Introduction to Imaro

I recently finished the first novel in Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro series. Imaro is a black African sword and sorcery hero whose adventures are set on a fictionalized version of Africa called Nyumbani. Saunders initially serialized his Imaro stories in fanzines throughout the 1970s before publishing some of them as a novel through DAW in 1981. Imaro was republished, with a significant edit discussed below, by Night Shade Books in 2006 and is also available on Audible. I listened to the Audible recording of the 2006 edition.

Saunders has written that one of his goals for Imaro was “coming up with a black man who could kick Tarzan’s ass.” Like the present author, Saunders admits to being ambivalent rather than hostile to Tarzan. He enjoyed Tarzan stories a lot as a youth, but turned against the white-jungle-lord trope as he became more politically aware.

The stories also combat the myth-making done by Burroughs et al. who wrote Africa as one big undifferentiated jungle, populated by undifferentiated savages. Where Burroughs’ writings are full of made up nonsense words and file-toothed cannibals, Saunders sought to inform his work by reading Basil Davidson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and back issues of National Geographic. One comes away from Imaro with a picture of Nyumbani (Swahili for “home”) as a vast continent with diverse biomes, landscapes, and peoples.

Who Is Imaro?

Imaro belongs to a savannah warrior tribe called the Ilyassai. The Ilyassai are generally badasses and their rite of passage to manhood involves killing a lion in one-on-one combat. They’re also kind of xenophobic and into misogynistic double standards. While men of the tribe can take mates from other tribes, the greatest shame that can befall an Ilyassai woman is to have a baby with a non-Ilyassai. So it was with great ignominy that Imaro’s mom showed up pregnant with him, claiming he had no father.

They allowed Imaro’s mom to raise him for five years and then forced her to leave the tribe forever. In her brief five years with Imaro, his mother never told him she loved him, because she didn’t want him to be soft. Following his mother’s departure, Imaro essentially went to tribal military school where he was teased by everyone for being, “the Son of No Father.” A major feature of the training regimen was for the older warriors to beat the boys unconscious.

As you’ve probably inferred, bad things happen to Imaro a lot and he does not have a ton of friends. For example, during this first chapter of his life, the only being he cared about was his cow, which was driven away by a rival Ilyassai youth who put fire ants in the animal’s nose.

Imaro is often compared to Conan and Tarzan. The major difference between Imaro and these two is that we actually get to see his emotional vulnerability fairly often. He often feels alone in the world and it is painful. This never stops Imaro from being a cunning warrior, but it’s cool that his wounds get investigated. The deepest one ever gets into Tarzan’s pain is his becoming enthusiastically homicidal over the death of loved one (or, more likely, the perceived death of a loved one). Imaro’s pain, subtle and nonexplosive, rings more true.

What Can Imaro Do?

Imaro’s main thing is superhuman strength combined with deft fighting skill. He can win in a fight versus a lion or a crocodile or like 5 or 10 guys. He is also shown to be a cunning tactical mind. However, unlike Tarzan, Imaro does not have strong woodcraft because he was raised on the savannah. Instead, he has a sort of “spider sense” called kufahuma that all the Ilyassai have from being trained on the plains. Since kufahuma comes from the savannah, it does not work in all environs.

What’s So Good About Imaro?

Saunders really gets the genres he is working in. He excels at the world building. We don’t get to just peer into the world of the martial Ilyassai. Saunders also takes us to the jungle where we meet fishermen who live on the river. We get to see the lives of outlaws who live in wastelands and to a lesser extent the cultures of well-developed east coast kingdoms.

A nice genre note that Saunders (following Burroughs) hits is to give the animals “native” names. For example, we learn that in the Ilyassai language cattle are called ngombe. Imaro names his ngombe Kulu meaning friend. It’s a nice touch that is a pleasure throughout the novel.

Throughout his world building, Saunders manages to keep the plot sufficiently violent and dynamic to be entertaining as Imaro encounters new human, animal, and magical friends and foes in each new environ.

Saunders being steeped in genre conventions comes with a couple weird side effects. For one, he’s drawn to antiquated terms like “thews” (that’s “muscles” in pulpspeak). More problematically, women in Imaro play the part of “women in refrigerators” or damsels in distress.

That One Thing That’s Kind of Fucked Up About Imaro

The set up for how Imaro gets a main squeeze is fairly fucked up. Imaro’s main squeeze Tanisha enters the 2006 edition in a story called “the Afua.”

Tanisha comes from a small tribe that protects itself by teaching its women all the best sex tips and selling them out as exquisite slaves to rulers of the major kingdoms on Nyumbani’s east coast. At the point of the story she enters, Imaro has joined a large band of outlaws call the haramia. The haramia steal her from a caravan taking her to one kingdom so that they can sell her to a rival kingdom. In the battle, she sees Imaro fighting and is totally taken with him. Later that night she sneaks away from her guards and gets into Imaro’s tent to have sex with him.

The incident was so strange and upsetting that it caused me to take a break from the book for a couple of weeks.

This One Weird Thing About Continuity

The 2006 edition of Imaro I read is not the original 1981 text. “The Afua” is a new addition to the book. It replaced a story called “Slaves of the Giant Kings.” The events of the story reminded Saunders too much of the Rwandan Genocide, a fact he found to be personally very jarring. He has written that his decision to change the text was caused, in part, by his desire to avoid folks unfamiliar with Imaro’s publication history feeling that he was trying to cash in on the Rwandan Genocide.

I haven’t read “Slaves of the Giant Kings,” but I hope to do a post about it next weekend, time and USPS willing. Suffice to say that I respect Saunders’ prerogative to edit his proprietary fictional universe as he sees fit, but that I’m also curious to see what’s up with the story he removed.

My current head canon is that the reason there are two varying editions of the book is that there are actually at least two Imaro alternative universes, one in which “The Afua” happened and one in which “Slaves of the Giant Kings” happened.