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Unyamwezi is a region of East Africa east of Lake Tanganyika and south of Lake Victoria. In the Nineteenth Century it lay on the trade routes and its people, the Nyamwezi, had great success as traders, providing porters for Arab caravans and explorers, and forming caravans in their own right. It was also a region that became riven with conflict, and as such is a perfect venue for Darkest Africa buffs who want to engage in some gaming that is more about the natives and less about the European colonizers. For into this region came the Arabs, looking to get rich trading in slaves and ivory, the fearsome Watuta, who were always up for some hooliganism and trouble, and the land bordered many other warlike peoples who were often dragged into its conflicts. You have a wide choice of interesting armies to play with in this setting. Perhaps greatest of them all were home-grown. For it was here that the Nyamwezi warlords such as Mirambo, and their fearsome ruga-ruga rose to prominence.
The explorers also came this way, for it was rumoured that a great inland sea was located in the region, and the theory was that this great sea was the very source of the Nile. This was the fabled Lake Uniamési, which took its name from the region.
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Unfortunately, that turned out to be a load of bollocks.
In a kind of reverse case of the fable of the blind men and the elephant, it wasn't a situation of a bunch of smaller parts making up a singular whole, it was just a bunch of smaller parts. Though the great lakes are pretty impressive in their own right, it must be said, they aren't quite the great inland sea that was imagined.
My plan is to recreate on the table top some of the strife that embroiled this region in the early 1860s, as described by the explorer John Hanning Speke, who along with James Grant was in the region at the time, still searching for the fabled Four Fountains of Herodotus, the source of the Nile. He documented the war that was raging between the Zanzibar Arabs and the deposed monarch Manua Sera (Mnywasele). We'll get back to him later. I have another thread running which is documenting my project to build Manua Sera's army, and has some background on him and the conflict. There's no point repeating it here. Go and have a look if you're interested:
http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=101585.0 (http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=101585.0)
Unfortunately I haven't made much progress on that of late, but I'm hoping to get back to it soon. In the mean time we figured we ought to actually try out The Men Who Would be Kings to see if it was actually a good fit. I had received this rules set as a gift from a friend last Christmas and on reading the rules they seemed like they would be a lot of fun. But I felt that I was getting ahead of myself planning this whole thing and not having ever actually played these rules. So a test game was cooked up, and how that went is what follows next.
Let's just say things did not go entirely according to plan...