African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 37
This involved playing a game of Bao without assistance of a board or other aid and in
which moves are only communicated verbally with a player who does have access to a
board with counters. Only the starting point and direction of a move needed to be
communicated.
The 1994 Bao tournament in Zanzibar.
Photo © Alex de Voogt.
The intricate rules of Bao have not facilitated the introduction of Bao to Europe or the
Americas, or encouraged programming of the rules by computer scientists. Apart from
most complex and volatile, Bao also remains the most popular African Mancala variation
next to Wari.
References
Flacourt, E. de. 1658. Histoire de la Grande Isle Madagascar. Paris.
Townshend, P. 1982. Bao (Mankala): The Swahili Ethic in African Idiom. Paideuma 28:175–191.
Townshend, P. 1986. Games in Culture: A Contextual Analysis of the Swahili Board Game and Its
Relevance to Variation in African Mankala. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge.
Voogt, A.J. de. 1995. Limits of the Mind: Towards a Characterisation of Bao Mastership. Leiden:
CNWS Publications.
ALEX DE VOOGT
See also Mancala, Wari
BASCOM, WILLIAM R. (1912–1981)
A quiet, patient man, William Bascom’s scholarship continues to grow in importance
over the years—not only his monumental work on divination, but his careful
documentation of the continuity of African traditions in the Americas. Bascom was
Melville Herskovits’s first graduate student and remained Herskovits’s colleague at