Emre Doğan

Mancala, the National Game of Africa

Stewart Culin's 1894 Paper, Annotated — with a Playing Guide to Three Complete Games, a Register of Record and Inference, Three Original Diagrams and What Has Been Established Since

In 1894 Stewart Culin went to Washington Street in New York and watched two Syrian men play a game with a board of fourteen cups and a handful of shells. A lad from Damascus explained the rules; Culin wrote them down; and the paper he read to the Oriental Club of Philadelphia that May became the first serious study of mancala in English. It is still cited. It is also thirteen printed pages, which is why this is the shortest book this press has made and why it says so on the cover of its own description rather than leaving a buyer to find out. What it contains is worth the length. Three COMPLETE games come out of these pages and this edition sets them out to be played from: the Syrian “crazy game”, whose result Culin noticed is fixed before the first move; its companion the “rational game”; and Chuba, the four-row version that Culin discovered, in a postscript, had already been on sale in America since 1891 — three years after he predicted the game might one day reach American firesides. A Register of Record and Inference separates what he watched from what he was told and what he read, which matters in a paper that moves between the three inside a single sentence. A who's-who identifies his named informants, including Prince Momolu Massaquoi, described here only as the son of a Vai king, who went on to become Liberia's consul-general in Hamburg and generally the first indigenous African diplomat accredited to modern Europe. A section on what has been established since 1894 gives the modern distribution figures, the archaeology — including one much-repeated claim this edition marks as disputed rather than repeating — and says plainly what has aged worst about the title. With three original diagrams, one of them three panels showing how a move works, because sowing is very hard to follow in prose. 38 pages, ebook only.

Pages

38

Language

en