Storm Leave - Time to Read

 As Hurricane Ian raises merry hell in central Florida, my workplace has shut down, thus providing me with another unexpected three-day weekend. I spent most of today reading. I've been reading a lot of Mike Snook's histories, the latest being an account of the Camel Corps' failed attempt to relieve "Chinese" Gordon at Khartoum. Besides seeing the classic Charlton Heston film in childhood, I haven't learned much about this period, but Col. Snook has a keen interest in it. Also an antipathy towards Garnet Wolseley, who managed to make a scapegoat out of the brigade's fallback CO, Charles Wilson.

Interesting takeaways:

The camels were worst off during this campaign. The British did not know how to care for them, and the old saw about them storing water in their humps seems to have been in full flow, as they were rarely watered on the apparent assumption they didn't need it. They were poorly-loaded as well, leading to increasingly-bad saddle sores. A great many of them died, and the delay caused by redistributing loads was part of the delay in reaching Khartoum. Yet at the same time, they seem to have been fairly immune to bullets, able to plod on with multiple wounds, and tended not to panic. Even when the square was broken at Abu Klea, they got in the way rather than stampeding, and may have prevented disaster by physically blocking large numbers of Mahdists from getting in.

Snook is a perfectionist academic, reconciling a great many reports and memoirs to determine, for example, exactly how many men, and from which regiments, were in each face of a given square. (One face being longer than the others is part of the reason for the break-in at Abu Klea.) The Camel Corps was particularly complex because it was a local expedient, built from half-companies from over a dozen different regiments, so Snook uses references to various officers being at specific locations to extrapolate the locations of their subunits and times of events.

Wolseley, not well known today but a popular hero then, does not come off well at all. The key issue in the Gordon Expedition was the attempt to travel down the Nile, when cutting across from Suakin on the Red Sea would have been much quicker and less consuming of resources. One almost has the impression that Wolseley regarded it as a chance to test pet projects - the Camel Corps and a Canadian voyageur unit - in Egyptian conditions. His blaming of Wilson is in line with his blaming of Wood for the loss of the First Boer War - and even if the Desert Column's faults were to blame, much of the delay was owing to its first commander, Sir Herbert Stewart, who (among other things) attempted a night march in unsuitable ground and with untrained animals and -handlers.

The other volume I'm reading today is a short mystery novel set in the Congo circa 1958:

It's not specifically historical - nothing to inspire gaming here - but it's well-written and brings out the feel of Africa, in the vein of the better-known Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency. It's about a white infant girl, abandoned during a kidnap attempt, who is rescued and raised by an African tribe. As the tribe avoids external contact, it is thirteen years before white missionaries and police discover her. She finds herself torn between tribes (by their choice - she considers herself a member of the African tribe and is content), as the Congo prepares for independence, and the shadowy figure who stole her in the first place tries to complete its plot.

Tomorrow - a game, perhaps?

More Colonial Reading

 I have not gamed at all for a while, whether work or home, fantasy or history. But I have been reading a lot, in several different periods. Here's the African colonial books I'm reading, three of them by Stephen Manning:

These are all relatively short but good overviews.

Britain at War With the Asante Nation covers the colonial presence in what is now Ghana from about 1600 on. The British and Dutch both had slaving stations there, and this is where the Asante (pronounced Ashanti) became a warrior nation - by dominating their neighbors. It wasn't until the early 1800s when the British began to actively suppress the slave trade that they came into conflict.

The 1823 war is the one that inspired the Brontes. Unlike their stories, there was never any substantial Western settlement beyond commercial (initially slaving stations), missionary and government elements which, as in India, accidentally grew rather than as part of a deliberate policy. The Asante were encouraged to take slaves from the surrounding tribes and then sell them to the white slavers, which of course led to a problem of the government's own making when it switched to anti-slavery. Treaties also caused trouble, as the Asante thought they were loaning or renting towns and fortresses that the British thought they held permanently. So the first war was a bit of a mess.

The second one was more deliberate, leading to the term "All Sir Garnet" after Wolseley's talent for organization. He gathered a ring of friends and proteges and prepared his expedition like his life depended on it - because it did. Thanks to extensive planning and acclimatization, there was little of the disease that had devastated earlier expeditions in the area (although the transport ships were barely seaworthy). Camps - what might have been called firebases a century later - were built along the road to reduce the load of the fighting troops, filled with food, water, and medical supplies. Even lighter, more comfortable uniforms were procured for the tropics.

Less successful was the attempt to form native regiments; part of the problem was that the locals couldn't protect themselves against the Asante, which is why the British were doing it for them. Against the wishes of the government, Wolseley demanded and got three battalions of British infantry. He took the Asante capital quickly and got out; the campaign lasted mere months and was carried out in the dry season, another cautious nod to the dangers of the tropics.

In the 1890s, they revolted, and their king was exiled. His mother was a strong woman who led the final revolt in 1900, which was entirely justified. The British governor demanded to sit on the Golden Stool of the Asante.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a throne, and he should have known that. It was the center of the Asante religion, and under the Queen Mother they rose. The rebellion was bloodily crushed, but the Golden Stool was never found, and is still kept by the Asante, still displayed on occasion but usually hidden.

The Brontes clearly didn't know this either. A wooden stool is a focal point of Pauline Clarke's The Twelve and the Genii, and the soldiers take it for their own with their kings standing on it. There are unspoken parallels here with the Boxer Rebellion, a war with which I'm completely unfamiliar and need to read up on.

Stephen Manning writes sympathetically, and is careful to quote Ghanaian historians and participants in the battles. A good short, if general, history, with many inspirations for The Sword in Africa.

Evelyn Wood, VC, covers the life of one of Wolseley's proteges, who gained important experience against the Asante. I first encountered him in Byron Farwell's Queen Victoria's Little Wars. There, it is pointed out that he was perhaps the unluckiest sod in the British Army, having been wounded, sickened or injured countless times in his career. These included falling down stairs twice, falling off and being trampled by a giraffe, and in Ashantiland being shot by a nail, and then left on an anthill by the stretcher bearers!

Wood's career stretched fifty years. He earned a VC in the Mutiny, and also served in Asante, India, Egypt and the Crimea. His role at the end of the First Boer War, however, scuttled his combat career. After three humiliating defeats and the death of another Asante veteran, Pomeroy Colley, Wood was sent out to take charge but ended up making peace with the Boers and returning their independence. Wolseley never forgave him, though openly he continued to support and assist Wood, who held several important posts in Britain - Aldershot, Quartermaster General and Adjutant General. These were actually his most far-reaching commands, as he was at the forefront of reorganization, the creation of reserve units, and the use of large-scale maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. So the British role in the First World War is down to him, perhaps as much as Kitchener.

His command in Ashantiland is useful for my hoped-for The Sword in Africa campaign. And while he saw no action in Egypt, he was at the forefront of the Egyptian Army's reorganization under British lines. His command of native units in Ghana was undistinguished, seemingly because he had very little time to train them. But two years in Egypt made his army what it needed to be to face the Mahdi, and provided useful background for his commands in Britain.

Despite his relative lack of combat experience later in his career, he retained an accident-prone tendency to "get out in front." Two instances are quoted of other officers pulling him out of the firing line and getting shot themselves, on the grounds that he wasn't supposed to be out in front. Reminds me of the Bill Mauldin cartoon where a GI asks his officer to get out of the open, "you're drawing enemy fire."

Overall a serviceable pair of books from Pen and Sword. I am working on the third, an overview of weapons improvements during the 19th century, as well as a short series of lectures by a Ghanaian professor on African responses to colonialism, to be discussed in a future post. And of course there are two more volumes of Wargaming in History, two 18th-century rulesets, and several books on Vietnam to be discussed! Gaming is falling well behind, but I am hoping to get in a couple small games in the next couple weeks, including my Picacho Pass scenario. See you then -

My Colonial Collection, Part Four: Zulu War

 Been a while since I looked at my 1/72 Zulu War figures; I'd forgotten how few of them I'd based. I started with about sixty Zulu and twenty redcoats just for small games of TSATF, and it seems I also finished a squadron of lancers, a handful of gun crews and thirty Natal Native Contingent. There are actually a lot more troops for both sides. What I have will do for now, as I intend to stick to The Sword in Africa for now. I'll use the Zulu as tribal proxies, and the gun crews might stand in for Belgians or Germans in a pinch.

The Zulu are very attractive; I bought them off Ebay from a painter who individualized each unit with differing shields. They're delicate, though; the kit clearly came with separate spears and shields and some require repair.

A smallish horde of Zulu.

White, brown and black shields.

Black and white shields.

White and brown shields.

Black shields with white spots.

White shields.

A squadron of lancers, and a company of redcoats.

Gatling gun crew, and either surveyor or heliograph crew.

Natal Native Contingent, and a naval Gardner battery.

My Colonial Collection, Part 3: Central Africa

In addition to The African Wars, Chris Peers has also written a handful of interesting rulesets; I read his In the Heart of Africa decades ago when it was available on the Foundry website. I was alerted to the newer Death in the Dark Continent by Peter Dennis, the maker of Paperboys, who recently was inspired by Peers to create a new line of his beautiful paper figures. 

 

Heart of Africa is a skirmish game with a maximum of around sixty figures a side; Death in the Dark Continent has similarities but uses up to nine multi-bases per unit - perfect for Paperboys, of course. Both are focused on the era of exploration - ie, interfering European and American busybodies with, in Peers's words, "a mad obsession for lakes and the sources of rivers," and a bewildering mix of African tribes and Arabs who regarded these goings-on with bemusement and increasing alarm.

I first was introduced to this period by Larry Brom's classic The Sword and the Flame, 3rd edition, which includes a "reduced" variant called The Sword in Africa.

When I played Warhammer 40K, one of my favorite armies was the Catachan Jungle Fighters - basically WWII Australians with a touch of Vietnam movies. The 3rd-edition codexes for 40K were masterful examples of concision, compressing impressive amounts of backstory, pictures, rules and hobby ideas into 48 pages or less. Codex Catachan had a unique method of creating a jungle battlefield which I like to use even in non-40K games.

Basically, you place discrete features like hills, clearings and villages. Then you link them with trails. All the rest of the table is assumed to be jungle, and so long as you can tell where it starts there is no need to fill it with immovable tree models - just move the individual bits when figures must pass through them. There is also a useful mechanism for triggering ambushes and traps. I'll use this page to lay out the table for The Sword in Africa.

TSIA is basically a half-size variant of The Sword and the Flame - units number just ten men at maximum, with just half a dozen units a side in most scenarios. These figures (again, purchased from Ebay) are most of the available factions:

 

Left: Three dozen generic Askaris, such as those that accompanied explorers. Could also be Ruga Ruga?

Right: About forty Belgian Askaris.

Left: No idea. Tribal chiefs of some sort?

Right: About forty porters.

Left: Twenty German Schutzetruppe and two officers, though I'm not sure the African troops ever wore slouch hats.

Right: Fifty Zanzibaris.

The only faction I haven't got for this theater is, ironically, natives - Azande, Masai, etc. I'll probably proxy with Zulu.

The African Wars, by Chris Peers

Have been slowly but steadily working on this book, learned a lot and gained quite a bit of inspiration. It's available free through the Hoopla library app. Peers lists his original sources, too; most of these will be available on Google Books and Archive.org, as they are long out of copyright.

There is significant useful detail on the Ashanti (of Bronte fanfic fame), perhaps for an Angria campaign as Man of Tin sometimes runs. We tend to think of the colonial period as the "Scramble for Africa," but there was plenty of excitement in the period of Brown Bess.

Some pages are devoted to the Zulu, particularly their "Wild West" clashes with the Boers. I've never seen a wargame recreation of a hasty wagon fortification, but am not sure it would be all that fun for either side.

The chapter on King Kabarega of Bunyoro is interesting because it was a case in which the Egyptians (under Westerners like Emin Pasha and Chinese Gordon) fought a Ugandan tribe rather than the Arabs and Arab-influenced groups for which they are famous. Kabarega stuck around for decades like a thorn in the side of the white explorers and administrators, who I imagine traded campfire stories about him. 

Some elements of this campaign to add interest to a scenario:

• Canoes were used, and some boats were packed in pieces. 
• The fighting was in tall, stiff grass that blocked movement and line-of-sight, but provided no cover.
• Wild animals were a distinct danger, particularly crocodiles.
• Chiggers brought entire expeditions to a stop as men went lame. Wear your boots and puttees, folks!

From the chapter on the Azande comes a reversal of the normal sort of fight - the Mahdists on the defense behind a zariba from an attacking army of Belgian Askari (supported by the Azande, but still!).

Then a section on "Congo Arabs" - a slaving station in the "Heart of Africa." It sounds like the Arabs and Africans intermarried, and in fact nearly all the "Arabs" were African-born. Again, fodder for an atypical matchup. There was also significant contact and conflict between them and the Belgian Congo, with both sides plundering and slaving and neither side coming out of it looking good. Both also fought the pygmy tribes, while the other unhappy tribes were trapped between the outsiders. This is clearly the nucleus of many of the scenarios in TSIA.

The next chapter, a short one, is on the Masai and related Nandi, who have interesting similarities and differences with the Zulu and each other. Both, like the Zulu, formed military units from "age groups," but were not rigidly organized. The Nandi especially were in much smaller groups, because they were a smaller tribe and living in rougher terrain, but were more disciplined than the Masai seemingly out of small-group peer pressure. Like the Zulu, their cultures were based on cattle, which would seem to be good objectives in scenarios involving them. The Masai carried swords and throwing clubs (!) as well as the traditional stabbing spears and shields, which might make for an interesting small-scale skirmish. While more numerous and threatening, the Masai were more fragmented, making the Nandi the greatest native challenge to the British in Kenya, and the Masai seem to have never formally submitted to the British - an unusually mutual respect instead.

A chapter on the Hehe of Tanganyika also covers the foundation of the German Schutzetruppe. Peers comments that their 1871 rifles were modern when issued, unlike those given to British subjects (wary of another Indian Mutiny). The reason the 1871 weapons were still in use by WWI was that at 11mm they were more powerful than the standard 7.92mm and thus better suited to bush-fighting! Tom "von" Prince, a half-British officer who later served in 1914, is a prominent character in these early (1890s) battles.

The next part is on the the border of northern Kenya, a real smorgasbord of mixed Central African tribes, Somalis, Ethiopians, and Arabs that intermixed and fought each other as much as they fought the British. The "Mad Mullah," who I first encountered in a book on the history of air power, was encountered in this area. The British seem not to have taken the Somalis very seriously. At this point (around 1900), ex-Mahdists were allied with the British, again an unusual mix of troops for a small force. The explorer Burton, who fought the Somalis during his search for the Nile, was an expert on sword and bayonet drill!

There is a sense of tragedy in the conclusion; the fact is that the disasters that befell the natives of central Africa were external, and largely even environmental. The famous Zulu and Masai had themselves emigrated away from invaders, a first wave of catastrophe for the people who had dwelt in their new homelands. Like the American Indians, they - but more importantly the cattle on which their cultures depended - also fell prey to disease as the white man came in. By the time white explorers and soldiers arrived, it was easy to disparage and underestimate the often demoralized and shattered remnants. 

But some resisted, others fought over the spoils, and therein lies the interest for a wargamer. I have actually presented Belgian-on-German fights to players as "Do you want to play the slaving-and-cannibal-accepting colonialists, or the genocidal colonialists?" The last chapter adds a brief discussion of the Battle of Adowa, and the book ends with a series of atmospheric sketches and photographs.

It's almost as if Larry Brom read this book while preparing The Sword in Africa. It whets my appetite to try that variant of the game. An excellent read, recommended.