Word with a Past: Assassin
The original Assassins were members of a revolutionary Shiite splinter group founded in eleventh century Persia by Hassan Sabbah.
Like many schismatic religious groups, the Assassins believed that Muslims, including mainstream Shiites, had taken a wrong turn. Islam needed to go back to its foundations. As far as other Muslims were concerned, Sabbah's beliefs were heresy. Among other things, he taught that Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali, and the Shiite imams who succeeded him were incarnations of Allah.
Like anarchists in the early twentieth century, the Assassins had neither money nor political power so they turned to the public murder of important figures as a way of exercising influence over society. (Anarchists called this "propaganda of the deed".) The cult was organized as a secret society. The goal was not the removal of specific political leaders, but making people believe that the Assassins could kill anyone at any time.
The sect was destroyed in 1256 when the Assassins made the mistake of trying to kill Hulagu, the grandson of the Genghis Khan and leader of the Mongol hordes. (If you want to assassinate a Chinggisid prince, you need to get it right the first time.)
Assassin n. One who undertakes to put another to death by treacherous violence. The term retains so much of its original application as to be used chiefly of the murderer of a public personage, who is generally hired or devoted to the deed, and aims purely at the death of his victim.
And Speaking of the Siege of Mafeking…
…as I believe we were just the other day, I was recently introduced to a vision of the siege that is very different from Lord Baden-Powell's casually stiff upper lip.
Sol T. Plaatje was a twenty-three-year-old African court interpreter for the Resident Magistrate when the Boers besieged Mafeking, and its African older sister, the adjacent township of Mafikeng, in October 1899. (Yes, I know. It looks like a typo.)
Plaatje was uniquely placed to comment on the progress of the siege in both towns. As an accomplished linguist who was fluent in English and Dutch as well as several African languages, Plaatje worked with the English authorities during the siege. He expanded his translation work to include two new courts that were established following the imposition of martial law. He served as the liaison between the British authorities and the local African population. He organized African spies and dispatch runners, and wrote up their reports. He sold his secretarial services to the British war correspondents who were stranded in Mafeking.
And in his spare time he kept an English language diary. (At least he wrote most of it in English. He also played with language, using words and phrases from Dutch, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa, and Zulu. Make you feel like an under-educated slacker? Me, too.)
First published in 1973, Sol T. Plaatje's Mafeking Diary gives us a different picture of the siege than those that appeared in the flood of memoirs and diaries published soon after the war. Wry, humorous, and often self-deprecating, Plaatje details the day-to-day experiences of the African population during the siege. A population that is too often invisible in traditional accounts of Mafeking. (Possibly because they concentrate o Mafeking, not on Mafikeng, now that I think about it.)
Plaatje's later career was a cross between Benjamin Franklin and the young Gandhi. In the years after the war, he became an important newspaper editor, the first General Corresponding Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), and one of the first black African literati. His published works include the historical novel Muhdi, the first novel in English by a black African. Plaatje never tried to publish his diary.
Plaatje was largely forgotten for several decades after his death. With the official end of apartheid in May, 1994, Plaatje has resumed his rightful place in South African history.
History on Display: The Horse
Now and then you stumble across history when you least expect it.
Yesterday my friend Nancy and I visited Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Sometimes you visit a museum because there's an exhibit you want to see. Other times you visit a museum because you want to hang out, talk, laugh a little . If you see something wonderful along the way, it's a bonus. Yesterday was the second kind of museum visit. We had a choice between whales and horses. We chose The Horse
It was history nerd paradise. There was an evocative thought at every stop, from the evolution of horses in North America to modern therapeutic riding.
Here are some of the highlights, filtered through my own historical preoccupations:
• One of the recurring themes in the kind of history that I read is hordes of armed horsemen riding out of Central Asia: Scythian, Mongols, Timurids, Turks. Turns out there's a good reason for that. Zooarcheologists* believe that the horse was first domesticated in what is now Kazakhstan.
• Pants, as opposed to say togas, kilts, or monastic robes, were first developed for riding horses. One more piece of civilization brought to you courtesy of Central Asia.
• The Pony Express only lasted eighteen months before the telegraph put it out of business. Evidently it doesn’t take long to become a cultural icon.
The exhibit will be on display at the Field Museum through August 14. If you're in Chicago, or are looking for a reason to visit, trot on over.
If you miss the exhibit in Chicago, you have another chance. The Horse will be at the San Diego Natural History Museum from June 1, 2012 through January 20, 2013.
*Zooarchaeologists (also known as archaeozoologists depending on your point of view) study animal remains located in archaeological sites. These people do some amazing things. For instance, they use fossilized horse teeth to tell them not only what ancient horses ate, but also what the environment was like in North American 55 million years ago.