So, I promised myself I wouldn't do any OSSRs until I finished Space Madness! - Which is sitting at about 10k right now out of a projected 50k wordcount. Because I have been neglecting it in favor of other projects. And I do intend to finish it. But then I ran across this, which is in the running for "Most Racist Call of Cthulhu Product Ever," and...I couldn't pass it by.
Let's start out with that this is a "Miskatonic University Library Association Monograph" - which basically means that this is a fan supplement that fans did all of the editing and 99% of the editing and layout on, and Chaosium obliged them by publishing it under their "official" logo and taking a large cut of the profits from its sale. So it's basically the precursor to Onyx Path in many ways, except that CoC never really had a "canon" to begin with, so all of their supplements are more or less optional. Hell, even the main book is more or less optional, as Frank and I pointed out.
So. How racist is Secrets of the Congo? Let's start with the back cover text.
...it could be worse. That's not a ringing endorsement by any means, and it could also be much better. What this back cover copy tells you is that you're looking at a 1920s/30s pulp version of a chunk of central Africa.SECRETS OF THE CONGO
...
There are still-wild regions of the Dark Continent, Africa. Darkest of all is the wilderness of Belgian Congo, at the very center of the continent.
Belgian colonial rule is harsh, and traditional practices such as slavery and witchcraft are widely practiced. Superstitions rule the vast number of tribes that live on or near the river.
The greed of the Belgian colonial administration, for ivory, rubber, and copper, surpasses even that of the Zanzibari slavers, feared for their raids among the Congo natives.
But the Dark Continent hides secrets as well. In deepest Congo, a treasure-house form primeval times awaits those who dare seek it out--and survive the search.
That yellowish bit in the middle is the Belgian Congo, circa 1913.
Because, you see, early science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction in the pulp era arose pretty naturally out of the appallingly racist but fantastical colonial adventure fiction. So in a very real way, if you took the disparate references to central Africa in Cthulhu Mythos fiction written by Lovecraft and his circle of writer friends at Weird Tales, you're going to get a really weird racist caricature based in large part on the really weird racist caricatures presented by actual malaria-addled, gin-and-whiskey-swilling British big game hunters from the 1880s.
There's no nice way to put it.
So going in, you know that if the book tries to be accurate to the source material, it's going to be wince-worthy. I mean, when Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom started spouting shit about jungle villages, that was terrible because that was written as visiting Africa in the 2000s, and painting native Africans as helpless, superstition-laden primitives and goddamned roads are ruining the native way of life is terrible and racist. At least Secrets has the slight excuse that it's trying to be accurate to the horribly racist source material.
But then there's the flip side: Secrets is also going to be talking about 1920s/30s-era Belgian Congo, not the Congo Free State or the Congo region before the Scramble for Africa. So that's...that's going to be another entirely different thing to deal with.
That's King Leopold II of Belgium. He's got a good claim to being the Hitler of Africa. By which I mean, he committed genocide. Estimates vary between 8 and 10 million people died do to forced labor so that Leopold II could profit from the products of the Congo.
Okay. I think I've mentioned that Chaosium basically has no line development, so there's nothing like a systemic effort to cover the whole world like you might see with Shadowrun or Greyhawk; products come out covering a given area and/or period and they might be followed by others also set in the same period/area and they might...not. The regions/periods that get the most attention get the most products. Which is why, if you want to run a CoC game set in Victorian-era London, you are spoiled for products from Cthulhu by Gaslight to Cthulhu Britannica, while if you're looking for books on Africa you get The Cairo Guidebook, Secrets of the Congo, Secrets of Morocco, Secrets of Kenya, Achtung! Cthulhu North Africa, and various and sundry other little products. Any and all of which are guaranteed to ignore each other.
Details...Secrets of the Congo is 125 pages and is written by Michael Fredholm von Essen, which is an excellent name, and based on the names of his playtesters (Thorleif Persson, Per Lundberg, Frederick Fooy, etc.) I'm guessing this is a largely Nordic gaming group in Scandinavia. Anyway, it's largely illustrated with out-of-copyright photographs, prints, etc. which, t'be honest, is how I might do this if I was forced to write such a thing, and is laid out in a double-column format and...not much else.
Look, let's just lower our expectations a little with this one, okay?