A long time a go, I read a short story – probably in a science-fiction anthology, but not necessarily – about a student in a college history class confronting her professor about the relationship between Rome and the Vandals. The professor had adverted to a motto about Rome being the source of strength, portrayed the Vandals negatively, and assumed that the Vandals had disappeared from history. The student pointed out that, because the Vandals relied on oral rather than written history, we were getting only one side of the story, and that the Vandals had disappeared only from written history. The ending implied that the student herself belonged to a thriving Vandal tradition that was invisible to modern culture.
Can anyone help identify the story? I have been looking for it for ages but haven’t run across it.
The idea that the Vandals were crude barbarians isn’t correct.
The Vandals were Christians, and at least the upper classes of the Vandals generally spoke Latin as well as their own language, and were literate. Some works by Vandal poets (in Latin) survives.
In general, administration in the Vandal Kingdom was little different from Roman administration, and many Roman bureaucrats remained in place. Educational and legal systems continued. The Roman tax system and records continued with little change.
From The Vandals by Andrew Merrills, Richard Miles (2009):
Within North Africa, the consequences of the Vandal occupation were at once dramatic and surprisingly short lived. … Many networks of power remained in place. The Vandal occupation was largely limited to the fertile valleys around Carthage, and the presence in Byzacena and Numidia was probably largely limited to military garrisons and estates held in the name of the Hasding family. In these regions, still rich agricultural and pastoral lands, the change of government in Carthage meant relatively little. Provincial government remained in the hands of the senatorial aristocracy (at least of those who had not flown at the coming of the barbarians), and municipal government, too, remained active. Where change came in these regions it was not from the Vandals, but from the emergence of new – rival – centres of political activity on the periphery of the Vandal kingdom. Moorish rulers provided local aristocracies with new channels for political and economic development.
Among these changes, the inhabitants of North Africa continued to live alongside one another in (relative) peace and (general) prosperity. The political systems functioned, educational and legal structures remained strong. These relations did occasionally descend into violence and persecution, as is well known, but the fault lines within this society did not run simply along the ethnic boundary between ‘Vandal’ and ‘Roman’. Geiseric and Huneric victimized Vandals as well as Romans, Arians as well as Catholics. Romano-Africans could earn promotion within the Vandal court and municipal aristocracy, just as Vandals could find themselves ostracised for political, religious or personal reasons. But the overall impression of the kingdom of Vandal Carthage is of integration under a strong – and evolving – form of kingship.
Laughing Matters contains a short excerpt from the story, within an essay by Robin Hemley titled “Relaxing the Rules of Reason,” but not the complete story. But I think that I have found the complete story in the anthology Sudden Fiction (Continued): 60 New Short-Short Stories, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393313425/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1). I should know in a couple days.
In a novelization of one of the Doctor Who episodes, (I can’t remember which one, or if the line in the the screenplay), the Doctor says, “The Vandals were quite decent chaps.”
I think it was the Third Doctor. I know that he didn’t meet any Vandals in the episode, just that someone (Sarah Jane?) said that some vandals had caused damage.
