I first read Charles R. Saunders’s Imaro in 2015, and basically since that time I’ve regularly thought, “I should reread that”, particularly as I’ve become more academically interested in sword-and-sorcery and the legacy of Robert E. Howard over the past few years. so I finally did it!
Imaro is the first in a series of novels — following from earlier short fiction — about the eponymous character, a skilled warrior of the Ilyassai people on the continent of Nyumbani, heavily inspired by East African histories and cultures (extremely heavily; more on this below). excluded from full belonging to his mother’s people because of his mixed (and partially unknown parentage), Imaro is driven from his home by evil sorcery, leading him to wander across the continent, from the savannah of Tamburure where he grew up to the great forest of Kajua to, finally, the coastal territories of Azania and Zanj, where he becomes a bandit leader and falls in love — only to find himself once again driven into exile at the end of the novel. I have not yet read the sequel (The Quest for Kush) but I have finally managed to get a copy, so I’m hoping to get to it soon. Imaro itself is in some ways extremely compelling and in other ways flawed (though not uniquely so!).
Imaro has a slightly complicated textual history, first in that it’s a fix-up, although ISFDB describes its contents as “completely rewritten” from their original published forms as independent short stories. secondly, though, the 2006 Night Shade Books edition (which I read) has had its original middle chunk removed and replaced with a completely different narrative written specifically for this reprint. Saunders’s preface, “Revisiting Imaro”, explains this choice:
At the time I was beginning to draw my mental map of Nyumbani—the early 1970s—a Hutu rebellion had overthrown Tutsi rule in Rwanda, but not Burundi. The romanticized image of the “Watusi” remained, but events in other parts of post-colonial Africa pushed the Hutu-Tutsi conflict into the background.
I incorporated the “Watusi” into Imaro’s world because I wanted to reinterpret the legend [of “King Solomon’s mines”] in a way different from the Haggard version of the people, just as Nyumbani was, in part, a reaction against the way Africa was depicted in Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, which turned the continent into a gigantic theme park full of ferocious beasts, savage black tribes, and lost white civilizations.
In the Nyumbani setting, the Tutsi/“Watusi” became the “Mwambututsi,” the Hutu the “Kahutu,” and their kingdom Ruanda, which is the French spelling of Rwanda. The story in which Imaro encountered the Mwambututsi was called “Slaves of the Giant-Kings,” and it appeared in a small-press publication during the mid-1970s and was later included in the first Imaro novel. In the story, Imaro leads a rebellion of Kahutu slaves against their Mwambututsi masters in a gold mine that did not belong to King Solomon. He also meets the love of his life—a Kahutu woman named Tanisha. At the end of the story, the Mwambututsi are massacred—but only at the gold mine, not throughout their entire kingdom.
When I wrote “Slaves of the Giant-Kings” in the 1970s, and when its modified version appeared in the first Imaro novel in the 1980s, I had no way of foretelling the horror that was to come in 1994, when 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered by Hutu extremists. The reality of that genocide was worse than anything I, or any other writer of fiction, could have imagined. As I read the horrific stories and saw the gruesome pictures of the unfolding tragedy, my shock, horror, and sadness were profound.
At the time of the Rwanda genocide, the three published Imaro novels were out of print. I had entertained sporadic thoughts of reviving them, but those considerations ended as the impact of the events in Rwanda hit home. My fiction had inadvertently crossed the border into reality, and there was no way I could allow “Slaves of the Giant-Kings” to go into print again. To do so would have given the impression that I was trying to exploit the Rwanda genocide, even though the story was first written nearly twenty years before the event.
normally I don’t like when writers go back and re-edit their earlier works, but under the circumstances I can appreciate Saunders’s position and his decision to, when Benjamin Szumskyj approached him about the possibility of republishing the novel, write a replacement section — “The Afua” — and rework some aspects of the later half of the novel to account for the changes. it helps, too, that “The Afua” is (albeit with some reservations) quite good.
I like a lot of things about this book. notwithstanding my complaint at the time I first read the book about Saunders’s commitment to the word “thews”, the writing is solid. Saunders is particularly good at action sequences that are both tense and concise, but I also appreciate his attention to Imaro’s mental and emotional landscape. Imaro is not a musclebound (or thewbound, if you will) capital-B Barbarian but an intelligent fighter with a complicated relationship with his past, grappling with an uncertain future that he — dare I say — fears but knows (or believes) to be inevitable. while the novel’s structure is definitely still episodic, it doesn’t feel like a fix-up but rather like a cohesive narrative, with each episode positioned at a logical point in Imaro’s journey and significantly tied to (or specifically breaking from) the episodes that preceded it.
I have two major reservations. the first is that, while setting out consciously to challenge fantasy’s racial politics, emerging from the adventure fiction of Haggard and Burroughs (and, I think, responding to Howard, specifically, in some ways), Saunders has unfortunately imported many of the problematic elements of the sword-and-sorcery genre aside from its racial politics. of particular note is the novel’s treatment of women. there are two major female characters. the first is Keteke, a woman Imaro took as a captive during an Ilyassai raid on her home community. given the novel’s pointed rejection of the institution of slavery in its second half, it is curious that neither Imaro nor the narration seem interested in the fact that Keteke was, at the end of the day, a sex slave, with access to (conditional) social status in Ilyassai society only by entering into a sexual relationship with an Ilyassai man. she is, in any case, summarily and gruesomely killed off (off-page), and when Imaro becomes involved with the second female character, Tanisha (who is no longer “Kahutu” in this version), he immediately concludes that his interest in Keteke was only a passing infatuation, not real love.
I’m of two minds about Tanisha. in some ways I think she’s a compelling character, and she’s certainly not a damsel in distress: not only does she ultimately learn to use a sword but even before this she is implied to be actively manipulating the politics of the outlaw band that Imaro has joined (to her own and Imaro’s advantage). the problem here is twofold. fold one: as soon as Tanisha sees Imaro for the first time she decides that she is in love with him and, indeed, that she “belongs” to him. fold two: the reason she decides this is that her people, the Shikaza, have maintained their independence by grooming (I don’t use the term lightly) their women to be — again! — sex slaves, trained in sex (and related disciplines, like sexy dancing) and traded as commodities to secure political alliances. Tanisha meets Imaro when she’s captured by the bandits, who plan to sell her to a man in one of the coastal states — but she was already on her way to another man, to whom her people had sold her. despite this mostly purely contractual system, the Shikaza also believe that each woman will meet the man to whom she “truly belongs”, regardless of who she has been sold to.
now, to the novel’s credit, there is one moment that questions this state of affairs, as Tanisha reflects on her position during a heated battle:
And, she thought when she had a moment’s respite from concentrating on survival, she was certain she would be the first Shikaza woman to die on a battlefield, rather than in the palace of an East Coast noble or king to whom she had been sold.
Perhaps if more Shikaza had died this way, none of us would have to die the other way, she thought.
in spite of this, though, Tanisha’s narrative as emblematic of the status of women in the novel just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. if it had been more substantially engaged with — for example, acknowledging that Tanisha’s identification of herself as “belonging” to Imaro is based on a socially constructed cultural narrative, even if the two of them do eventually fall in love — I think there could have been an interesting critique here. certainly this passage raises the tantalizing possibility of an interrogation of the Shikaza’s use of their women and of the status of women in general. as it was, though, there wasn’t enough follow-through to outweigh the framing here.
alongside the treatment of women are other uncomfortable moments. when Imaro arrives (unwillingly, as a captive) at the bandit camp for the first time, we meet the bandit leader Rumanzila and his henchman Mbuto, who is introduced like this:
Then Imaro saw another man who was more than his match in girth, rather than height, although he was the Ilyassai’s equal in that regard. A leather loincloth was the man’s only garment; otherwise, his elephantine bulk was fully exposed. Rolls of cocoa-colored flesh spilled across his torso and limbs, but Imaro surmised that hard muscle lay buried beneath the flab.
The huge man’s head seemed to grow directly out of his shoulders. The dark moon of his face was devoid of expression, and his small eyes stared vacantly. In his right hand, he held a whip as thick as a python. He carried no other weapon—he needed none.
His name was Mbuto. His wits were as small as his body was large, but he was as loyal as a dog to Rumanzila, whose side he seldom left. Mbuto could not speak, but he could hear and understand simple commands, such as “beat” and “kill.”
yikes! that Mbuto is ultimately implied to be more intelligent than he has previously appeared does little to counter the ugliness of this portrayal — in fact, for me it makes it worse by implying that Mbuto is actively sadistic and deriving pleasure from whipping people to death, rather than simply being taken advantage of by Rumanzila.
my second major reservation is about Saunders’s world-building generally. I appreciate the impulse to produce an African fantasy, but I find the execution of that impulse here frustrating, for several reasons. one is, simply, that to a significant extent Saunders is not doing “world-building” as such, in the sense of developing a secondary, fantasy setting, but rather transferring elements of primary-world African history and culture — or ideas about African history and culture — fairly wholesale. the most notable of these is his use of language, much of which is just straight-up Swahili (e.g., mchawi, which Saunders uses to mean “[m]align magic, evil sorcery, witchcraft,” though in fact in Swahili it means not “sorcery” (the related uchawi) but “sorcerer”) with some Maasai mixed in among the Ilyassai (e.g., “Ngatun” (lion), from the Maasai root -ŋatúny). (as an aside, Saunders also seems to think Maasai and Swahili are related, such that Imaro can understand bits of “Kiswa”, though he must actively learn to speak it.) this extends to other areas, too, not just language: the bandit king of Rumanzila is from the coastal city of “Mugishu” and and claims that “it is the blood of the rajas from the Lands across the Sea that flows in my veins”. the two major coastal polities are Azania and Zanj.
which is to say, Imaro is certainly “African-inspired”, and I appreciate Saunders’s attention to the cultural (and linguistic) diversity of East Africa. but to a nontrivial extent it is also “African-inspired” in the way that “Celtic fantasy” is “Celtic-inspired”, i.e., in that it presents a mishmash of signifiers of (real-world) Africanness transferred into a fantasy setting. that the “real” elements here are (misunderstood) Swahili, a mix of East-Central African religious practices, and the mercantile states of the Swahili rather than (misunderstood) Irish and Welsh, druids and fairies, and Highland clans marks a nice (and admittedly refreshing!) change of pace, but it’s a difference of degree, not of kind — it is a fantasy of Africa as much as it is “African fantasy”.
I’m reminded in this respect of other works, in particular Ehigbor Okosun’s Forged by Blood, which I read a few years ago, where fake-Iberia, fake-Northern Europe, and fake-East Asia all have fantasy names for both places and inhabitants, but the main setting is just called...Oyo, including a “Benin City” and a “Lokoja”; Oyo’s principal language is straight-up called “Yoruba”.
I’m not sure what to do with this observation, to be honest! I do have a sense of the kind of things I’d like to see — like Moses Ose Utomi’s The Lies of the Ajungo or (in other contexts) Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man or even Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky (my frustrations with that series notwithstanding), but this isn’t to say that Imaro is bad for what it is. it’s just to register my dissatisfaction with the “what it is”, at least on one level. I’ll be curious to read some of his other work, too, to see how it handles this and other things — I have a copy of Abengoni: First Calling waiting for me to get around to it, and I’m really curious to see how that handles gender with an actual female protagonist.
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