Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
OK, I think I have it planned - a set of vignettes taking place in Quito, Macapá, Libreville, Kampala, Kismayo, Pontianak, Waigeo, and one other location. I'll probably post them a couple at a time, although that's subject to change without notice. The unifying theme is left as an exercise for the reader.
A few days ago, a nasheed got posted on a thread by @GoulashComrade and this was among the recommended videos:
Yes, it's a nasheed in English. I think TTL's Abacarists might eventually come up with something quite similar to this, IMO. Or, hell, a certain member of the Abacar family with an inclination for mysticism and poetry could write it himself.
Yes, it's a nasheed in English. I think TTL's Abacarists might eventually come up with something quite similar to this, IMO. Or, hell, a certain member of the Abacar family with an inclination for mysticism and poetry could write it himself.
Hey, John. I was rereading some of the post-Great War stuff, specifically about China. It said that Chinese peasants created local self-defense societies that confiscated landlords' land and gave them to peasant collectives. That seems unusual, and out of character for 1890s China, for a few reasons.
First, Chinese peasants weren't really in a Chinese "nation" or "people" or "人民" at this point. They wouldn't offer serious resistance to conquest. I'm reminded of Lu Xun, the author, who decided to abandon medicine in 1905 when he was shown a picture from the Russo-Japanese War in class (he was studying medicine in Sendai). In this picture, Japanese soldiers were executing a Chinese man for being a Russian spy, and a large crowd of Chinese peasants were watching impassively, not offering any resistance at all. He later said, "After this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles ... The most important thing was to change their spirit, and ... at that time I felt literature was the best means to this end." It would take more than just foreign presence to inspire actual resistance. The Boxer rebellion was not only sponsored by officials and gentry, it was mainly directed at other Chinese. Their primary goal was to kill the "one dragon, two tigers, and 300 lambs", or Emperor Guangxu, Prince Qing, Li Hongzhang, and officials who dealt with foreigners. They also hated the Chinese "吃教" Christians for living on the church and evading the law and the railways and telegraph lines for supposedly disturbing the feng shui and causing natural disasters. They held the foreigners responsible for all of these things. Unless Japan favors Christians or commits frequent atrocities while foraging I don't think peasants would resist them.
Second, I don't see why land would be collectivized. The Chinese government never reached below the county level before quite recently; the local elites ran the show at the township and village levels for thousands of years. There was a fairly stable order at the ground level. Landlords and rich peasants were only a bit more than a tenth of the population, but their tenants were loyal to them because it was a two-way relationship. Middle peasants were about 40 percent of the population, and poor peasants were a bit less than half. Until the Taipings, bandits and rebellions would rob the gentry, but they would not redistribute their land. "Landlord" was not even a word in the Chinese vernacular until the communists made it one. Also, China didn't have a tradition of communal ownership. Even when the communists came into villages to reshape them, they would distribute land equally to each household, not collectivize it, because peasants wanted more land and didn't care to share it. Collectivization happened top-down, not bottom-up.
First, Chinese peasants weren't really in a Chinese "nation" or "people" or "人民" at this point. They wouldn't offer serious resistance to conquest. I'm reminded of Lu Xun, the author, who decided to abandon medicine in 1905 when he was shown a picture from the Russo-Japanese War in class (he was studying medicine in Sendai). In this picture, Japanese soldiers were executing a Chinese man for being a Russian spy, and a large crowd of Chinese peasants were watching impassively, not offering any resistance at all. He later said, "After this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles ... The most important thing was to change their spirit, and ... at that time I felt literature was the best means to this end." It would take more than just foreign presence to inspire actual resistance. The Boxer rebellion was not only sponsored by officials and gentry, it was mainly directed at other Chinese. Their primary goal was to kill the "one dragon, two tigers, and 300 lambs", or Emperor Guangxu, Prince Qing, Li Hongzhang, and officials who dealt with foreigners. They also hated the Chinese "吃教" Christians for living on the church and evading the law and the railways and telegraph lines for supposedly disturbing the feng shui and causing natural disasters. They held the foreigners responsible for all of these things. Unless Japan favors Christians or commits frequent atrocities while foraging I don't think peasants would resist them.
Second, I don't see why land would be collectivized. The Chinese government never reached below the county level before quite recently; the local elites ran the show at the township and village levels for thousands of years. There was a fairly stable order at the ground level. Landlords and rich peasants were only a bit more than a tenth of the population, but their tenants were loyal to them because it was a two-way relationship. Middle peasants were about 40 percent of the population, and poor peasants were a bit less than half. Until the Taipings, bandits and rebellions would rob the gentry, but they would not redistribute their land. "Landlord" was not even a word in the Chinese vernacular until the communists made it one. Also, China didn't have a tradition of communal ownership. Even when the communists came into villages to reshape them, they would distribute land equally to each household, not collectivize it, because peasants wanted more land and didn't care to share it. Collectivization happened top-down, not bottom-up.
Hello, Jonathan, and sorry if I ask something that has already been asked, but is there any other way of reading Malê Rising than on this forum?
I'd like to get my father to read it, because I'm certain he would love it, but he is a tad old-fashioned and I'm afraid the added hassle of reading on a forum will prevent him from reading this. Is there perhaps a .pdf or, even better, a published version?
I'd like to get my father to read it, because I'm certain he would love it, but he is a tad old-fashioned and I'm afraid the added hassle of reading on a forum will prevent him from reading this. Is there perhaps a .pdf or, even better, a published version?
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https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=timelines:list_of_male_rising_posts
This wiki page has links to every update and post. You could give your father that, which would be easier than scrolling through this thread, or take the time and put it all in a PDF yourself - might take a while, I know! As far as I know there's no PDF or published version.
Cheers,
Ganesha
Sorry for the late response to some of these - I've been busy, away, and busy, in roughly that order.
I was hoping one of the China experts on the thread might address this, but since that hasn't happened, I'll have to do my humble best.
As to the first factor, I don't see any reason why Japan would favor Christians, but frequent atrocities are sadly possible, especially where the foraging armies are cut off from their supply chain due to military activity in their rear. Also, a few impolitic remarks by Japanese officers about confiscating land for future colonial settlement (whether or not plans for such confiscation actually exist) might help inspire local resistance.
The second factor might be put down to Belloist communal influences filtered through Hui Islam as well as narodnik influences filtering down from the Ukrainians north of the Amur, and maybe "collectivized" can be read to mean "redistributed and organized in cooperatives," with full collectivization being a later project of the Ma Emperor. Maybe the local gentry in some provinces also discredited themselves during the war, possibly by widespread collaboration.
Given that I'm not about to rewrite the timeline wholesale after it's finished, those will have to do - I wish you were around when I was writing this for the first time.
I couldn't imagine IVF not existing in any technologically advanced timeline with values even roughly resembling our own - fertility is a very widespread human desire, and enabling infertile couples to have children would be a natural line of medical research during the 20th century. There would be religious and ethical debates as IOTL, and most likely the technology would be subject to various regulations depending on jurisdiction (also as IOTL), but the desire for fertility is strong enough that I don't think any of these would actually forestall IVF or result in it being generally prohibited.
Also, every update is illustrated except for the ones on the first few pages - part of the reason I did that was so readers could easily tell the story posts from the comments. Once your father gets past page 8 or so, he can skip past the discussion by looking for illustrations.
The list of posts that Ganesha pointed out also has links to all the maps.
BTW, I haven't forgotten the 2100 vignette, but (a) see above about being busy, away, and busy; and (b) the space elevator theme didn't really come together, so I'm working up another story series.
I was hoping one of the China experts on the thread might address this, but since that hasn't happened, I'll have to do my humble best.
As to the first factor, I don't see any reason why Japan would favor Christians, but frequent atrocities are sadly possible, especially where the foraging armies are cut off from their supply chain due to military activity in their rear. Also, a few impolitic remarks by Japanese officers about confiscating land for future colonial settlement (whether or not plans for such confiscation actually exist) might help inspire local resistance.
The second factor might be put down to Belloist communal influences filtered through Hui Islam as well as narodnik influences filtering down from the Ukrainians north of the Amur, and maybe "collectivized" can be read to mean "redistributed and organized in cooperatives," with full collectivization being a later project of the Ma Emperor. Maybe the local gentry in some provinces also discredited themselves during the war, possibly by widespread collaboration.
Given that I'm not about to rewrite the timeline wholesale after it's finished, those will have to do - I wish you were around when I was writing this for the first time.
I couldn't imagine IVF not existing in any technologically advanced timeline with values even roughly resembling our own - fertility is a very widespread human desire, and enabling infertile couples to have children would be a natural line of medical research during the 20th century. There would be religious and ethical debates as IOTL, and most likely the technology would be subject to various regulations depending on jurisdiction (also as IOTL), but the desire for fertility is strong enough that I don't think any of these would actually forestall IVF or result in it being generally prohibited.
Also, every update is illustrated except for the ones on the first few pages - part of the reason I did that was so readers could easily tell the story posts from the comments. Once your father gets past page 8 or so, he can skip past the discussion by looking for illustrations.
The list of posts that Ganesha pointed out also has links to all the maps.
BTW, I haven't forgotten the 2100 vignette, but (a) see above about being busy, away, and busy; and (b) the space elevator theme didn't really come together, so I'm working up another story series.
Thanks. Redistribution seems like something the Chinese peasants might do (several dynasties did land reform at the beginning of their tenures so there’s a precedent) if they were more politically conscious. The only question is why the traditionalist Gentry would aid the modernist Japanese. If they were more modernist they might, but I don’t see how that could happen. I have two ideas though. One, since there was no 1SJW Li Hongzhang wouldn’t be discredited. Two, if there were less natural disasters in the last 19th century they wouldn’t be blamed on railroads.
Possibly this could result from co-option, with the Japanese civil administration promising civil service posts to members of the gentry who passed their exams but were not selected (or even to those who failed their exams) as well as promises of land and money. The Japanese might also portray a modernizing central government in Beijing as a greater threat to the gentry's traditionalism than they are. It's already canon that Japan did this in Korea during the Great War in order to bring the yangban to its side (with varying degrees of success), so they might try the same thing in China, resulting in the gentry losing trust among the peasants.
Malêverse 2100: Elegy for an Oasis
Amadou Ba was a hundred and nineteen since the Eid, and Mariama, his motor wagon, wasn’t much younger. He’d built and rebuilt the wagon a hundred times over: he’d added solar batteries and an exhaust scrubber, jerry-rigged a waste-heat harvester, replaced worn parts with new ones he’d machined himself. He knew it as well as any animal, and sometimes it could be as temperamental as one.
Today was one of those times. It was hot even for the Sahara – fifty-six in the shade – and even with the coolant mix Amadou had put in that morning, the engine was constantly on the verge of overheating. He’d had to rebalance the load, take the hills on battery power, call a dozen halts to let the beast cool down, and once, to pull over and plug into the solar farms for an emergency charge. A camel couldn’t have been more contrary, and to Amadou’s fading memory, none of those he’d known in his childhood ever had been.
But Mariama could still cover as much ground in two hours as a camel could in a day, and now, with evening coming and the heat starting to fade, the destination was near. The road was winding down from stony hills, past the endless hectares of solar and wind farms, and below, the oasis was in sight.
It was a small oasis, not large enough for permanent settlement – a pool and a stand of date palms, nothing more. It would be a welcome haven for two or three nights, though, and Amadou wasn’t the only one of his Shelterer tribe whose heart rose at the sight. He eased Mariama into low gear, took the slope carefully, and ground to a stop at the oasis’ edge with an hour to spare before sunset.
The rest of the tribe pulled in behind him – eighteen motor wagons, a hundred people and about the same number of sheep – and began the ritual of unloading and pitching tents. Amadou got his own shelter down from the wagon’s back before anyone could stop him; he was the oldest of the band but he wasn’t dead yet, and while he accepted more help than he used to, he was damned if anyone was going to accuse him of not working.
“Stop that, jadde,” said his granddaughter Alimatou, coming up behind from where her own family’s wagon was grounded. She wasn’t the only one saying so either – at Amadou’s age, the price of not wanting to be caught slacking was being reprimanded for working too much – and after token protest, he let her finish setting the tent up and taking down his supplies.
“Where are your tools, jadde?” Alimatou said. “I’ll need them for Salif – it’s his first time out to the farms.”
“I’ll get them for you tomorrow…”
“No, tonight. It’s looking like tomorrow will be an inside day – best to get the work done while we can.”
Amadou nodded his agreement. When he was a child, the tribe had made its rounds in Mali and cared for the plantings at the desert’s edge; now, far to the north, it was one of those that maintained the Consistory Environmental Section’s energy farms. In exchange, its customary rights to the oases and desert roads were inviolate and the electricity it took from the farms was free – and when the windmills mixed the air and the solar panels’ waste heat made the nights warm and moist, the plants that grew in the open spaces were theirs to cultivate and harvest.
“In the cab,” he said. “I’ll get them down.” But as he went do so and Alimatou moved to forestall him, their attention was seized by another tribe coming down to the oasis from the north.
He didn’t recognize them, but that was nothing unusual. There were many Shelterer tribes that moved among the three million square kilometers of energy farms, and even more that roamed the six million square kilometers that had yet to be installed. When the project was done fifty years from now – only the Consistory could plan in such terms – the Sahara would produce eighty-four terawatts of power, and the desert people – Shelterers, Tuaregs, Bedouins, Moors – would be its customary owners…
“Amadou!” called Dawudu, this year’s ra’is, interrupting Amadou’s train of thought. “Will you greet them? Our fires are theirs.”
Again, Amadou nodded. He was neither ra’is nor imam, but as the oldest, there were still some things he was expected to do. “Give me your arm,” he told Alimatou as he realized how tired he was, and set off for the other end of the oasis where the newcomers were making camp.
His own campsite was coming to life around him: fires blazing outside tent-flaps, families renewing conversations where they’d left off in the morning, excited children racing thirsty sheep to see who would get to the pond first. None of them showed signs of alarm. The ownership of oases might have been bitterly contested once – battles had been fought over them, and generations-long lawsuits waged – but the same arbitration that had made the Environmental Section’s use of the Sahara subject to its residents’ customary rights had recognized an ulema to oversee its management, and that council had declared the oases open to all. There were strict limits on their use, and those were litigated before the ulema as much as grazing and water rights had once been, but with neither Amadou’s tribe nor the newcomers staying more than a couple of days, they were unlikely to be tested.
Something alarmed Amadou all the same as the newcomers’ encampment drew close. They were poor, in a way that poverty had rarely meant since his childhood. They had no motor-wagons; their clothing and tents were threadbare; the animals were gaunt and the people nearly as much so; few of them were over seventy. If Amadou had crossed paths with this tribe before, they had fallen on bad fortune since, and they were obviously too proud to take zakat even if it killed them.
An old man – no doubt the oldest in his tribe – came out of one of the tents and walked to where Amadou was standing just outside the camp. “You are welcome here,” he said, and Amadou let Alimatou lead him across the invisible threshold.
“Come share our shelter and our meal,” Amadou answered. “Our fires are your fires.”
The other man’s response wasn’t what Amadou expected. Invitations such as he had delivered were a rite of meeting, and their acceptance was equally a ritual. What should have followed was an offer to contribute to the feast, to which, with a tribe as poor as this, Amadou would agree to the smallest extent consistent with their honor. Just as customary law made the Sahara a gift economy writ large, the ritual of hospitality made it one writ small.
But there was no acceptance and no offer of food or fuel. “I will come,” the old man said instead. “Those who want to come will come. But the others will stay, and don’t be surprised if there are quarrels over it.”
“Whoever comes will be welcome,” Amadou said – a hundred questions flashed through his mind, but none of them were his to ask. “And the first portion will be yours…”
“Ismail.”
“Ismail,” he repeated, and returned to his camp in much confusion.
An hour later, as Amadou leaned on Mariama’s right front wheel and finished a cup of tea, Ismail crossed the threshold; with him was the other tribe’s ra’is, who introduced himself as Youssou, and a scattering of followers. They were families, as they should be, but some of them looked incomplete to Amadou’s eyes; fathers without their sons, children without parents, husbands without wives. From the number of tents in the other campsite, they might be half their tribe.
What followed was as ritual dictated. The tribes exchanged greetings; young people brought out couscous and joints of lamb to serve their elders before they ate; old men and women inquired after each other’s animals and grandchildren and brought each other up to date on weddings and births. But after a few moments, Amadou realized that another set of polite inquiries wasn’t being made, and that their guests were carefully looking away from parts of the camp. And it all became clear to him, because what they weren’t looking at was the machines.
Decades ago, in Amadou’s childhood, his father had made fun of the Belloist parties in Mali’s parliament: how could anyone who claimed to abjure politics share in the government of a state? The jokes were funny then. They no longer were, because Amadou’s tribe had made the same compromises.
The tribe had shunned modern technology once, as all Shelterers did. But that had changed as the world did: as the summers became hotter, as the places where nomads could live grew steadily smaller, as open space grew scarcer even though the world’s population was declining. By the time Amadou had grown to manhood, “no technology” had become “only as much as we need to survive,” and by the time he was a grandfather, it was “as much as we need to keep living apart from settled people.” They had accepted motor-wagons, air conditioners, nanomedicine, solar panels and biofuels – better that than to become unable to live in the desert and be thrown on the charity of the world they had left.
The Shelterers’ ideal was still the same as the Tall dynasty had envisioned – a righteous society of peasants, herders and scholars – but as the Belloists had redefined politics, they had given new meanings to “peasant,” “herder,” and ultimately “scholar.” Alimatou wasn’t the only one in the tribe who’d been to university.
But not all the Shelterers felt as Amadou’s people did, and the way their guests looked down at any mention of machinery screamed their disgust louder than any words. When Ismail asked Amadou to walk with him to where the date palms stood, what he said came as no surprise.
“Some of us – my own son – will call us apostates for coming to you tonight.”
“But?”
“But we can’t go on as we have. You saw our camp – we can be poor, but when our children cry out for something to eat and old people die of heatstroke, that’s something more than poverty.”
Ismail fell silent, but something told Amadou he wasn’t finished, so he stood and waited. Behind them, the feast was ending and Alimatou was leading the maintenance crew out to the energy farms. Amadou’s eyes followed them and Ismail’s followed his, and he could see the moment when the other man remembered that beyond the date palms were three million square kilometers of windmills and solar panels.
“There are things my ra’is can’t talk about with yours,” Ismail said at last. “But some of us will join you tomorrow, and I hope you will welcome them.”
“Better that than a settlement?”
Ismail nodded. “I thought I would join you myself – what would someone my age do in a town? – but when I saw your machines, it was too much. Some of the younger ones might make the change. They won’t like it, but they’ll get used to it if their other choice is to live with the ones like my son.”
“Yes.” The young were both the most adaptable and the most fanatical; some would join Amadou’s tribe, but others would pretend that nothing needed to change until the desert sand covered their bleached bones.
“Make sure your ra’is accepts them,” Ismail said and walked back to his camp; Amadou spread a blanket on Mariama’s flatbed and counted stars until he fell asleep.
The morning sun awakened him, and he could tell that Alimatou was right about this being an inside day. An hour after dawn, the temperature already stood at fifty-two, and the Radio Sahara forecast called for it to reach sixty in the afternoon; with the night’s moisture still in the air, that was killing heat even at rest. Even with all the Environmental Section had done to keep the temperature down – even with everything that governments up and down the scale had done – there were a few days like that in the desert every year. The communal air-conditioned tent was open, and everyone who wasn’t in it would soon be; only the most necessary work was done on days like this, and only as much of it as couldn’t be avoided.
Amadou, in his old age, had come to like inside days more than not; air conditioning made them more comfortable than the old ways of evaporation cooling and drying the air, and they were days with the whole tribe under one roof, days to study and sip tea and tell stories. He found a cushion near where Alimatou and her crew were assessing the night’s work, settled in with a book of Usman dan Fodio’s poems, and wondered when the first members of the other tribe would come to the tent and how furtive their steps would be.
What he heard instead were gunshots.
It took him a moment to recognize the shots for what they were; it had been sixty years and more since the tribe had last known battle. Younger men, quicker to react, were running for weapons; parents hustled children out of the tent and toward the uncertain cover of the motor wagons.
“Hold!” shouted Dawudu. “They’re not attacking us. It’s all inside their camp.”
Again, everything suddenly made sense. Amadou could imagine what had happened: die-hards catching family members as they made ready to sneak across; words exchanged; accusations of heresy and treason; quarrels becoming too heated for words or even fists. A way of life was ending on the north side of the oasis, and such things never went quietly.
“We should stop it,” Amadou said.
“It isn’t our fight…”
“Some of them were coming to join us. They are ours already. It is our fight.”
Dawudu didn’t look convinced. Amadou could appeal to the whole tribe, but it would take time for a consensus to form, especially with the ra’is on the other side. By then, the fight would likely be over…
An explosion cut off whatever he’d planned to say next – one, and then another and a third.
Those weren’t coming from the other camp, and Alimatou realized what was happening a second before Amadou did. “The farms!”
That, too, made sudden sense – in Amadou’s young manhood, the most fanatic of the Shelterers had attacked the plantings and irrigation works, and in the early days of the Consistory’s Sahara project, terrorists had razed solar panels and bombed windmills. But who would do so on a day that would kill the unprotected in an hour?
People who don’t care if they live or die, his mind answered. People who see their way of life ending, and want only to take something with them.
Maybe that was what had started the shooting – maybe the moderate ones had been the first to fire, to prevent their countrymen from doing what they what they now did. And if so, then it was doubly Amadou’s fight, because the ulema had decreed that such acts were haram and that all the desert had a duty to stop them.
The tribe seemed to come to that realization all at once. The young people, already armed, threw on the cooling suits that Alimatou had designed, clothing that would protect them and conserve their moisture in the heat of the day. They flung the tent door open and ran toward the gunfire and rising flames, hurrying to join the battle.
No one called on Amadou to fight; he had long since passed the age for such things. “Get everyone out!” Dawudu ordered instead. “Children and old people into the wagons, and get them out of danger. Leave two wagons for us. We’ll catch up when it’s done.”
Amadou obeyed. It was the work of a few minutes to get the children into their suits and onto the wagons, and a few more to break down the tents and throw them on the flatbeds. The wagons would carry more than they had the day before – people were running across from the other side, children in their arms – but those very people sped the work.
Mariama’s engine rumbled to life, and Amadou picked out a path that led away from the explosions; the wagon was temperamental as always, but he knew how to handle it, and his repairs held. The other wagons followed behind, all but two, leaving the battlefield to the fighters.
The gunfire continued, but as Amadou led the way up the hillside, the shots became farther between. He knew that the struggle would continue long after the fighting was done; his mind’s eye saw the fighters from both tribes building firebreaks and desperately trying to contain the damage. That would be so even now that the first aircraft were arriving, the emblem of the Tree of Ténéré declaring their allegiance as they dropped water and foam on the fires.
The loss would be great, no doubt. But the tribe was stronger than yesterday, and it would rebuild.
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