Gabata and Other Board-Games of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa

Summary In volume XIV of this journal we published a long account of the widely distributed game known most commonly as mankala (bao in Swahili). The present article presents a regional analysis of the varieties of the game played in north-eastern Africa. Dr. Pankhurst was recently a Senior Research Fellow of the British Institute; previously he was Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. The board-games of Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudanese borderlands display elements of both similarity and diversity. These may be analysed in terms of the number of rows, holes and balls used, as well as on the basis of various opening gambits, and, above all, the objective of the game. The latter may be directed primarily towards the capture of holes, the acquisition of balls irrespective of ‘territory’, or in some rare cases a combination of both, or else towards a player's survival on the board after his opponent's supply of counters is exhausted. Some games take the form of a series of rounds i...