A small unnoticed extinction in East Congo

The tragic situation in East Congo is outside the scope of this blog. The scale of death and suffering is unimaginable in modern Europe, and nothing I say below should take away from the misery of the people who have suffered for years and who are still suffering in Congo.

Apart from the humanitarian situation my interest in north-eastern Congo is due to the fact that it is - or was - the home of many variants of the great African game of Mancala. In the brief period between the colonisation of central Africa and its decolonisation several anthropologists collected tantalising glimpses of the richness of the region in terms of variants unknown elsewhere. Many of the writers said that many other variants existed, but had not yet been documented. Decolonisation, and the collapse of civilisation in several important mancala playing regions, mean that they may now never be collected. The widespread disruption and death in the region now means that much of the memory of these games is being lost. A displaced people is likely to lose large parts of its culture, through loss of artifacts (game boards), loss of the people who know the rules, or the homogenising effect of mixing with other peoples in refugee camps.

Men are the main players of mancala, but the war has separated many men from their friends and their children, and the knowledge of the games may not be passed on. The children will be more likely to play football or cards - these effects were visible even before the war. So by the time the war ends, as it must some day, there may have been a widespread, unnoticed, unknown, extinction of many mancala variants.

In 1977 a young anthropologist, Philip Townshend, published the biggest study of Congolese mancala games ever: Les Jeux de Mancala au Zaire, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Les Cahiers du CEDAF, Cahier 3, 1977)(Not on the internet - I got it via the library of the ULB in Brussels). In it he gives details of dozens of games played all over the region, many of which are threatened with extinction. How many more there were, we can only guess. In his conclusion, Townsheld says that "this study does not claim to be exhaustive. There are undoubtedly a large number of other games that are unknown to us, and it would be interesting if other researchers could complete this preliminary study" (my own translation from the original French). Unfortunately those other researchers never materialised, but instead war came, and amongst its sad unfortunate casualties may be a large part of the regions gaming culture.

Whether additional knowledge exists in the Africa Museum in Tervuren just outside Brussels is hard to know. The Museum only allows accredited researchers access to its collections, and provides no real information on its website. Townshend, in another publication in 1979, stated that the Africa Museum has a good collection of boards, but whether it has also the playing rules that they need, is unclear. In any case, boards and rules in cold wet Belgium do not compensate for the death of games in their natural habitat. If the games are lost in Congo, they are lost as real games. Our diversity as humans has probably just shrunk in this, as in so many other, aspects.