View attachment 6349
NAME: Doctor Langa
AGE: Immortal, over 200 years old
CANON: OC; Original Verse
POWERS/ABILITIES/EQUIPMENT: A master of all African and Afro-Diasporic religions (Macumba, Obeah, Santeria, Candomble, Voodoo, Palo Mayombe and more).Learned some Scholomantic magic which amped up his spellcasting considerably so he doesn't require rituals for spells. Also has learned stray bits of Western Hermeticism and other systems.
BIO: Doctor Langa is in fact the character named ‘Oolanga’ in Bram Stoker’s ‘
The Lair of the White Worm.’ However, far from the demeaning caricature Stoker described, Langa was a former slave and an indentured servant from West Africa. As a child he showed great propensity for magic and spirituality, and was prepared to become a Vodun priest prior to being captured by slave traders. Having first been forced to work in Caribbean plantations, where he officiated Voudou rituals to encourage hope and resistance in his fellow slaves, he was brought to England to serve as an indentured servant, where in the 1850s he fell into the service of Edgar Caswell, a low level ceremonial magician from Derbyshire, England.
The reality of his time during the events of ‘Lair of the White Worm’ is that while in servitude to Caswell, Langa learned all he could about Caswell’s magic arts and mastered them in no time (Caswell had no more than a passing interest in Langa’s traditions and considered them inferior to his).
Additionally, this is also where he first encountered the forces of The Scholomance.
A note about the Scholomance: while it may be
the black magic school of ancient lore, that could well be a front. The Scholomance guards an evil scroll, The Untext, which secrets and power stem from incomprehensible, alien entities that escape human conception, would easily overrun our reality and reshape it to theirs, and leave anyone engaging its secrets at the highest level an addled, mad mess. No, it is thought by only a select few that The Scholomance may actually perform a vital function: producing comforting, slow acting, beautiful gothic horrors that the human mind can grasp even as it fears them, and keeping the forces behind The Untext in check and satisfied enough to prevent an Apocalypse.
Back to Derbyshire, 1860, one such creature of The Scholomance was the Lady Arabella (protagonist of Stoker’s novel), who was in fact a Lamia, one of four classes of vampires generated by The Scholomance. Arabella sensed the power and potential in Doctor Langa and sought to seduce him to her side (she could not turn him, for only females could become Lamiae). Arabella herself had attended the Scholomance, though not in their Inner Circle of ten. Doctor Langa charmed her enough to learn some of Scholomance magic, which amped his power considerably and set him on his course to become an occult, anti-colonial liberation mage.
Before fleeing England, he purchased immortality from the loa Papa Legba.
Doctor Langa spent the following decades of the 19th and 20th century:
- Becoming an initiate of all Afro-Diasporic religions (Macumba, Obeah, Santeria, Candomble, Voodoo, Palo Mayombe and more)
- Learning stray bits of Scholomantic magic, Western Hermeticism and other systems
- Aiding revolutionary forces in Africa, Asia, Latin America as well as in North America,Europe and Australia
- Coming into conflict with: Lord Ruthven; a white supremacist coven; the CIA, British and European security forces; the vampire hunter Cade Morris; the sorcerer Gaheris MacLot; The Unknown Patrol; and more.
In the early 1990s, Doctor Langa shifted his focus and decided to protect exploited communities from supernatural menace little by little, in a more pacifist approach. He continues this mission until today.