Aid Thoughts

I was recently re-reading sections of my books on Africa, and came across an interesting little aside in John Iliffe’s Africans. Africans is the most useful general history of Africa I’ve read, though the relevant sections of The Birth of the Modern World are brilliant, too. The aside pertains to the most common game in Sub-Saharan Africa, known as Ba(w)o in Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania and Mankala in West Africa. It’s a game in which two players have a set of stones each, and face off with the objective of obtaining (‘eating’) as many of the opponent's stones as possible, and bringing them to one's own side of the board. I find it fiendishly difficult, but my Malawian friends play it as second nature with speed and forethought that would make rational choice theorists beam.

Iliffe looks at the game through the lens of a population history of Africa, in which his central argument is that the struggle to increase population in a geographically and climatically hostile continent has been the central force of African cultural and historical change. He writes of the game (my emphasis):

The only leisure activity with a [recorded] history stretching back beyond European contact is the board game … mankala. Played in Ancient Egypt, where a stone board of c. 1500 BC has been found, the game seems to have spread … throughout the continent, except its southern tip… Everywhere it was seen as a test of intelligence. Legend said that Sunjata played it for his life against his rival for power in Mali… Being African, the game was played quickly, publicly, socially, noisily. Islam frowned upon it and replaced it by the more sedate dara … while Ethiopian nobility either played an especially complicated variant or preferred chess. Chess was the game of a stratified society, with unequal pieces and the objective of destroying the opposing forces. In mankala all pieces were of equal value and the aim was to capture the opposing pieces and add them to one’s own. It was the game of a society dedicated to building up its numbers.

In all the years I observed it being played, and the few occasions I braved humiliation and allowed myself to be thrashed at it, this never occurred to me. Chess was developed in land-scarce, populous countries, (India and then Southern Europe); one advances to new land, decimating the forces laying in front of you. Its popularity in America and Russia probably owes more to cultural exchange with chess-playing nations than indigenous factors. In Africa, land has rarely been the constraining factor; thus in Bao one remains in one’s own land, but captures as many of the ‘other’ as possible. You do not kill them, and they contribute to the further prosperity of your land. It’s an interesting insight.

Having a keen interest in Japanese culture as well, a friend and I questioned  if there was a similar interpretation of Go. I’ve read two brilliant books which use Go as a central motif to describe social change. In Kawabata’s The Master of Go conflict is generational, with the aging master playing an elegant but forceful game of classical beauty; his young opponent begins at a more sedate pace but finally explodes into a violence of attacks. In Shan Sha’s The Girl Who Played Go, the conflict is between a Chinese girl and a Japanese soldier, with styles representing their nations. My speculation for a similar theory of Go would be that it is a game for countries where land and people are abundant: hence the emphasis on tactical colonisation and balance. This is just a wild stab in the dark, though. Anyone care to venture a better theory of Go?