Pygmies!

The darkest Africa game Congo from Studio Tomahawk certainly has caused a stir of interest at my local club. So much so, in fact, that there’s talk of planning a campaign. I carefully thought what I’d like to take for the campaign - White Men Explorers I could do easily, but it’s likely there will be a few of these. Zanzibaris? Could do with the Sudan and Afghan armies I’m slowly painting. African Kingdoms? I have plenty of painted Zulus… No. I wanted a challenge. So then I looked at Forest Tribes … how about a Warband comprised solely of Pygmy tribesmen? Now that’d be cool…

I understand that the term ‘Pygmy’ is frowned upon nowadays, so I should really refer to Baka, Twa, Aka and Mbuti tribes. I use the term Pygmy as it is recognizable to most people and for no other reason. I knew Wargames Foundry do suitable models - but I had a look online for different manufacturers of Pygmies nevertheless. All of the ones I saw were cartoony or really over the top and caricatured - maybe fine for fantasy but definitely not what I wanted for a (mostly) serious Darkest Africa campaign.

The Foundry ones are nice sculpts and not cartoony - I really didn’t want some sort of crazy looking or stereotypical models in my force. The ones with the masks would be good for a Witchdoctor maybe… So it’s Foundry I decided to use.

My force was quite easy to work out. I had six archers from the Forest Tribes pack. Another three packs from Foundry (one of each set) gave me a total of 30 figures. These would be divided into a King with an attendant, three units of six archers and two units of five warriors for 98 points. A perfect fit for what I had in mind, down to the last point! In a future blog, I’ll detail how I painting them and readied my force for its first bloody battle.