I had an idea for Technomancer/Merlin.
It's the world that Robert Jenkins is from.
I had wondered to myself what differences would occur in this world than ours in Rhodesia.
When making an alt-history it's a good idea to learn about the real history so you're consciously making changes instead of blundering along. This helps a lot with internal consistency.
My goodness is a lot of writing about this particular period of history colored with the rose colored glasses of political correctness.
There's an equally large body of work filtered through pure jingosim too.
One boggle I have to decipher is what the truth is, and more importantly, regardless of the real truth; what will the truth be in the game world?
So far it's turned out to be complicated and shaded in tones of gray without the stark contrasts many narratives would have.
The flavor of racism the whites of Rhodesia have is unfamiliar to an American.
There are some things that stand out and the hypocrisy of some is stunning. The black population had been systematically disenfranchised by British colonial policies and practices. The white population was keen on not losing what had, from their perspective, always been their property. The British insisting that those policies be abandoned literally overnight as a prerequisite for independence was unwise.
Some authors assert that the long range plan was to bring the black population up to speed on the whole representative democracy thing and eventually they'd be equal members of the greater society. There's some justification for thinking that such education and acclimatization was needed since they were certainly second class subjects under British Colonial rule.
The racism thing factors in here. The attitude of whites was that the blacks were kind of mildly retarded; like overgrown children. Racism absent of hatred is not the American norm so it sometimes seems odd. Many whites in Rhodesia felt that the blacks couldn't govern themselves because they were incapable.
It seems that the long term education portion was a concession to the people who felt the blacks could learn and the benchmarks were defined rather nebulously so that they never actually would gain their equality.
It's very soft and subtle. Under the law, a black had all the same rights as a white. But to vote there were wealth and property requirements that most whites and very few blacks met. And since the rich tend to get richer and the poor get poorer... the chance of a significant portion of the majority of the population ever getting to vote seems remote.
Yet...
At the time all of this was going on, the white population was very aware of what decolonization meant in other countries. In particular the Mau Mau uprising. In hindsight, Zimbabwe under Mugabe has proven that there might have been a core of truth to the minority white position. On the whole, Africa has not prospered after independence.
It's fascinating reading and I am learning a lot.
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The British writer/doctor who goes by the pen name of "Theodore Dalrymple" was actually there, and has some interesting things to say. You might want to look him up. One thing he says was that the black doctors he worked with were just as competent as the whites (of course, since this is British doctors who came up under the NHS we're talking about, I'm not sure if that standard is very high...) but that their standard-of-living was much lower. Seems that in Rhodesia, as in many other traditional societies, a successful individual was expected to be willing to help support a huge extended family; the British didn't have that, and so they lived like royalty.
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