Working on worldbuilding, I wrote a blog inspired by wheat, grateful to a degree that it wasn’t colonial. Then I stumbled across the article “Why Africa Prints Money in Europe” and I became astonished by the hold colonialism still holds. HORRIFYING hold. (This is expanded from a tweet)
It makes me evaluate the ideas and identities of these cultures I’m crafting. If I look back to Fate of the Red Queen, there is that emperor who tries to take over other countries… Take ownership…
Cultures have been creating colonies for ages. Greek colonies in Spain influenced myths, for instance. Working on the background of the Pruannese mythologies, I read about Abellio in the Pyrenees. A solar god influenced by Apollo—Greek—and Belen—Celtic—deities. In fact the Pyrenees mountains are named after a Gaulish damsel who was raped by Hercules. He was, presumably remorseful after finding her dead.
Granted it was a long while back, but Spain doesn’t print (or coin) its currency in Greece. Probably didn’t back then.
Basically other countries printing out your money impacts liquid money. How does that impact any kind of “Made in Africa” if money is printed even as far away as Sweden? There’s so much erasure of culture that we need shows like the most excellent Africa’s Great Civilizations to tell us that there were more powerful African countries besides Nubia, which took over the ruling of Egypt for quite some time. Two cultures people know more about.
Considering it’s the birthplace of humanity, Americans and other westerners know ridiculously little about that entire continent beyond that a Belgian king took over an entire nation, and that’s where we got our slaves from. [I hope you shudder as much as I did in the writing of that line].
Being the daughter of immigrants to America, whose parents helped colonize South Africa… I can only shudder at the audacity, and arrogance of it all.
Maybe this is foolish, but writing all these unique cultures in a much larger world… one of the things I love about it is their autonomy. Sure, they influence each other, mythologies, and trade and so on… but they are not… requiring another culture, a foreign culture on an entirely different continent to have such influence on their wealth!
Maybe this was part of why I created Ihyel? I long despised how colonialism erased cultural identity. I hadn’t known about the wealth.
I spent the day wonder how much a printing press costs, my heart hurting over lost cultures and lots civilizations, and hunting for my copy of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and putting the rest of the Trilogy on my To Read pile!