An Interview with George R.R. Martin
How Martin’s Peace Corps service in Mozambique inspired A Song of Ice and Fire
The War of the Five Kings was immortalized by George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which turned into HBO’s Game of Thrones. The book and series are fiction, but at the Texas Renaissance Festival in Todd Mission, five hours northwest of Houston, I overheard Martin telling Steven King that the War of the Five Kings was based on a real conflict in Mozambique.
A few months after the festival, I visited Martin in Santa Fe to ask him what he meant. We spoke at his home, a medieval-style castle that overlooks an expanse of piñon-juniper trees.
Greg
George, thanks for taking the time to chat.
George
[Nods]
Greg
How did you end up in Mozambique?
George
I’ve always been fascinated by the coast. We grew up in Bayonne, this little strip of New Jersey surrounded by water. Kill Von Kull right out front and Staten Island on the other side of the straight. New York City over the East River. The city was not that far, but it always felt way off in the distance. We didn’t have a car, so growing up, I never made it to the city. We lived in a brand-new housing project across from Brady’s dock where my dad worked. When I was young, I’d watch these huge ships come in and out and go up and down the straight. From where? To where? I always daydreamed they were shipping something ancient, exotic, secret. But they were probably just carrying motor oil or toilet paper.
Greg
Did you think they were coming from Mozambique?
George
I never heard of Mozambique until I went off to college in Chicago. Journalism at Northwestern. That was 100 years ago, in 1970, and then I got my Master’s at Medill the next year. When I graduated, Vietnam was raging, and I was 23 and ripe for drafting. But I didn’t want to go, so I applied to get conscientious objector status. I told this story to George Strombo years ago. The big question they ask you is, “Would you have fought in WWII?” I told them, of course I would have fought against the Nazis. But the Viet Cong weren’t the Nazis, and I didn’t think America had any business in Vietnam. My draft board in Cook County Chicago was so conservative, they believed anyone who wanted CO status would be branded a coward and a traitor. They thought my life would be ruined if I didn’t fight, and for them, this was punishment enough. I ended up getting CO pretty easily. I wasn’t scot free though –
Greg
Scot free? S-C-O-T or S-C-O-T-T?
George
S-C-O-T.
Greg
Hmm. What does that mean?
George
I’m not sure actually. Let’s look it up.
Greg
OK. Here we go: “In medieval England, there was a tax called a ‘scot,’ and if someone was able to avoid paying it, they would be getting off ‘scot-free.’ That’s from Kris Spisak.
George
That’s probably from sceat, a penny, basically, in Old English. So, I wasn’t scot free. I didn’t need to pay a tax, but I had to pay my dues through alternative service. COs had a few options, like building dams or working with the poor or being a guinea pig for medical tests. But I really wanted to go abroad, and wanted to use my writing skills. In the ’70s, the Peace Corps was sending conscientious observers to countries where conflict was likely to break out. Before war broke out, Washington wanted us to learn about local history. Understand it, preserve it. For what? I’m not sure, but it was a better option than Vietnam. I could choose Lebanon or Mozambique, and I chose Mozambique. They were fighting the Portuguese for independence.
I split my time, mostly, between Beira and Chibuene on the coast because the coast was safest. Beira is just north of Sofala, which was the oldest harbor in Southern Africa. Settled by Persians in about 1,000 at the mouth of the Buzi River. It’s where gold from the Barberton highlands left for the Indian Ocean. A real El Dorado that sank into the sand 500 years ago. Sofala and the ancient city of Chibuene were connected to something called the Indian Ocean Trade Network. It was a major, major network; Arabian, Egyptian, Persian, Indonesian, Indian traders all flowed through here.
Greg
How’d they get so far south back then?
George
They used small, sturdy plank boats with cloth sails. As you can imagine, it took a long time for sailers to get to the Mozambique coast. When they got here, they stayed for six months, sometimes more, to do their business and to wait out monsoon winds. Some stayed longer, or forever, building families and never going back home. Even though Mozambique - what’s now Mozambique - was far from older cultures, the people became connected to progress. Traders introduced medicine, advanced metalsmithing, astronomy, math, sailing, irrigation, dykes, the concept of treaties and organized religion. Sofala became a massive port. Imagine, way off the beaten path in the 11, 12, 1300s, the port could hold 100 ships.
When I was there, from ’72-’74, Rick Duarte was digging ten hours south of Sofala to look for a lost city no one was sure existed. So I went down there too. Rick’s team was chipping away at these coastal cliffs until they came across the foundation of a castle. They found the ancient city of Chibuene! It was even older than Sofala. 600s AD or so. Rick resurrected the southern tip of the Indian Ocean route. What I remember most was that the site was filled with bones: people, cows, sheep, goats, sharks, shellfish. I mean, a massive, Chibuene was a massive medieval city for that area. Rick’s team found the base of aqueducts that would have brought fresh water across the plains from big lakes to the west. They found weapons, the foundations from early workshops and religious etchings of a seven-pointed star.
Greg
So you based A Song of Ice and Fire on the ruins?
George
I didn’t. But Chibuene was the inspiration for King’s Landing. In Sofala and Chibuene, I brought my typewriter everywhere to put down what I learned while it was fresh. The only bar in Chibuene was called Conto de Velhas Esposas - Old Wives’ Tale - where I met my wife.
Greg
Fitting.
George
Very. I hung out there a lot. To write and drink and flirt. I was 26. You know how these things go. Not everyone there had seen a typewriter, even in the ’70s, and I brought my Olympia everywhere. One night - evening, really - I’m sitting outside under a full moon, not doing any writing, and an older woman comes up to me and points at the typewriter. She tells me she’s never seen a machine like that. And then she tells me she’s never seen the sea before, which made me sit up straight so I could ask her too many questions.
Greg
In what language?
George
In English, but my translator, who I couldn’t go anywhere without, spoke to her in Chewa, the language of the highlands. I asked her where she came from that she’d never seen the ocean, and she laughed and said her name was Aira, “of the wind.” I said, “no really,” and she told me that she’d come down from the mountains around Lake Chilwa where the revolutionaries were building up. I asked her for more detail, and she said, “history is long, and there are many kings.” I didn’t know what that meant. Not sure I know what that means, even now.
Like I said, I was 26. So history wasn’t long for me. I was totally caught up in the ’70s and the revolutions happening all over the world. And in America. Everything was new to me. I didn’t understand what she meant by kings. I was embarrassed by the gap between her knowledge and mine, and I fumbled. I shoved my Olympia towards her and asked her to tell me a story.
She told me she came from a family of mhondoro, spirit mediums who channeled their royal ancestors and recorded the names, deeds and lives of past kings. Generation to generation without writing anything down. “I’ll tell. You write,” she said. So she told me about a great war where five kings all fought against each other after the death of Mzila. Mzila was from the warrior class, which was unusual, and he didn’t last long. He’d killed the previous king, an insane king, from a royal family, but after two years, Mzila was dead.
Greg
Assassination?
George
Shark-hunting accident.
Greg
Sounds made up.
George
All the best stories do. She told me that kings had consistently held - let me see if I can get this right - held Mutapa, Zanguebar, Mongala, Nimeamaia, Cafreria, Toroa and Jagacasanj together for centuries, and suddenly they were up for grabs. The Zanguebar capital was right where she and the translator and I were sitting, in Chibuene, and that’s where everyone came crashing against each other. The mad king’s daughter Razavalona was too young to fight. She escaped across a narrow sea to Madagascar after his death.
Over there, across the Mozambique Channel, in what’s now Madagascar, the Merina nobles took her in as a kind of pet. It was a luxurious life. They had vanilla and cloves and blue cobalt. Even though she was the daughter of a king, the Merina looked down on her until she broke and domesticated -
Greg
Dragons?
George
No. Dragons don’t exist. But elephant birds did. Twelve feet tall, two thousand-pound night hunters. Eggs 150 times bigger than a chicken’s. They couldn’t fly, but they ran so fast in the pitch-black dark that it seemed like they were. We don’t know how she was able to break the birds, but the Merina got scared. They captured Raza and sold her to the Mutapa, these amazing archers on horseback from the Barberton steppes. Raza’s handmaids smuggled a dozen elephant birds with them back to the mainland. Together, Raza and the Mutapa conquered and destroyed Chibuene, which is where we get the word raze.
Greg
What about Winter, White Walkers and the Night King? Those are made up, right?
George
Embellished, but not made up. Like I said before, the Mozambique coast was part of a big, international trade route. They bought and sold things, they traded words, they traded stories. Mozambique, the name, comes from Mussa Bin Bique, an Arab merchant. From about 1200 on, the coastal cities were very conscious of two big threats: Drought and Europeans. Huge regional megadroughts happened every few hundred years, and in the 13/1400s, the happy, long, wet era was ending. Trees and plants died, soil turned to sand and sand just buried cities. Sandstorms filled the mouth of the Buzi, destroyed Sofala, filled the Chibuene lakes and forced the Mutapas back into the highlands.
The Portuguese didn’t land until 1500, but the kingdoms heard stories about Europeans long before then. By the 900s, explorers had traveled all the way to Novgorod - 120 miles south of St. Petersburg. Ibn Rustah, the most famous explorer, called Europe “The Land of Darkness.” In my book, dark land and white skin becomes white walkers and night kings. With blue eyes and silver swords and silver armor that made them immortal. And, of course, he wasn’t wrong. They did find, kill and take everything they touched.
To sound the alarm for both the coming sand and coming invaders, the mhondoro’s recurring chant was Dhoruba Inakuja, Storm is Coming.
Fiction
Mozambique map by Emmanuel Bowen
Elephant bird drawing from Getty Images