"Freshly painted Ruga-ruga!" Topic

My Ruga-ruga
Of all the colourful characters from the"Darkest" Africa wargaming genre (East Africa in the late 19th century) I think the Ruga-ruga are my favourites to paint. Not that they were nice people. In fact they were downright horrible. The British Brown Bess musket was the AK47 of it's day and thousands of surplus muskets were dumped on the African market at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Africans who got the muskets first destroyed the Africans groups who had none and along with the Zanzibar Arab/Swahili slavers they spread devastation across East Africa. Many of the resulting orphans, escaped slaves and refugees began to form their own lawless bands of musket armed bandits, ivory hunters, mercenaries and slavers called the Ruga-ruga. Eventually Ruga-ruga states evolved, the most famous was that of the warlord Mirambo, the chap in the blue robes unsheathing his sword. The Ruga-ruga depended on speed,ferocity and terror, seeming to appear out of nowhere to attack sleeping villages before dawn. They wore belts made from human entrails, necklaces of human teeth and caps made from the flayed faces of their slain enemies that terrorized their victims and gave the Ruga-ruga magical protection. The higher ranking Ruga-ruga adopted aspects of Arab dress and red was a popular colour, due to it's association with blood. Many Ruga-ruga were recruited from the Nyamwezi, whose young men competed with each other to invent unique and extravagant hairstyles. The figures are North Star Ruga-ruga and are excellent figures that fit in perfectly with my already existing Foundry Ruga-ruga,

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Good job on some nasty looking folks.

A good looking, colorful group of ne'er-do-wells.

Looks great.
Mark