History of Nama

Nama is a very large state in the Poswob Empire that arose from an agreement signed by the rulers of the many independent kingdoms within it to trade sovereignty for military protection and economic benefits. Nevertheless, people in Nama live the freest lives of anyone within the entire Poswob Empire and in some remote areas the people do not even know they are living within a larger nation.

14287 BC to 1400 AD

Nama's territory was within the range of the Repilian aboriginal people. Thus the only true aboriginals in Nama are Repilians. Nama was much larger then, and essentially borderless in the north and east; all known territory was welcome to consider itself part of Nama. Thus Nama in its early days consisted of the entire northeast half of the continent, apart from anyplace that chose to secede. Nama did not consider itself a pacifist empire, since its people could change its politics at any time, but throughout their long history they only participated in wars as a victim, never an aggressor.

Around the year 10,000 BC, pirates from Laba crashed into Nama and began enslaving Namans. At ifrst, they picked some Namans to rule the others, and blended with them to create a new ruling class. Even this, though, did not destroy Nama. However, Namans were forbidden from moving to Laba. A previously existing group of people in Nama considered themselves Labans and tried to make an alliance with the Laban pirates, but they were rejected and had to flee to the interior or be enslaved. These were called Paleo-Thaoans, not because they were related to Thaoans, but because they lived mostly in the areas later settled by Thaoans. Paleo-Thaoans were largely held down by their addiction to the hallucinogenic drug produced by a plant common in their area of Nama.

By the year 0, Nama had over two thousand tribes, with a population of a bit over 1,000,000 in total. This was very large for one country at this time. However, the islands of Laba had more than 10 million people on them, living in a much smaller space. Laba realized that they could crush Nama easily if they could only unite amongst themselves. Then they would have plenty of land for their populations. Boats of Labans began arriving on the south coast of Nama shortly after the year 50 AD.

The Namans invited the settlers to start up colonies within Nama, as they had always traditionally been welcoming of outsiders even though they had not seen a boat from the islands of Laba in the last few thousand years. (The outsiders they were welcoming of were almost always other Repilian tribes.)

But the heavily armed Laban settlers soon discovered that aboriginal Repilians in Nama were a very peaceful people, preferring books and songs to spears and swords. This meant that the colonists who killed the most Repilians would be the ones with the most room to grow. In response, some colonists sided with the Repilians, holding back the efforts of the more aggressive settlers by causing settlers to fight each other. These people were not simply being virtuous: some really were malicious all along ,but figured if the soft, tender Repilians were at least given weapons, they would be far stronger than the colonists, even if millions of colonists came, and any colonists who had sided with the Repilians even when they were weak would be given the choicest rewards when they were strong.

Outside of Nama, the Repilian people were generally more militarized, and these areas did not fall to Tapilula settlers nearly as easily, and in some cases were only eventually convered after several thousand years of peaceful intimate relations. This is how it came to pass that an area with extremely difficult terrain was settled by colonists before the flat lowlands to the east.

1400 to 1989

Around the year 600 the boats arriving from Laba stopped. Intermittent settlement continued until around 1400, but by this time almost all of the settlers were from other areas of the continent of Rilola, not from Laba. The settlers had not actually defeated Nama; they had merely assimiliated culturally. The prehistoric government of Nama remained intact, which meant that Nama was still open to even more settlement from outside and was still a generally peaceful nation. They created the "Naman Dissenter Union" where different governments that disagree about politics are still allied with each other and will cooperate militarily.

Nama with its 1989 borders. Naman states are in light blue.

Nama invited peoples from all around the world to move to Nama and participate in their government. They wanted to hear all points of view on all issues and become the best educated country in the history of the world. They had no ethnic majority (the aboriginal Repilians did not consider themselves to be one tribe.)

Slavery still existed in Nama during this time, as it had for the least 11000 years. However it was mostly in the rural rolling hills of the far north, not the south coast where most of the civilization was.

Other empires grew around Nama and challenged its power. Nama was still the strongest country in the world, even if its people were individually weaker than the people of the smaller "sharper" countries around them that mostly focused on war. They were in an advantageous location, essentially the crossroads of the continent, and had control of most of the sea traffic that passed through nations that bordered Nama. But they had a few weaknesses.

One weakness was their geography: they had lately focused mostly on maintaining sea power, but their empire had only a small coastline and this was cut off from the rest of Nama by the world's tallest mountain range. This meant by the early 1900s that southern Nama was much more intimately connected with its hostile rival empires, the Star Empire and Subumpam, than with the rest of Nama. The Star Empire wanted to bottle them up in their own harbor by making an alliance with Subumpam and having a united Star-Subumpam navy blockade Nama and reduce its southern coastline to utter wasteland so the Stars could move in and take over.

In 1905, Lulala seceded from Nama. It had a coastline, but Naman ships were strong enough to blockade their ports.