CK2 forum, or Who's the A-hole?

[Raguel]

So I'm still playing CK2 and waiting for the new dlc to drop. The devs are adding new areas, specifically in Africa. I ask what I thought was a pretty innocuous question and I start getting dislikes/downvoted and someone telling me not to post in the thread.

Thread in question: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/ck2-dev-diary-95-amending-africa.1114195/page-36

I'm Junassa.

Obviously I didn't have to respond to every response to me but I don't think I did anything wrong, and they were being assholes, which is odd because I think in general it's a good community.

So was I out of bounds?  I just don't see it.

[MahrinSkel]

Constantine was the asshole that set off the racism alarm, then whistled innocently while they dogpiled on you. Brush it off, it's the kind of thing where fighting back against their misunderstandings just makes them double down.

--Dave

[Khaldun]

The asshole is the guy who said the dumb shit about Mexicans and skin tone.

Your question is innocuous. In fact, quite pertinent: there is nothing racist or troubling about asking where the African diaspora was substantially drawn from.

The answers are variably accurate, none of them outright wrong, but often basically just parsings of Wikipedia.

Basically, it's like this:

The Mande-speaking or Malinke societies of the Upper Niger bend (present-day Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Eastern Senegal, Eastern Gambia, Eastern Guinea), whose most well-known states or kingdoms are Ghana, Mali and Songhay (it's confusing: the present-day nation of Ghana is not anywhere near where the historical kingdom of Ghana was), is not a major point of origin for most African-descended people in the New World, but they were a major sociocultural influence on African societies throughout West Africa. Many societies closer to the coast who were among the first West African societies contacted by the Portuguese spoke Mande languages and followed Mande customs even though they didn't really identify as Mande and had other languages that they also spoke. The Mande states of the interior were basically cultural imperialists of a sort--pretty loosely so, mostly in terms of exerting indirect influence over other societies.

The early slave trade was small-scale, but mostly drawn from the "Guinea coast"--basically present-day Mauritania around to present-day Liberia, if you look at a map, and from present-day Democratic Republic of Congo--the Congo was the majority of slaves in the early slave trade.

The 18th Century slave trade, which was when millions of people were brought across the Atlantic, was drawn much more from the states that existed from present-day Ghana over to present-day Cameroon, and from Congo and Angola as well. The states involved included the Asante Empire, the Oyo Empire (the most powerful Yoruba state in what is now Nigeria), the kingdom of Dahomey, the city-states of Hausaland (northern Nigeria), and various smaller cities in the Igbo-speaking parts of what is now Nigeria. I gather these aren't in CK2, but this is where most African-Americans would be connected to. But at its height, the slave trade was drawing increasing numbers of people from interior West Africa, so any given family or person might actually be connected to many other points of origin. This includes a small number of people from southern Africa, some of whom may have Malay heritage as well. (Once again, complicated.) The reason there are so many people with Yoruba heritage in particular in the Americas is that there is a catastrophic civil war within the Oyo Empire at the end of the 18th Century and many people fleeing the violence end up captured by slave raiders.

In the 19th Century, as the British move to make the slave trade illegal, there's a brief but very intense period of slaving in Madagascar and East Africa, which affected populations especially in Brazil and Cuba (the last states to outlaw slavery). That introduces a whole new set of heritages into the New World

[Raguel]

Constantine was the asshole that set off the racism alarm, then whistled innocently while they dogpiled on you. Brush it off, it's the kind of thing where fighting back against their misunderstandings just makes them double down.

--Dave

Yeah I normally don't post much on any fora and I typically don't get into heated, inane arguments on the internet and I know I shouldn't take this seriously but just their general attitude really pissed me off. I see people complaining all the time about pc culture running amok, sjws are ruining everything, and I can't even ask the question about ancestry in relation to the game? Fuck those guys.

[Khaldun]

Also, the guy who says, in essence, that the CK state that is closest to African-American origins is the Malinke people is basically right. It's not exactly true that the Hausa are not a part of the African diaspora--they speak a Semitic language but that doesn't mean (complicated, again) that they are closely tied genetically or culturally to other peoples who speak Semitic languages. There were plenty of Hausa speakers taken across the Atlantic as slaves--in fact, it led to a huge Islamic revival movement in the 19th Century in which a lot of ordinary people rose up against corrupt Hausa-speaking princes who were involved in the slave trade.

The maps in the original post in that thread are actually pretty good in historical terms. The devs definitely did their homework.

[Raguel]

Thanks Khaldun. 

[HaemishM]

People on games forums are assholes, trolls and some of them racist asshole trolls. Back out of that thread and don't look back.

[Khaldun]

CK2 attracts some really cool people who know a lot about history, some really cool people who are curious about history, and some unusually virulent racist types who think CK2 is or ought to be an accurate simulator of white supremacy.

[schild]

The deeper the game, the more the crippling autism as well.

[Khaldun]

Yup. That should be a T-shirt or something, it's that true.