Asase Lewa

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Bahian Council Republic of Asase Lewa
Flag Coat of arms
Motto: "Subɔ Ameawo" "Serve the People"
Anthem: the Internationale
Capital and largest city	Edudzi Agyeman City
Official languages	Asalewan
Recognised national languages	Ajaizo Ashana Gundaya Lokpa
Recognised regional languages	Over 100 Pygmy languages
Ethnic groups (2020)	41.2% Gundaya 17.6% Ashana 11.4% Lokpa 10.1% Ajaizo 9.8% Anlo 9.9% other
Demonym(s)	Asalewan
Government	Federal hybrid socialist council republic with party-state elements
• Presidium of the Section of the Workers' International	List Kwassi Kodjo (General Secretary of the Presidium) Deputy General Secretary Name General Name General Name General Name General Name General Name Intellectual Name Intellectual Name Youth League Leader Name Women's Federation Leader Name Supreme Workers' Council GenSec Name Supreme Workers' Council Deputy GenSec Name CDR/Intelligence Officer Name Diplomat Name
• Presidium of the Supreme Workers' Council	(General Secretary of the Presidium) Deputy General Secretary Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name Name
• General Secetary of the Section	Kwassi Kodjo
• General Secretary of the Supreme Workers' Council	Name
Legislature	Supreme Workers' Council
Independence from Estmere
• Independence	1951
• Formation of the Bahian People's Republic	May 1, 1953
• Formation of the Bahian Council Republic	May 1, 1969
Area
• Total	828,719.36 km2 (319,970.33 sq mi)
Population
• 2023 estimate	70,636,291
• 2022 census	69,420,396
• Density	85.24/km2 (220.8/sq mi)
GDP (PPP)	2023 estimate
• Total	$645.40 billion
• Per capita	$9,137
GDP (nominal)	2023 estimate
• Total	$208.45 billion
• Per capita	$2,951
Gini (2023)	18.5 low
HDI (2023)	0.737 high
Currency	Asalewan cedi (external) Work point (internal) (AC)
Driving side	left
Calling code	+963
Internet TLD	.asl

Asase Lewa, officially the Bahian Council Republic of Asase Lewa, is a socialist middle-income country located in northern Bahia and Coius in Kylaris, bordering Tiwura to the south. The third-most populous country in Bahia after Yemet and Mabifia, the country has a population of 70 million, one-fifth of whom live in the capital and largest city of Edudzi Agyeman City.

Like the rest of Bahia, Asase Lewa is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited countries in the world. The country was largely governed according to the egalitarian, communalistic Sâretic system until the tenth and eleventh countries, when the Irfanic conquests of Bahia led to the development of the Houregic system, the first recognizable states, throughout the region. However, Asase Lewa itself largely avoided Irfanization and remained largely Fetishist until the Toubacterie. Furthermore, modern, Houregic states did not develop in the Asalewan Highlands, where between one-fourth and one-third of the population lived; the Highlands instead saw the development of the ojeṣẹbun system, a modified version of Sâre. The division between the Asalewan Lowlands, which boasted exceptional agricultural fertility and whose inhabitants frequently fled to the Highlands to avoid state control and associated issues such as forced labor, and the Asalewan Highlands, avoiding state development and whose inhabitants frequently raided or invaded the Lowlands whenever the Highlands suffered from overpopulation, remained a prominent feature of Asalewan society until the twentieth century.

A center, albeit not the most important one, of the Transvehemens slave trade, the Asalewan Lowlands became a major exporter of the cash crops coffee and palm oil, and later cocoa, spices, abd above all sugar, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During and after the Bahian collapse, the Lowlands and an increasingly depopulated foothills and fringe between the Lowlands and Highlands were colonized during the Toubacterie in the nineteenth century. Except in majority-Ashana areas in northern Asase Lewa, the Toubacterie had a far more disruptive effect on Lowlander society than elsewhere in Bahia, as the colonial state reorganized Lowlander agriculture and economy for producing and exporting these cash crops under the Asalewan plantation system.

Alongside other Estmerish colonies, Asase Lewa achieved home rule in 1942 and then independence in 1951 under the conservative, pro-Estmere rule of Arko Kwarteng, who established a virtual single-party state by the late 1940s. However, Asase Lewa also saw far more radical anti-colonial movements than other Bahian states. The socialist Asalewan Section of the Workers' International successfully waged the Asalewan Revolution, a thirty-year revolutionary war which emerged victorious in 1953. In the 1950s and 1960s, the new state substantially reduced the Highland-Lowland divide by ending the centuries-long Ojeṣẹbun system through collectivization, established a command economy that made significant progress in economic development, healthcare, and education, and achieved one of the largest reductions in economic inequality in history. However, the Section established an authoritarian political system, first under a tripatite power-sharing agreement and then single-party state, and presided over mass popular killings of dissidents and class enemies Nutiklɔdzo. In the 1960s, crisis triggered by the Sugar Crash and the collapse of the United Bahian Republic, which Asase Lewa was a member of, led Asalewan leader Edudzi Agyeman to launch the Protective-Corrective Revolution, which caused considerable chaos but eventually led to the establishment of a multi-party council republic, and the reorganization of the Asalewan economy under the framework of participatory economics and labor vouchers, supplemented by a large, generous welfare state and rationing-based subsidies for basic goods.

Commentators usually classify Asase Lewa as a hybrid regime and flawed, or Southern, democracy. Criticism of the socialist system is strictly prohibited and monitored by the Revolutionary Councilist Defence Committees, and the Section, which no longer participates in elections, retains significant power in Asalean society, most prominently the power to veto candidates, de facto total control over foreign policy, and close integration with the People's Revolutionary. From 1979 to 1984 and 2014 to 2016, military-backed self-coups led to mass expulsions of Section members and temporary direct Section control over the country, a legally-formalized state of exception ideologically justified through the doctrine of Perpetual-Cyclical Revolution. Nevertheless, elections are considered free and Asase Lewa retains a pluralistic political system, albeit one within the strict confines the Section imposes. Furthermore, the country has—during both colonial and socialist rule—boasted one of the wealthiest, most productive, and most diversified economies in the region, metrics supplemented since the Asalewan Revolution by comparatively high rankings on key metrics of human development such as literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, and malnutrition, and by one of the most egalitarian distributions of wealth in the world. A member of the Association for International Socialism, the country is closely aligned with other socialist countries, particularly the Brown Sea Community, and is additionally a member of the Community of Nations, International Forum for Developing States, and Congress of Bahian States.

Etymology

Formerly named Odo by Estmerish colonial authorities after the Odo River (a tautological place name, as Odo means "river" in Gundaya), the country was renamed Asase Lewa by the Section of the Workers' International, or "beautiful land" in the two-most common languages of the country: "Asase" means land in Ashana and "Lewa" means beautiful in Gundaya.

Geography

Climate

• Highlands mostly tropical and subtropical rainforests
• Lowlands a mixture of rainforests and savannahs
• More arid further north in the country

Biodiversity

• Lots of large mammals; one of the few remaining places where there are mountain gorillas

Deforestation and Reforestation

A reforestation campaign in Asase Lewa.

Asase Lewa is home to some of the most prominent and expansive examples of both deforestation and reforestation in the modern world. Though an estimated 90% of the country's land was covered by forest in 1800, its forest cover declined severely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, going from an estimated 90% of the country's land in 1800 to 70% in 1900, 40% in 1950, and 30% in 1970. Most forests were felled to grow cash crop plantations, especially coffee, cocoa, and above all sugar plantations. To a lesser extent, trees were increasingly felled in the early twentieth century to produce charcoal. Deforestation peaked in th}e 1930s and 1940s, primarily thanks to the invention of the sugarcane harvester, reducing the need for labor and further accelerating sugarcane production. In addition to deforestation, the biodiversity of many existing forests, especially in the Asalewan Lowlands, severely decreased as forests became modified for the purpose of coffee and to a lesser extent palm oil monocultures.

Deforestation and environmental degradation continued after the Asalewan Revolution, with the government's developmental goals involving the continuing intensification of cash crop production and its mass construction of hydroelectric dams frequently resultling in substantial flooding of forested areas. However, deforestation slowed after the Revolution, and halted in the Asalewan Highlands, as the Revolution politically empowered Pygmies, the key supporters of the Revolution in Highland areas, whose livelihoods largely depended on forests and agitated for their protection.

By the 1970s, the Protective-Corrective Revolution further empowered Pygmies and various other environmental activists against deforestation. In additional to this environmental activism, a number of factors reduced developmental pressures for deforestation: the discovery of oil and natural gas in Asase Lewa, along with industrialization, reduced the importance of cash crops to the Asalewan economy, widespread electrification and subsidization of domestically-produced fuel severely reduced demand for charcoal, substantial agricultural development associated with the increasing availability of fertilizer substantially increased cash crops' land productivity, and Asase Lewa sought to regulate sugar production following the international overproduction that led to the Sugar Crash. Furthermore, broad section of Asalewan society, beyond just the Pygmy population, took increasing interest in forestry affairs thanks to fears of desertification and the advent of mass international tourism in the 1970s and 1980s, with many Asalewan policymakers seeking to capitalize on this tourism boom by promoting ecotourism within the country.

The result of this confluence of increased Pygmy empowerment, reduced pressures for deforestation, and non-Pygmy support for forest protection was Asase Lewa's initiation an early and ongoing reforestation campaign in the 1970s. This campaign has substantially increased Asase Lewa's forest cover in the past 50 years, with forests now covering approximately 50% of Asase Lewa's landmass, the highest level since the 1930s. Associated with this campaign of reforestation has been other environmental protection measures, including the creation of national parks, nature reserves, and severe restrictions on the hunting of endangered faun most notably megafauna that attract ecotourism such as mountain gorillas, Bahian elephants, and lions.

Government and politics

Government

• Council republic with Section supervision

Politics

• Divided between the Machete camp (more "hardline," descended from the radicals during the Protective-Corrective Revolution), the Reed camp (more "reformist," descended from the moderates during the Protective-Corrective Revolution), and the Molasses camp (pure pork-barrel)
• Camps are comprised of more-organized groups that are for the most part clientelistic and non-ideological, support bases depend on who one's family supported during the Protective-Corrective Revolution
• But more repoliticization since the Anti-Revisionist Revolutoin

Military

• Mandatory military conscription from 18 to 19 and non-military conscriptio from 19 to 20
• Military conscription used just as much as a way to install ideological conformity and national identity as for military purposes
• Mandatory service in popular militias for all citizen aged 20 to 60 (Militias became an important part of counterinsurgency during the Lokpaland insurgency)
• Between a brown and green-water navy
• Stronk military has stronk influence over the Section and politics, closely aligned with the Section and sees itself as guardians of the political order like in Turkey

Foreign relations

• Homies with socialists
• Kinda homies (but only kinda) with Zorasan and Shangea
• Very much sees itself as the leader of the Bahian left, kind of like Cuba
• Relations with the EC are better than they used to be for mostly economic relations, but still not very good

Economy

Economic structure

• Participatory economics: workers' and consumers' councils, labor vouchers, etc.
• Computerized facilitation board

Agriculture

• Dominated by large collective farms
• Coffee, palm oil, cocoa, various spices, and above all sugar heavily produced for export
• Amaranth, cassava, sorghum all major staples

Energy

• Semi-major oil and gas exporter
• Hydroelectric dams heavily constructed in the 1950s/1960s/early 1970s before the discovery of oil, sitll an important source of energy for domstic consumption that supplements oil and gas

Mining

• Exporter of nickel, copper, and gold
• But not enough resources to become a commodities-based economy like Yemet or Mabifia

Industry

• Decent amount of light industry for domestic consumption
• Most heavy industry is related to things the country produces; nickel, copper, and sugar refineries, etc.

Tourism

• Decent amount of ecotourism; one of the few countries where someone can visit mountain gorillas
• Government has tried to promote Asase Lewa as a nearby tropical vacation spot for Eucleans (not super successful)
• Popular-ish vacation spot for left-wing Bahians in the Asterias who can afford to travel

Demographics

Languages and ethnicity

• Asalewan is the lingua franca, language of the state and of instruction in schools
• But most people's first language is the language of their ethnicity, usually not Asalewan

Religion

• Officially state atheist
• About half of Asalewans consider themselves irreligious, about 40% Sotirian, about 10% Irfanic
• Very few people consider themselves adherents of traditional religions but most Asalewans practice traditional religion in some way, but they don't see it as religious and see themselves as either irreligious, Sotirian, or Irfanic
• About 25% of the population are actually irreligious

Education

• Compulsory education from 5 to 18
• About 10% of Asalewans pursue higher education; getting a college degree is closely associated with Section status
• College students are selected by local communities (like worker-peasant-soldier students in 1970s China)
• Decent amount of educational instruction is focused on localized economic practices
• Ideological and political education also an important part of education
• Some democratic education aspects thrown in

Healthcare

• Pretty good single-payer healthcare - "We live live like poor people, but we die like rich people"
• Lots of doctors and nurses per capita

Transport

• Very low car ownership
• Bicycles the main way most people get around
• Intercity bus service and bus rapid transit in cities heavily used
• Metro in Edudzi Agyeman City

Culture

Art

• Traditional art = Similar to West African art in Asase Lewa's cultural influences, particularly Yoruba art since Yoruba are the plurality
• Art today is inspired by styles from socialist realism and folk art
• The government heavily promotes folk art and a minimum percentage of art at any given museum or exhibit is required to be folk art

Literature

• Substantial residual orality until the twenty-first century because most Asalewans were illiterate until the Revolution
• Proletarian literature was basically the only allowed literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, still fairly popular
• Things are more liberalized now
• The combination of mass literacy and low television and Internet access means there is a thriving culture of printed media and literature

Music

• Revolutionary songs and folk music heavily promoted from the 1950s to the 1980s, still fairly popular
• What would IRL be called desert blues is fairly popular

Cuisine

• Traditional cuisine supplemented by amaranth-based recipes because the government saw it as a miracle cop
• Asalewans really really REALLY like tea, traditional tea ceremonies are an integral part of socializing

Media

• Radios are ubiquitous, but television and Internet access is very low
• However, movie theaters and film are ubiquitous, which combined with the absence of television and Internet access means there is a thriving film culture and industry (socialist Nollywood!)

Sport

Mass games commemorating the centenary of the founding of the Asalewan Section of the Workers' International in 2012 in Edudzi Agyeman Memorial Stadium, one of the largest stadiums in the world.

As in most countries, sports and physical exercise and recreation is very important part to Asalewan culture. Most Asalewan children and adults are members of amateur recreation leagues, swimming and cycling clubs, or gymnastics associations. Besides its primary functions of serving as a popuar source of recreation, the Asalewan state and Section extensively promote mass participation in sports as an important way to integrate mass organizations—which most large amateur recreation leagues and gymnastics associations are affiliated to—into daily life, and to promote an extensive, militaristic culture of physical fitness so that Asalewans are physically prepared to defend the nation if necessary. Physical education is a mandatory subject in Asalewan schools and mass organizations extensively sponsor and organize recreation leagues, swimming and cycling clubs, and gymnastics associations.

The Asalewan state and Section has particularly engaged in an extensive project of promoting gymnastics, uplifting the sport from little popularity during the pre-colonial and colonial periods to extensive popularity during the socialist period. A tradition inherited from the workers' gymnastic associations of Euclean mass socialist parties, Asalewan political elites have extensively promoted, especially in its non-competitive form, for its perceived utility in promotings collectivistic and communalistic political and cultural goals. In particular, Asalewan mass games, the largest choreographed events in the world, are an extensive part of Asalewan political, sporting, and communal culture. An estimated 150,000 athletes and participants are involved in the annual International Workers' Festival at Edudzi Agyeman Memorial Stadium in Edudzi Agyeman City, with hundreds of thousands more participants involved in smaller mass games in other urban areas and additional mass games held on notable anniversaries, such as centennials, of other public holidays.

The Asalewan national football team.

In addition to this mass participation, spectator sports are also popular in Asase Lewa. The near-total lack of television and the Internet in the country, and the construction of very large stadiums in large urban areas for the purpose of hosting mass games that are otherwise used for hosting other sports and cultural events throughout the year, means that physical attendance at spectator sports, either in arenas where games are held or broadcasts of games, is high relative both to countries at similar income levels and, in some cases, substantially wealthier countries. Except at the most elite levels of competition, few sports players are professionals, with the country's extensive populist political and cultural tradition contributing to a substantial culture of amateurism.

Forms of folk wrestling, closely related to the Mabifian sport of Inchema and part of the broader tradition of Bahian wrestling, have been practiced for centuries and are the most popular type of sport dating from the pre-colonial era, attracting large crowds and serving as a regular form of physical exercise and recreation for many Asalewans. In the modern era, however, association football has surpassed both gymnastics and wrestling as the country's most popular sport. Except among children, who as members of the Pioneer Workers' League perform the most important roles in mass games, football recreation leagues surpass both wrestling leagues and gymnastics associations as the most popular physical recreation leagues in the country. Association football is also the country's most popular spectator sport and where the few professional sports players in Asase Lewa are largely concentrated. The Asalewan national football team's qualification for, and performance at, the IFF Coupe du monde has become a mass sensation for the country and occassional for extensive displays of Asalewan patriotism and nationalism. The country participated in and extensively sponsored the Games of the Red Star until the 1954 to 1990, hosting the headquarters of its organizing assocation, the Association of Emerging Socialist Sportsmen, from 1965 to 1990. After the Games of the Red Star were last held in 1990 thanks to the Association of Emerging Socialist Economies's dissolution in 1988, the country began to attend the Invictus Games.

Communal culture

• Asalewan culture is very collectivist
• Mixture of traditional collectivist values, socialist policies, and relative poverty meaning resources have to be shared to ensure an okay-ish, equitable standard of living all reinforcing this collectivism
• Communal apartments, dining halls, and bathhouses all ubiquitous, half because of poverty and half because of socialism
• Radicals tried to experiment with kibbutz-style sleeping in the 1970s but this was largely involuntary and unpopular, but some people still practice it
• Almost all Asalewans are members of fraternal organizations, usually affiliated in some way with the Section (Pioneer and youth wings, women's clubs, CDRs, etc.)
• Despite the government's attempts to stamp them out, kinship networks are important-ish, important indicator of political loyalties

Public holidays

Workers gather for an International Workers' Day rally in Edudzi Agyeman City.

As part of the Asalewan state and Section's attempt to establish a new socialist culture largely untethered to either the colonial or pre-colonial pasts, no public holidays in Asase Lewa are either traditional religious or cultural celebrations, and only four holidays—New Year's Eve and Day, Mothers' Day, and Fathers' Day—have a substantially depoliticized character. Virtually all other public holidays in Asase Lewa are either anniversaries of key moments in Asalewan revolutionary and post-revolutionary history, the birthdays of Asalewan revolutionary leaders, or the celebrations of social movements or classes which have mass organizations affiliated with the Section: International Women's Day, celebrating the international feminist movement; International Workers' Day, by far the most important holiday in Asase Lewa; International Children's Day, in Asse Lewa viewed as the celebration of the youth movement and pioneer movement; and Peasants' Day.

In concert with this explicitly politicized orientation, and Asalewan communal culture more broadly, most public holidays in Asase Lewa feature extensive marches, rallies, and demonstrations, usually organized by Section mass organizations. The most important national holidays, namely International Workers' Day and key five and ten-year anniversaries of other major holidays, also feature mass games, usually featuring members of the Pioneer Workers' League. Both cultural anthropologists and Asalewan organizers themselves have described these public holidays as important displays of collective effervescence, in which the crowd collectively displays extreme emotion as part of a conscious effort to unify and politicize the Asalewan population. This includes mass displays of collective joy on holidays such as Revolutionary Action, Theory, and Democracy Days, mass anger and rage on Pan-Bahianism Day, and collective grief on Martyrs' Day and Revolutionary Succession Day. Even during periods of mass depoliticization, such as the Years of Reed from the 1980s to the 2010s, these public holidays remained occassions for extensive participation in, and performance of, mass politics, albeit in a largely controlled format. This exercise of mass politics ranged from these displays of extreme collective emotion to mass games to reminders of the holidays' explicitly political character; International Women's Day, for example, advances feminist activism by being a non-working holiday for Asalewan women but not for Asalewan men, and is conceived of as a women's day off, in which Asalewan women do not perform any work, including housework, of any kind.

Public holidays	Date
New Year's Day	January 1
Mothers' Day	January 7
Fathers' Day	January 14
Revolutionary Action Day	February 1
Revolutionary Theory Day	February 25
International Women's Day	March 8
Revolutionary Indefatigability Day	March 21
Revolutionary Democracy Day	April 11
International Workers' Day	May 1-3
Pan-Bahianism Day	May 13
International Children's Day	June 1
Revolutionaries' Day	July 10
Martyrs' Day	July 30
Soldiers' Day	September 2
Revolutionary Succession Day	September 27
Scholars' and Students' Day	October 30
Anti-Tribalism Day	November 14
Peasants' Day	December 7
New Year's Eve	December 31

Notes

1.^ Portmanteau of ojeṣẹ, the Yoruba word for duty, and ẹbun, the Yoruba word for gift (writing down for myself to include in etymology should I create an article on this later on).

2.^ The birthday of Asalewan revolutionary leader Edudzi Agyeman.

3.^ The birthday of Soravian revolutionary socialist Yuri Nemtsov, theorist of Nemtsovism.

4.^ The birthday of Chistovodian socialist leader Konstantyn Tretyak, theorist of Tretyakism.

5.^ The anniversary of the outbreak of the Protective-Corrective Revolution.

6.^ The national day and by far the most important holiday in Asase Lewa, commemorating both the international workers' movement and the foundation of the Asalewan state, proclaimed on May 1.

7.^ The anniversary of the Conference for the Promotion of the Pan-Bahian Idea.

8.^ The anniversary of the foundation of Asalewan Section of the Workers' International.

9.^ The anniversary of the 1912 Alààyè Massacre.

10.^ The death day of Asalewan revolutionary leader Edudzi Agyeman.

11.^ The anniversary of the September 2 Statement, widely considered the beginning of the Asalewan Revolution.

12.^ The birthday of Asalewan revolutionary leader Adelaja Ifedapo.

13.^ The anniversary of the outbreak of the Anti-Tribal Revolution.