To AP’s point, I don’t think this is what Rowling was actively trying to do, but isn’t naming the location as the Mountains of the Moon, an imagined place that Rwenzori has been associated with, roughly equivalent to calling the school the Prester John Academy?

I may well be wrong, but my memory of the bits and pieces of magical history that found their way out of Hermione’s notes into the books is that wizard history was largely separate from muggle history, involving conflicts with magical creatures of which the muggles remained largely blissfully unaware, and the former was more likely to influence the latter than the other way around (there’s something in their about muggle witch hunts having no real effect on real witches). So if Rowlings were to carry this thread forward with respect to Africa, it would make more sense to ground it in African wizard histories than in African muggle history. She would still need to draw on actual African history and culture to ground it realistically in the continent, but would be much freer to chart a parallel course of development (say the original Uagadou was one of a series of regional wizarding schools which competed and collaborated with one another and the name moved when the school was destroyed and most of the faculty had to relocate to Rwenzori following the Third Djin War).

The not using wands, just their hands thing, given how much the books invest in the power and importance of wand magic, is either a deeply lazy and orientalist conception (European wizards develop this amazing magical technology, but African wizard never adopt it because … something about sensual embodiment?) or it would have to involve some extended discussion of the pro and cons of using wands instead of hands and why African wizards have chosen collectively to reject it.

I think I am right to say that Farrell and Blattman’s acknowledgement that there were states is essentially prophylactic, meant to head off precisely the kind of Twitter objection I offered.

Stands out as oddly and uncharacteristically uncharitable. This seems to be suggesting that F&B desired to make a claim about Africa and states that they knew to be false, and changed it to a half-false claim to deflect criticism. But why would they desire to claim something they knew to be false? I’m not familiar with Blattman, but Farrell is a careful, scrupulous scholar; it’s difficult for me to believe he’d have such a motivation, let alone act on it in this way.

Good thoughts! I could imagine the following:

1) formal wizarding institutions in Timbuktu/Djenne and Axum as you say. There’s some states for you, and some state systems for you, and some state systems linked into global systems of trade and cultural exchange. I think in the Timbuktu/Djenne academy, there’d be a three-layered conflict between Islamic magics, non-Islamic indigenous magics, and Western-inflected magics (wand users).

2) “secret society” wizarding institutions in many West African societies that would be formal, extensive in their influence, but not centered in a building or a materially specific location

3) a formal colonial-era wizarding school in the Karoo that had to cope with apartheid, etc.

1) I think that the phrase Mountains of the Moon is a giveaway to how JKR’s thinking. Let’s look at Hogwarts. Hogwarts is basically a turn of the twenty-first century Brit’s magical-fantasy version of an Edwardian public school (but without quite so much rape). In the same way, if you say Mountains of the Moon rather than, say Ruwenzori, you’re basically saying that this is a British fantasy version of Africa, since Mountains of the Moon invokes the school child’s fantastical images of remote and inaccessible Africa.

1a) I think the best analogy is Charlie Stross’s Black Chamber in his Laundry Files novel. It’s basically a British left-libertarian’s imagination of the very worst possible version of the American security state, even though it’s placed in a series that has decent world-building with respect to the rest of NATO.

2) I wonder if making a fuss over JKR’s world-building seems to be asking the wrong sort of questions. This is a series where Slytherin basically has WE ARE DEATH EATERS OR DEATH EATER-SYMPATHIZERS written on the house crest and yet we spend seven books wondering how could we possibly find and root out the death eaters.

3) If you wanted to do good world-building and keep a wizard-y flavor, I figure you should actually have two African wizarding schools and put them in Timbuktu or Djenné and Axum. After all, Sahelian and Ethiopian magical traditions would look at what we pale faces think of as sophisticated wizardry since our own concept of sophisticated wizardry comes out of the Greco-Roman and Arabic traditions, with some European elements for flavor. In the same way, Ethiopian and Sahelian magical traditions would come out of the Greco-Roman and Arabic traditions, with some indigenous elements for flavor. And of course, since both Greco-Roman and Arabic traditions claim Egyptian pedigree, the oldest wizarding academy in the world should very obviously be in Alexandria.

3a) Ethiopia actually has 1 and 2 Enoch in its biblical canon! And both Ethiopia and the Sahel have an ongoing manuscript tradition. You could do *so* much with a wizarding academy there.

4) I suspect that in a Timbuktu or Djenné wizarding academy, there’d be all sorts of tension with the way that several generations ago the heads of the wizarding academy cut a deal with the Europeans to maintain magical autonomy in the face of French colonization. So you probably have a lingering tension over the curriculum of Timbuktu’s school of wizardry, especially the Europeanized elements. Do they make spell-casting more efficient? Or are they simple rank colonialism?