Sword and Soul: The Genre That Walked Africa Out of the Margins and Into Myth

by | Culture

Culture

There is a particular kind of silence in a library when a reader goes looking for himself on the shelf and finds only strangers. For decades the sword-and-sorcery aisle was a hall of pale-skinned conquerors — Conan striding bloody out of Cimmeria, Elric pale as bone, Kane with his red eyes — and the only Africa on offer was the one the pulps had painted: dark, dumb, decorative, a backdrop for white men with bigger swords. Then a quiet man in Nova Scotia decided to break that silence with steel of his own making. He called the sound it made sword and soul.

This is a working tour of that subgenre — what it is, who built it, who carries it now, how it differs from the Howard tradition it grew out of, whether it can survive the leap to the screen, and how you, a novelist, might raise such a series from the ground without it collapsing into pastiche. I have kept the romance of the prose; I have not loosened the facts.

What Sword and Soul Actually Is

The simplest definition is also the most cited. As writer-publisher Milton Davis puts it, sword and soul is adventure fiction — heroic, sorcery-haunted, sword-swinging fiction — rooted in African myth, history, and culture, a tradition coined by Charles Saunders. Sword and sorcery itself, the parent stock, was a term coined by Fritz Leiber in the 1960s, and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stands as its canonical example. Sword and soul keeps the bones of that body — the lone wanderer, the brisk and brutal action, the magic that bites — and replaces the marrow.

Emory University’s library guide on Black speculative fiction draws the line cleanly: it is a fantasy subgenre centered on African history, culture, and tradition, structurally similar to Howard’s Conan but typically set in a pre-colonial Africa and built around a single African hero, and Charles R. Saunders founded it through his Imaro and Dossouye stories. The “sword” is the inheritance. The “soul” is everything Howard’s hall of mirrors left out.

The Standard-Bearer: Charles R. Saunders

Every genre needs a first heart to beat, and this one beat in the chest of Charles Robert Saunders. Saunders, who died in May 2020, is remembered as the founder of the sword-and-soul subgenre, fusing African history, culture, and mythology with sword-and-sorcery convention, and is best known for Imaro (1981). He was an American who crossed into Canada to escape the Vietnam draft, became a journalist, and lived modestly in Dartmouth while, inside, he held a whole unseen continent of warriors, beasts, and rival kings that his quiet neighbours never suspected — a world he named Nyumbani, Swahili for “home.”

The origin is now half-legend, and Saunders told it himself: watching Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan ululate across a jungle that was never real, he imagined a Black man stepping out of the brush to humble that king of a borrowed Africa. That man became Imaro. The work began not as a novel but as short stories submitted to fanzines like Dark Fantasy and Weirdbook in the 1970s. DAW Books published the first novel in 1981. Two more followed — Imaro II: The Quest for Cush (1984) and Imaro III: The Trail of Bohu (1985) — and decades later, when the trade had abandoned him, Saunders rescued his own warrior through self-publishing with a fourth book, The Naama War (2009).

Two case-study details matter to any writer studying the form. First, the wound at the launch: the original Imaro carried the blurb “The Epic Novel of a Black Tarzan,” which drew a legal threat and forced a reissue with the line removed. The genre was born fighting the very comparison it was built to overthrow. Second, Saunders did not stop at Imaro. He wrote Dossouye, a warrior woman inspired by the women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey. That second creation matters because it proves the form was never a single man’s adventure — it was a country with room for many roads.

And here is the academic anchor, because you asked for one and it is honest to give it plainly. A University of Nebraska–Lincoln study of Black “futurist fiction and fantasy” treats Saunders as the first Black writer working exclusively in the sword-and-sorcery subgenre in the early 1980s. The same study notes that the old pulps had assigned the ugliest qualities — brutality, treachery, unreason — to Blackness, then turned around and lent those very qualities to their white champions. Against that, Saunders assembled Imaro from scattered inheritances: the strongman of Hebrew scripture, the Geatish dragon-slayer of Anglo-Saxon song, and Kimera, a founder-hero out of Ugandan tradition. It records that Imaro was nominated in 1982 for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award for its innovative approach to heroic fantasy, and that Saunders stands as the first author since Edgar Rice Burroughs to seriously reinstate Africa as the backdrop for a fantasy series.

One caveat I owe you: peer-reviewed scholarship aimed squarely at “sword and soul” as a named subgenre remains thin. Most of the deepest documentation lives in author essays, genre journalism, and the long-memoried fan press, not in journals. I will not pretend otherwise.

The Torchbearers, and How Their Hands Differ

A founder makes a fire; a movement needs many to feed it. The man who fed it most is Milton J. Davis, an Atlanta chemist-by-day who built the small press MVmedia to put people of color at the center of speculative fiction. Davis wrote the Changa’s Safari saga — a sword-and-soul epic published across three volumes (2010, 2012, 2014) — and teamed with Saunders himself to edit the anthologies Griots and Griots: Sisters of the Spear. Where Saunders’s Imaro is interior and bruised, a tribeless wanderer staring inward, Davis’s hero is outward-facing and salt-sprayed: Changa Diop, a fifteenth-century prince driven out of Kongo, who is sold into bondage, fights his way free through the pits of Mogadishu, and rebuilds himself into a merchant captain whose name travels the trade routes from the Swahili coast toward the courts of China. Davis’s other pillar, Meji, he describes as a celebration of the continent’s diversity told through twin brothers — proof that the same source springs many shapes.

That first Griots anthology is the genre’s most important act of community-building, a single book that turned one man’s invention into a roster. It gathered fourteen stories, with work by Charles Saunders and Milton Davis alongside Valjeanne Jeffers, Maurice Broaddus, Minister Faust, Carole McDonnell, Anthony Nana Kwamu, and a young writer credited as Djèlí A. Clark. Read that last name again. P. Djèlí Clark — pen name of the historian Dexter Gabriel — has since won Nebula and Locus awards, and “djèli” itself names the West African storyteller-bard. A subgenre that incubates a future award-winner is not a curiosity; it is a nursery.

The styles fan out from there like fingers from a palm. Balogun Ojetade brings a folkloric, mask-and-drum exuberance — Once Upon a Time in Afrika, and the Ki Khanga sword-and-soul role-playing game he created with Davis. Carole McDonnell insists the genre need not stay tethered to the ancestral continent at all; for her, sword and soul is about theme and culture as much as setting — a celebration of African heritage but also a story rooted in an African-American present, carrying injustice, prejudice, and oppression as living themes. That tension — Africa-of-the-past versus Africa-of-the-diaspora-now — is the genre’s productive fault line, and a writer should know which side of it they stand on before the first chapter.

How It Varies From Howard’s Sword and Sorcery

It would be lazy to call sword and soul “Conan, but Black.” It is closer to say it is Conan’s question answered honestly. The UNL study notes the irony at the heart of the older form: the very traits the pulps assigned to Blackness were quietly borrowed to animate white heroes like Howard’s Conan and Burroughs’s Tarzan. Sword and soul takes those traits back and roots them in a real cultural soil rather than a racial caricature.

Mechanically, the differences are concrete. Howard’s Hyborian Age is a Europe-of-the-imagination stitched from Celtic, Greek, and Norse offcuts; Saunders built his own such age from the tapestry of Africa instead. As for structure: Howard issued Conan in scattered, stand-alone installments; Saunders instead threaded Imaro’s episodes into one advancing line, so the warrior accumulates a history rather than simply reappearing. And the hero’s interior weather differs. Imaro’s pursuit folds back on itself; he hunts enemies across the savannah while hunting, harder, for the father and the origin that were stolen from him — a hero turned inward in a way the older school rarely allowed. The sword still sings; the soul, however, keeps a diary.

The Screen Question: Can It Do What Conan Did?

You raised Conan’s film career, and the comparison is fair and instructive. The 1982 Conan the Barbarian proved sword and sorcery could swing a broadsword at the box office. Sword and soul’s screen history is older and smaller than most readers know: one of Saunders’s Dossouye stories, “Agbewe’s Sword,” was adapted as the film Amazons! (1986), for which Saunders wrote the screenplay. So the form has already touched celluloid — quietly, decades ago.

Whether it scales to Conan’s wattage is, candidly, unproven. Around 2015 and 2016, Davis promoted an independently crowdfunded animated short, “Changa and the Jade Obelisk,” adapted from the saga — but a decade on there is no evidence it was ever completed or released, and the safer assumption is that it stalled rather than shipped. What I can say with confidence is that the cultural appetite has arrived: Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), an epic drawn from African history and mythology, was a National Book Award finalist and won the L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize. James is not, strictly, a sword-and-soul writer in Saunders’s lineage — but his success is the weather report. The readers now praising that novel reached mythic Africa long after Saunders had already drawn its map. The market that rewards James is a market that could, finally, film Imaro.

Why It Still Matters

Relevance isn’t nostalgia and the genre matters now for three durable reasons. It corrects an old erasure by treating pre-colonial Africa as a legitimate engine of myth rather than a jungle to be conquered. It supplies a hunger the mainstream is only now admitting — readers who stepped into a world where Blackness was simply the water everyone swam in: the hero, the villain, and every face between them. And it is structurally generous: it is heroic adventure, the most portable of all forms, which means it can carry hard cargo — the histories of slavery and genocide that Imaro’s Nyumbani reflects — without ever ceasing to be a rousing yarn.

And here is the accomplishment, measured honestly, because honest measure is the only kind worth printing. A subgenre conjured by essentially one man, then abandoned mid-story by its first publisher, should by every commercial law have died quietly in the remainder bins. It did not. It clawed its way back through self-publishing and a single devoted micro-press, grew anthologies and a role-playing game and a standing community around itself, and seeded at least one Nebula- and Locus-winning writer into the wider field. The raw readership stays small — a devoted congregation rather than a stadium crowd — but its footprint runs far larger than its sales, rippling outward into the broader current of Black speculative and mythic-Africa storytelling that the marketplace now courts. Survival and seeding rather than scale: that is the rarer triumph, and the one worth celebrating without inflating. Call it huge and a sharp reader will check the numbers and catch you. Call it improbable endurance with an outsized shadow, and you are simply telling the truth.

Where It’s Headed

Here I am inferring, not reporting, and I will mark it as such. The trajectory I read in the evidence is consolidation, then crossover. The community infrastructure exists — MVmedia, the Griots anthologies, the role-playing game, FIYAH magazine as an adjacent home for Black speculative voices. The mainstream proof-of-concept exists in James. The likeliest near-future is not a single blockbuster but a steady thickening: more anthologies, more authors who started in Griots-style collections graduating to major houses (Clark is the template), and eventually a screen adaptation that arrives because the surrounding ecosystem made it inevitable. That is a forecast, not a fact. Treat it as one.

If You Want to Build Such a Series

You asked the practical question, so here is the practical answer, plainly. Do the homework first. The defining strength of the canon is that its Africa is researched, not imagined-from-afar; the writers who endure read African arms and armour, study the Dahomey women warriors, learn the empires of Benin, Ghana, and Mali. The fastest way to fail is to swap European set-dressing for a generic “African” veneer and call it new. Choose your axis early — McDonnell’s fault line between ancestral-Africa and diaspora-present. A wanderer in a mythic Nyumbani and a hero negotiating an African-American present are different books with different research burdens. Honor the form’s contract: sword and soul is still adventure. Brisk pace, real stakes, magic with teeth. The “soul” deepens the “sword”; it must not replace it.

What to watch out for: the Black Tarzan trap, in which your marketing — or your own framing — defines the work by the white tradition it answers rather than the culture it celebrates. The pastiche trap, where specificity collapses into a pan-African blur. And the lecture trap, where theme strangles story.

How to know if it fits you. Be honest about three things. Do you have a genuine, sustained relationship with the cultural material, or are you tourist-shopping for novelty? Do you actually love heroic adventure, or only the idea of writing something important? And can you carry dark material — slavery, genocide, exile — without either flinching from it or exploiting it? If you answer those cleanly, the form will hold you. If you are reaching for it because it looks like an open market niche, readers will smell the opportunism before chapter three.

What the Fanbase Expects

This readership is small, loyal, and discerning, and it has expectations earned by the genre’s history. It expects authenticity of cultural texture above all — the grace notes of language, naming, and cosmology that signal real study. It expects the action to deliver; this audience came up on Howard and Frazetta as much as on griots, and it wants the visceral, fast-moving combat that reviewers praise in both Saunders and Davis. It expects heroes of real interiority, not invulnerable action figures. And it tends to expect, and reward, work that takes Black protagonists seriously as the center of their own universe rather than as a diversity gesture grafted onto a Eurocentric frame. Meet those four expectations and you have a fanbase that will follow a series for a decade. Miss them and the smallness of the niche becomes unforgiving.

The man who started all this lived quietly and was, for years, one of the more obscure names in the field. The world he made was not. Walk into Nyumbani once and you understand the whole argument of the genre in a single stride: the savannah was always big enough for legends. Someone simply had to write them home.

 

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Scholarly / academic

Journalism / author & publisher sources

Genre blogs / fan press

Reference / bibliographic