Howondaland

Howondaland is often mentioned as an example of dark and mysterious jungle in the continent of Klatch. Howondaland has a brief appearance as the location of the Lost Jewelled Temple of Offler, in Reaper Man.

It is also, by his own account, the ancestral home of the spirit guide One-Man-Bucket, who bemoans not having been born in its wide-open plains, as is his perceived birthright. Unless part of Howondaland actually has wide open plains where Indians roam, rather than just thick impenetrable jungle, the possibility exists that Bucket is fantasising.

We know plains and veldts exist: the elephant-wranglers of Moving Pictures demonstrate as much when rounding up those one thousand elephants Dibbler has ordered, in a moment of big-screen madness.

Was much visited by (and anthropologised by) Lady Alice Venturi. Or Alice in Howondaland, which fits....

It is known there is one black kingdom there, ruled by a King Samuel.

In Jingo, we learn that Lady Sybil Ramkin's grandfather Sir Joshua Ramkin led a military expedition to Howondaland, having run out of sworn enemies of Ankh-Morpork to fight who lived any nearer. By the time he left the continent, by all accounts there had been a great deal of swearing and a lot more enemies had been brought into existence.

There is at least one major city and port, Zambingo.

At least three years prior to the events in Snuff Gravid Rust established a tobacco plantation in Howondaland. For a workforce he had goblins forcibly taken from The Shires and shipped there to use as slave labour until they were worked to death.

He also used the plantation to make a number of troll drugs such as the deadly Crystal Slam and others including Slab, Slice, Slap, and Slunkie. He then had them shipped to Ankh-Morpork for sale smuggle into along with the tobacco. This whole vile opperation lasted until the Watch found out about it and retribution arrived in the form of constable Wee Mad Arthur.

More speculatively, Howondaland may be the location for the famous battle of Lawkes' Drain as described in the booklet accompanying the Discworld Mapp, and it may also, by inference, be the home of Assassins' Guild School teacher, Miss Smith-Rhodes. Another odd pointer to the existence of a white people in Howondaland is, indirectly, given in the Discworld animal name Bewildebeeste. Who named it and gave it a distinctly Afrikaans-sounding name? Meerkats, too...

It's a very large and ill-defined place on the Mapp, after all, and to paraphrase a Roundworld aphorism:

Ex Howondalandia, semper aliquid nova.

(On Roundworld, a Roman poet is looking south into the heart of unknown Africa with all its vast unexplored spaces, and speculating "Ex Africa, semper aliquid nova" - There's always something new out of Africa. Maybe in future books something new comes out of Howondaland?)

Semper Aliquid Nova...

In Snuff, Howondaland is used as a location for Gravid Rust's slave-plantations, where captive goblins are worked to death on tobacco farms. In roundworld's Africa, tobacco is a cash crop in most African countries south of the sub-Sahara, most notably in Togo, Senegal, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The exact location of the slave-plantations is not given, but analogy to Africa would place them in the jungle belt of central Howondaland, near the coast and ideally a port for export. Zambingo?

Annotation

Presumably comes from "Wonderland", as in Alice in Wonderland, a work of nonsense literature written by Lewis Carroll, considered a classic example of the genre and of English literature in general. However, TP has openly stated that he dislikes the book: "I didn't like the Alice books because I found them creepy and horribly unfunny in a nasty, plonking, Victorian way. Oh, here's Mr Christmas Pudding On Legs, hohohoho, here's a Caterpillar Smoking A Pipe, hohohoho. When I was a kid the books created in me about the same revulsion as you get when, aged seven, you're invited to kiss your great-grandmother." See here.

Of course the name could be from Gondwanaland, one of the ancient supercontinents of Earth, as the existence of continental drift on Discworld, including a Pangola (instead of Pangaea) is documented.