History in the Margins

The Question of the Queen Mother

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Speaking of the linguistic booby traps that await the unwary in the pursuit of global history, as I believe we were, I offer you the example of the Queen Mother.

In English, the term “Queen Mother” generally refers to the widow of a king* who is the mother of a reigning monarch. The term has been in use since the sixteenth century, but for most of us, the courtesy title is inextricably linked with one woman: Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1900-2002), the widow of King George VI of Great Britain and the mother of Elizabeth II.

Portrait of the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, by Richard Stone. Stone placed this portrait in the public domain on his website: “Since The Queen Mother had been such a support to me in my career, it seemed appropriate to place the portrait in the public domain, as a token of my appreciation.”

That’s all clear enough in theory, though occasionally convoluted in practice.

Things change dramatically when we move our attention to the Asante and Swazi nations of West Africa, where the position that is translated into English as Queen Mother was something entirely different. In these states, the Queen Mother was very seldom the king’s mother. The women who held this role were from a generation senior to the reigning king and not always related to him. Holding joint sovereignty with the king, the Queen Mother had her own royal court, council, and army. She served as the king’s chief advisor, was equal to the king in the ruling hierarchy, and played a critical role in choosing the next king.

The best known of these was the Asante Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa of Edweso, who ruled from 1887 to 1900 and led her soldiers in rebellion against the British in the War of the Golden Stool in 1900-1901. A different vision of Queen Mother indeed.

*Also known as a dowager queen. The title distinguishes dowager queens from current queen consorts. It is not used to describe the mother of a ruling monarch who was not previously a queen consort: the most obvious example of this was Queen Victoria’s mother, who was the Queen’s mother, but not the Queen Mother. Got it?

The Umbrella vs the Crown

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In the course of writing Women Warriors, I wrote a lot of variations on the sentence “inherited the throne/crown” . (Or in several instances, “seized the throne/crown”. Because transfer of power is often not a bloodless event.) Eventually it dawned on me that while throne and crown can be actual objects, they are also metaphors for rule. Literally snatching a crown from someone’s hand is not the same as snatching a kingdom. We all know this. But knowing it in our heads is different from knowing it: the metaphor is deeply coded into our brains and our language.

Once I actively thought about throne and crown as metaphors for rule, I realized that they are inherently western metaphors at that. Not all polities* invest the authority of their rulers in crown or throne. The most important piece of royal regalia in the Ashante kingdom (in modern Ghana) was the Golden Stool–a throne-like symbol so revered that it sat on a stool of its own beside the Ashante king. An umbrella was the symbol of royal authority in a huge portion of the world that includes the Middle East, Egypt and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Persia, South and Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Korea. It appeared as a royal emblem as early as ancient Egypt and as late as nineteenth century West Africa. In some steppe and desert based cultures, the royal symbol was a horsehair whisk. I am sure there are other examples.

Conflating these symbols with thrones and crowns is a problem. If we describe an Ashante stool as a throne, we disguise essential differences between the cultures of say, nineteenth century England and nineteenth century Ashante. At the same time, the words we use in English to describe such symbols reduce their royal and sometimes mystical authority by giving them the names of common, even lowly, household objects. The Incident of the Flyswatter, which set off France’s decades-long attempt to conquer North Africa and hence the complex and difficult relationship between modern France and its Muslim citizens, is rendered trivial, even comic, by the way French newspapers described the Algerian royal regalia.

I have no answers. Only a growing awareness that writing global history is laden with booby traps.

*To use a more general term than kingdom, which is laden with linguistic assumptions of its own.

From the Archives: Déjà Vu All Over Again – Climate Change

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The consensus in the places that I hang out, in real life and on line, is that it is unseasonably cold and we are sick of it. It reminded of this blog post, which I wrote in February, 2014, when we were also sick of winter in these part.

Earlier this week I stood in a line that moved very slowly. As we waited, people began to tell weather stories–the natural consequence of five weeks of alternating snow and deep freeze. At first the stories focused on the efforts individuals had made to be in that line when the ticket office opened for a once a year event: digging out cars, walking through two feet of snow on un-shovelled sidewalks, etc. Then people moved on to tales of their experiences of the Big Chicago Snowstorm in 1967, or 1979, or 1999.

Just as I got to the head of the line, the snow began to fall again. A collective grumbling broke out. Then a voice from the back of the line said, “You know, winter used to always be like this.”

Whether that’s true depends on how you define “always”.

Over the life of our planet, glaciers have expanded and contracted more than twenty times at intervals of roughly a hundred thousand years, caused by tiny changes in the way the earth moves. “Brief” periods of interglacial warming* were followed by long periods of cold when ice covered the planet. Even those periods of warmth aren’t stable. In the most recent warm spell, following the Great Ice Age, we’ve experienced a number of dramatic climate changes, including:

The Medieval Warming Period

From roughly 800 to 1200 CE, Europeans enjoyed mild winters, long summers and good harvests. Warm centuries in Europe brought problems in other regions. Higher temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns created extended periods of drought in Central America, Central Asia, and South East Asia.

Cultural changes followed climate change. On the plus side: more stable food supplies help Europe take the first steps out of the “dark ages”,** favorable ice conditions allowed the Norse to travel pretty much everywhere, and reduced grazing land helped Genghis Khan to pull the Mongolian tribes together into an empire. On the down side: drought contributed to the end of the Chaco Canyon culture of modern New Mexico and Angkor Wat, favorable ice conditions allowed the Norse to travel pretty much everywhere, and reduced grazing land helped Genghis Khan to pull the Mongolian tribes together into an empire.***

Just to put things in context: the Medieval Warming Period was several degrees cooler than the recorded mean temperature since 1971.

The Little Ice Age

Between 1500 and 1850 CE (give or take 50 or 100 years) , things cooled off–at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Glaciers wiped out villages in the Alps. Rivers in Britain and the Netherlands froze deeply enough to support winter festivals. Even more amazing, in 1658, a Swedish army invaded Denmark by marching across the frozen Great Belt.

“Eighteen hundred and froze to death”

A violent volcano eruption in Indonesia on April 5, 1815, disrupted weather across the planet: more than twelve months of heavy rains in Europe, drought in North America and unseasonable cold everywhere.

I don’t know about you, but I suddenly feel a lot warmer.

* Brief in this case meaning 10,000 years or so.
**Short-hand for a more complicated discussion.
***Proving once again that plus or minus depends on where you stand.

Video of the Chicago Blizzard of 1967 courtesy of the Chicago Fire Department