed sympathy for targets of racist policies is somehow incompatible with a bonedeep commitment to a white supremacist politics, i suggest you examine the career of the soon-to-be-departing president, who is very much in the rail-splitter’s tradition.
but don’t rely on me. here’s lincoln in his own words, in 1858:
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. […] I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a [white] man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.”*
and here’s alan singer, summarizing his assessment of where lincoln had arrived at in 1865:
“As I read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, I see a war-weary and politically cautious president who never believed in racial equality; who in December 1862, less than a month before finally issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, offered the South gradual compensated emancipation that would have extended slavery in the United States into the twentieth century, and who in the actual document sharply limited the scope of emancipation so that very few enslaved Africans out of the millions in bondage were directly and immediately affected.** This Lincoln expressed tentative support for voting rights for black veterans, but did not believe he had the authority to enforce the idea.”
but, to take your patronizing last paragraph seriously: the secessionists saw both abolitionism and other forms of anti-slavery sentiment as threats. their strategy for addressing them was an abject failure in relation to the latter; after reaping the consequences of that failure, they made common cause with the majority of their erstwhile opponents to defeat the former as comprehensively as they could, which was very. the establishment of that alliance of the rehabilitated*** plantocracy with the anti-abolitionist anti-slavery leadership is the defining event of subsequent u.s. history – and arguably global history, given the many ways its basis in white supremacy fed the u.s. turn to empire****, and the many ways its core opposition to grassroots multiracial democracy is at the roots of the 20th century’s two red scares and cold war.
.
* i’m tempted to take this last with a slight grain of salt, but surely we can accept honest abe’s word for who he saw out and about – or at least for what the people he saw were willing to say in front of a man of his convictions.
** as du bois pointed out nearly a century ago, the Proclamation was nothing but an acknowledgement of the existing material fact of massive self-emancipation that lincoln had nothing to do with. its main – if not sole – effect was to restrain northern officers from actively re-enslaving self-emancipated people for their own benefit, which likely would have added a third, abolitionist, side to the war as well as ending the practical cooperation of self-emancipated people with the union army (whose efficacy and survival often depended on their labor and local knowledge).
*** dare i say “de-confederified”, as a nod to the similar bureaucratic fiction that rendered the bonn republic magically Nazirein with a few forgiving strokes of the pen? or does that risk scuffing the sacrosanct pedestal of a later openly white supremacist president, further threatening my fellow white u.s.ians’ heroic self-regard with the intrusion of mere historical fact?
**** i’m pretty sure stalwart abolitionist t. wentworth higginson pointed this out in his writings opposing the u.s. conquest of the phillipines, though i may be confusing his words with those of his biographer and editor, howard meyer (who wrote a wonderful piece during the civil war centennial asking what would have happened if the north (i.e. abolitionism) had won the war).
confusing his words with those of his biographer and editor
Meyer’s where you can easily find the text (for some reason that isn’t clear to me), but the last paragraph of “How Should a Colored Man Vote in 1900?” is pretty unambiguous on this.
David Eddyshaw: I was considering reading Cahokia Jazz, but I was wondering how well the linguistics aspect was handled. Apparently well enough — thank you for your comment. I like alternate history, but I am very easily disappointed when the linguistics are not well thought out, which is very often.
Apparently it was awarded the Sidewise award at Worldcon this year, but according to my schedule it was on Monday at 10 am and was not recorded (videos are otherwise available until the end of this year for attendees). Checking my schedule, I had already promised to go to another panel at the same time two days before.
Cahokia Jazz wasn’t mentioned in the “Creating a Language for Your World” panel, which I did watch a recording of, and a panelist related how they had to politely tell someone that their French, Japanese and I think Arabic based language in their manuscript looks nothing like actual creoles, more like throwing random vocabulary and grammatical features together without any thought about how it came about.
He’s no Tolkien, and the language itself is not the main focus by any means, but it was good enough not to be a distraction (once I realised why it was a bit reminiscent of Muskogean.)
I had put this on pause because I think rozele was right that I wasn’t speaking respectfully enough. I’m sorry about that.
I do interpret the words of politicians rather differently. I don’t think they shade things to make themselves look ‘better’ to posterity. They do so to make themselves more electable.
Along those lines, I actually think the Lincoln quote rozele advances is fascinating, and for very different reasons than those rozele gives. Lincoln is at pains here to establish that he’ll only go so far, because he knows his neighbors are wary of too much progress on this issue. And indeed, despite his efforts, he lost that contest, and definitely not because he wasn’t radical enough. He was right to try to show there were limits to what he would do, if he wanted to get anything done in terms of eventual abolition.
He was speaking extemporaneously there (at least, I think so – this is from one of the debates with Douglas, if I remember.) At one point, he strayed into explaining why rather what his limits were, and he hit on a truly startling phrase. What was it that Lincoln believed would prevent a state of full social and political equality?
“A physical difference.”
Really. Pause and think about that phrase. And what it doesn’t say.
“A physical difference”
This is distinctly not the difference most contemporaries would have supported that argument with. Sadly, most whites at the time would have said African Americans weren’t intellectually or morally equal.
Why doesn’t Lincoln say this? It would have been politically expedient. Wouldn’t lose him many votes, and would gain him more. But I don’t think he could bring himself to. Because he didn’t believe that African Americans weren’t the equals of white men. His conception of a better outcome was rooted in a dark understanding of human nature. The “physical difference” meant whites would always see blacks as other, outsiders, not part of the commonwealth. He wanted them free but saw little chance of his neighbors accepting them.
The rest of his argument is just policy – I’ll do this, won’t do that (because that’s how far I believe I can convince the voters to go.) But when he inadvertently talked about his motives, his reasoning wasn’t based on any statement of black inferiority, but simply in his deep distrust of human nature.
In an 1858 context, rooting one’s cynicism about equal status on the “physical difference” of blacks was in fact anti-racist. He essentially said “they’re equal, but you racists will always prevent them from securing the blessings of liberty as long as they live among us.” This is why he supported colonization.
My mother, a segregationist (b. Kentucky 1920) but not a believer in racial hierarchy (I now think, in fact, that her mother was a crypto-Melungeon–and it gets more complicated than that)–my mother used to cite that Lincoln quote. I think it had currency in certain circles in her youth.