Some time ago I stated that the fantasy genre sometimes draws from too narrow a pool and that we could branch out the genre by pushing towards other frontiers. So it felt like a fun idea to go over mythologies of the world and share some of the lore, cryptids, and beliefs that may sometimes be overlooked. I’ve given brief glances at Asia and Australia so far. Neither of them are thoroughly covered by my short articles listing only a handful of creatures from their folklore, but I can always go back to them later. Still, having covered the two of those I found myself on a continent that a lot of people know almost nothing about.

Africa: a continent sometimes mistaken for a country by the uneducated. But for most people there’s not a whole lot that they can tell you about the culture outside of a few notable examples. We all know of Egypt and a great deal of us know some of the more popular Egyptian gods. But Egypt makes up a tiny fraction of a much larger continent and you’d be hard pressed to find someone in the west that knows about the rest of the cultures there. Maybe you’ll find someone familiar with Anansi, or will know something about the figures of the North African coast, maybe have a decent understanding of Voudon (or a wildly inaccurate one), but then it goes a bit blank. This leaves one to wonder…