SEA LION PRESS

By Gary Oswald Hendrik Witbooi, Nama Leader, with Theodor Leutwein, German Governor, in 1896. Photo from the German Federal Archive and shared under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence The residents of the area that is currently the country of Namibia arrived there in a series of different migrations. The first residents were the San, who had been there since at least 25,000 BC. Then various Bantu cattle driving pastoralists arrived in the area during the 1600s, the most powerful of whi

By Gary Oswald Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville's depiction of the Anglo-Zulu War In 1951, the word to indicate Z in the phonetic alphabet for radio communication was changed from Zebra to the more distinct sound of Zulu. In 1964, the film 'Zulu' about the Battle of Rorke's Drift would be released and it would become one of the biggest box-office hits of all time in the British market and launch the career of Michael Caine. In 1979, a big-budget American film called 'Zulu D

By Gary Oswald Africa in 1870 according to the Cambridge Modern History Atlas of 1912 Looking at a political Map of Africa in 1870 what is perhaps most striking is how little European control there is. Europeans had been travelling to Africa since antiquity, they had an overwhelming monopoly on African trade from the 15th century onward and yet politically there were still hundreds of independent African polities, which together ruled 90% of the continent, despite European do

By Gary Oswald In 1820, in the aftermath of King Henry’s suicide, troops from the Southern Republic of Haiti invaded the Northern Kingdom...

By Gary Oswald The men who would later become Emperor Dessalines, King Henry and President Pétion had all been loyal soldiers of France...

By Gary Oswald The goal of the original slave uprising in Haiti was simply that they didn’t want to be slaves anymore. These were people...

By Gary Oswald In August 1791 a number of plantation slaves met in the woods of Bois Caïman in North Haiti. That meeting was the starting...

By Gary Oswald On the Sea Lion Press Forums , we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write vignettes on a specific theme (changed monthly). The theme for the Sixteenth Challenge was Revolution Jikada was a Mino and she was proud of that. Why would she not be? She had been chosen as a child, picked for greatness by the King himself, had survived the gruelling initiations and was now an elite soldier in the Greatest Army in Africa. Were the Mino no

By Gary Oswald Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth ​ 1578 - The Portuguese Empire was one of the first and most powerful Global Empires. It ruled land in South America, West and East Africa, the Middle East, India, the East Indies and China and for over 150 years Portugal had been attacking and annexing Moroccan port cities and taking the fruits of Moroccan farms as tax or tribute. And now it was coming for the Capital. King S

By Gary Oswald In the previous articles we have discussed the development of Dahomey in the late 19th century as it ran into the limits of its expansion and moved away from the slave trade and how in an Alternate History in which it was not conquered by France in 1894 those trends would develop. One major problem with the lack of new conquest would be religion. Vodun, the state religion of Dahomey, is not a naturally hierarchal religion, it is based around the idea that var

By Gary Oswald In the previous article , I talked about the Kingdom of Dahomey the shift in power there during the 19th century, when the most powerful elites within it went from being the primarily female residents of the palace to the primarily male coastal traders. In this article we will explore the cultural ramifications of that and the results of that in an Alternate History wherein Dahomey survived longer. The domination of women within the palace, during its heyday,

By Gary Oswald Africa is a treasure trove for Alternate History for the simple reason that culturally, economically and politically it was one of the great losers of the 19th century. African institutions, customs and economies were stamped upon, supressed and eliminated by European colonialism. If the fundamental appeal of AH is to take ideas that were never completed and explore how they would have enfolded had they been put into motion, if the obsession around Nazi German