Mancala, the National Game of Africa

"Mancala, the National Game of Africa" by Stewart Culin is a scholarly publication written in the late 19th century. The book serves as an anthropological exploration of Mancala, a game deeply rooted in African culture, examining its rules, variations, and significance across different regions. Given the time period, it reflects the era's interest in ethnology and cultural history. In this detailed study, Culin provides a comprehensive account of Mancala's gameplay, its historical context, and its distribution globally, particularly within Africa and the Middle East. He describes various forms of the game, such as La’b madjnuni and La’b hakimi, and illustrates how Mancala is played using pebbles and boards of differing designs. Culin goes further to illustrate the cultural implications of Mancala, being a link between peoples and a form of entertainment that has traversed demographics and geographies. He notes the game's prevalence in cafes, among children, and highlights how it reflects social interactions within communities, ultimately arguing for its significance as a cultural artifact. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Robert Stewart Culin was an American ethnographer and author interested in games, art and dress. Culin played a major role in the development of ethnography, first concentrating his efforts on studying the Asian-Americans workers in Philadelphia. His first published works were "The Practice of Medicine by the Chinese in America" and "China in America: A study in the social life of the Chinese in the eastern cities of the United States", both dated 1887. He believed that similarity in gaming demonstrated similarity and contact among cultures across the world.