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.

Janggi - Korean Chess

A short time ago I bought a set for Janggi, the Korean version of the great chess family. Janggi is more closely related to Chinese chess (Xiang Qi) than any other version, and it is generally believed that Janggi derives from an earlier version of Xiang Qi.

Janggi is played on a board similar to that of Xiang Qi, but without the river, which obviously affects some moves (in Xiang Qi the elephant piece cannot cross the river). The pictures below show the two sides set up in a conventional arrangement, and the empty board (paper, as is also common for Xiang Qi):

The pieces used in Janggi are flat, as in all other East Asian chess variants. They have the name of the piece written on the flat surface, in green for one side and in red for the other (or, at least this is the commonestcolour combination -modern Korean sets use other clours, such as blue). The pieces are usually hexagonal, as shown below, but again, modern Korean sets (and one reported from 1895) can be circular as well:

My set are basically cheap plastic pieces - I would like to get better wooden ones, but they seem to be unavailable in Europe. Most games shops are unaware of even the existence of Janggi - I asked in Just Games in Camden Lock (London), a long established games shop, and the owner has never heard of Janggi, despite selling nice wooden sets of Xiang Qi pieces. In Korea, though, you can get lovely sets, but I cannot figure out how to buy them, as the sellers website is in Korean only.

There are a few good websites that explain the rules of Janggi, including (of course) Wikipedia, and the Chess Variant pages. Written information in English is quite scare, and quite recent. The original source was the great games historial Stewart Culin, who wrote one of the earliest descriptions in his 1895 book Korean Games:

Unfortunately, Culin's book is not easily available - Amazon.com has some copies available second-hand, but at a price. I don't remember where I got my copy, but I think it was not too expensive at the time. It is a Dover Publications reproduction from 1991 (ISBN: 0486265935).

An unusual mancala game board

Yesterday I bought a Mancala game board in a small 'ethnic knickknacks' shop in Brussels. Most such boards on sale in Brussels come from Africa, and are designed for playing the common West African variety of the game called Awalé. The board I bought, however, is from Indonesia, where the game is played on a slightly different size of board.

In Indonesia the game is called Congkak or Dakon, and is usually played in boards with two rows of seven holes (2x7), plus 'store holes' at each end. The board I found, though, is rarer – it has two rows of only five holes, plus the store-holes. I have never before seen such a board on sale – in fact it is rare to see any boards other than the mass-produced 'two rows of six holes' Awalé boards; so much so that many westerners think that this is the only real form of Mancala. They could not be further from the truth – there are over 400 varieties of the game, spread from South America and the Caribbean across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as far as the Philippines and the Marianas Islands.

The rules of play for Congkak on a 2x5 board may be the same as in the larger versions (boards of 2 x 9, plus store holes, are also known), but the game may be shorter and quicker.

The game was sold along with a set of 40 pieces, which were Nickernuts, or seeds of the Caesalpinia bonduc shrub. These are the traditional playing piece in West Africa and the Caribbean, but not in Indonesia, so it seems that the shop added them to the board.

In Indonesia, and much of Asia, the game is played with small Cowrie shells:

In fact the holes in the board would be too small for Nickernuts, which are much bigger than Cowrie shells. In Congkak there are usually as many shells per hole at the start of the game as there are holes on each side of the board, i.e. 5 shells per hole, or 50 in total for the game. The fact that the shop gave me only 40 seeds showed that they didn't really understand what they were selling.

Upon request, the shop also gave me a simple photocopied sheet of 'rules' for the game I was buying, and this proved beyond doubt that they didn't have much understanding of the game, because the rules were for Awalé, and a board of 2x6 was specified. No harm was done though, because I already have rules for most of the known Mancala variants, including Congkak. The board joins my collection of Mancala boards, mostly home-made, which already includes all of the main sizes of boards – 2x6, 2x7, 2x12, 3x6, 4x7 and 4x8.

Luzhanqi

This is a curious little game that goes under a variety of names: Tezhi Luzhanqi, LuZhanJunQi, Luzhanqi, or Chinese land army chess. It is claimed to be popular in China, and various sources describe having bought the game there. But it is entirely absent from the classic western source books on games (HJR Murray, RC Bell, DB Pritchard).

The game is one in which two armies of rectangular block pieces, each inscribed with the name of the rank of soldier or piece of equipment it represents, face each other on a board inscribed with lines of movement, some of which are railways. The picture below shows the two armies facing each other:

This one shows the red army from the perspective of its player:

And this one shows the black army from the perspective of its player:

I bought my set on the internet, from http://www.ancientchess.com/ in the US. It cost very little, and it came with a cardboard board and rules in English. The same rules can be downloaded directly from Ancient Chess. The pieces are small plastic blocks, with their ranks painted on one side only (the enemy remains ignorant of which piece is which, as the picture above shows).

The history of the game is obscure, and probably not very old. The soldiers and the equipment refer to a 20th century form of warfare, rather than the medieval form found in Xiangqi (Chinese Chess). Nonetheless, the game has been around for most of the 20th century, judging by the 1950s version from Taiwan shown here.

The object of the game is to capture your opponent's Flag. Fights are resolved based on the rank of different pieces. High ranking pieces such as the General or Lieutenant General defeat pieces of lesser rank such as Engineers or Captains. There are two special pieces; a mine which destroys anyone who attacks it (with the exception of a Engineer), and the grenade which can kill any unit but in the process destroys itself.

Shogi – Japanese Chess

Shogi is the Japanese version of chess. To know more, see the Wikipedia article on Shogi. Although it is recognisably part of the same family as western chess, there are also significant differences. The most obvious ones are that it is played on a 9x9 board, the pieces are flat wedges (all the same colour – each player knows their pieces by the direction the wedges are pointing), there is no Queen (but rather two 'Gold Generals' on either side of the King), captured pieces may be re-entered by their capturer to fight alongside his army, and pieces may be 'promoted' to a higher rank when they reach the last three rows on their opponent's side of the board (the 'promoted' rank is written on the underside of each piece).

Shogi boards and pieces are not easily available in Europe. A few shops may stock them, but they are few and far between. Here in Brussels, Marchand on Rue de Belle Vue, near the top of Avenue Louise, claims to stock Shogi boards and pieces, but when I asked them they did not have any in stock.

So I turned to E-bay, and was very pleasantly surprised. There was a very good 'E-bay shop' selling chess-related articles, including Shogi pieces, at reasonable prices (and not ripping the customer off via inflated 'postage' charges). I placed an order (using Paypal, of course), and waited to see if it would work. And it did! Within 3 working days of placing the order, the pieces were delivered from Japan to Brussels!

The picture below shows my new Shogi set, arranged on a board that I made myself:

This picture shows the 'promoted' sides of the pieces, which are always written in red ink). As can be seen, some pieces do not promote – the King and the Gold Generals:

This picture shows the shape of the pieces more clearly: