This chapter argues that when separated from loved ones in the nineteenth century, enslaved people who had the opportunity to do so utilised letter writing to maintain networks of love and affection. Though enslaved people were largely forbidden from learning literacy skills, some did acquire these skills through being taught by their enslavers or through secret lessons by community members. Focusing on messages that enslaved people sent to their families and communities in letters to their relatives or enslavers, this chapter argues that enslaved people used letter writing as an emotional practice, to name, communicate, mobilise and maintain familial love. Working within the confines of anti-literacy laws and white letter-writing conventions, enslaved people appropriated aspects of sentimental culture, moulding this to suit the needs of a mainly illiterate population. Positioning letter writing within enslaved communities as an oral practice, this chapter reveals how the orally transmitted nature of these letters worked to create and maintain a network of affection between vast communities, in refusal of their enslavers’ attempts to decimate their kinship ties.

Museums and Curators

The origins of most public displays in museums or exhibitions can be traced back to private collections of fossils, minerals, specimens, tools, and artisanal objects amassed by aristocrats, monks, scholars, academicians, natural scientists, and wealthy citizens. In some instances, special galleries known as Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) were built in stately homes or palaces to accommodate them. For their owners, such places were expressions of authority and affluence, trophies that demonstrated possessive mastery and social preeminence. It was only when the general public was admitted into these galleries that the concept of the public museum was realized.

One evening in 1791, a room in Walbrook's Bull's Head inn began to fill with a rowdy London Welsh crowd, all members of the Caradogion – or ‘Caractacan’ – debating society. In a poem commemorating the night written by member David Samwell (1751–1798), he ironically declined to decide whether the society's round table reminded him of the one owned by King Arthur, or a modern cock-pit where ‘bloody fowl dispute’ – giving some indication of the lofty aims and raucous realities that fuelled these gatherings. Samwell was known to Welsh revivalists by his bardic name ‘Dafydd Ddu Feddyg’ (‘Dafydd the Black [i.e. dark-haired/complexioned] Doctor’), a bilingual poet and minor player in the revivalist Society of Gwyneddigion; but he was more widely renowned as a surgeon on Captain Cook's third voyage, and author of a famous account of Cook's death in conflict with Indigenous Hawaiians. It is appropriate, then, that the topic of Caractacan debate that night would involve another link between contemporary Welshness and Indigenous identity, namely the long-running controversy over Welsh claims to have ‘discovered’ and colonized America in the twelfth century, founding there a nation of so-called ‘Welsh Indians’. Samwell summed up the subject as follows:

One moon-light [sic] night it was decreed, To sift the tales that run; Concerning Owen Gwynedd's breed, Madog his gallant son.

Who, as our ancient bards explore, And histories a few; Found out America, before Columbus and his crew. (PH, p. 145)

This chapter will use Samwell's poem ‘The Padouca Hunt’ – named after a tribe supposed to be Madog's descendants – as a framework for investigating occasions when Welsh revivalism turned its gaze on the Indigenous peoples of Britain's wider empire.

INTRODUCTION

These trials originated with the illness of Sir George Maxwell, of Pollok House, south-west of Glasgow. On the morning of 14 October 1676, he was planning to visit the city. Prior to leaving, Sir George had called before him a servant, accusing him of having broken his orchard. The servant (whose name later emerged as Alan Dougal) admitted the offence, and added that Hugh Stewart, son of Janet Mathie, had been his accomplice. That night, Sir George fell ill and suffered for nearly seven weeks from pain in his right side. During his convalescence, an apparently deaf-mute girl aged 13, Janet Douglas, came to Pollok. Douglas identified Janet Mathie as having bewitched Maxwell, and led Maxwell's servants to Mathie's house where she ‘discovered’ a wax effigy, stuck with pins.

Janet Mathie was thus accused of witchcraft, along with two of her children: not Hugh, but her eldest son John Stewart, and their young sister Annabel Stewart, variously stated to be 12, 13 or 14 years old. Bessie Weir, Marjorie Craig and Margaret Jackson were also accused. Several of them were interrogated; Annabel Stewart seems to have been the first to confess, on 9 January 1677. Her confession brought demonology into the investigation. She confessed that she was present at a meeting in her mother's house, and that she saw a black man with white cuffs on his sleeves there. She had also been present at a meeting in her brother's house, where a ‘picture’ (effigy) of clay had been made. The stories of these two effigies, of wax and of clay, need to be distinguished in the testimonies. Later a third effigy, made of earth, was also mentioned.

From Appreciation to Attribution

Modern-day connoisseurship is essentially concerned with identifying an artist's “hand,” with determining “authorship.” Connoisseurship is premised on the idea of individual personality and assumes “that perfect identity of characteristics indicates identity of origin”—an assumption that is itself based on the definition of characteristics as “those features that distinguish one artist from another.” Interest in an artist's hand can be traced to Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, in which Giorgio Vasari distinguishes between good and indifferent work, and describes the methods, manners, processes, behavior, and ideas of his subjects. Vasari denoted all ways of working by the same term: maniera (manner). The word derived from the Latin manus (hand) and had originally been used to describe handwriting styles. Vasari believed that a painter's idiosyncratic manner could best be apprehended in passages executed with boldness and resolve when the painter did not follow nature too closely but relied more on his imagination and inborn talent. By calling attention to personal style and authorship, Vasari, himself a skilled and experienced connoisseur, imparted a powerful impulse to the ideology of attribution.

Courtiers, officials, local notables, and petitioners followed the royal progress as the new king Charles visited the West Country in the autumn of 1625 to inspect his troops and fleet assembled for the expedition against Cadiz. A scandal unfolded nearby as the royal party broke its homeward journey in Somerset to enjoy the generous hospitality laid on at Hinton St George by John Poulet (1586–1649), ‘of whose nobleness all men talk’. According to hostile testimony, steeped in local gossip, the gentleman lawyer Hugh Pyne (1570–1628) said to a neighbour who had seen the king at Hinton,

These were dangerous words, sotto voce, not necessarily accurate, and best not repeated. But Pyne allegedly dug an even deeper hole for himself with expressions that were scandalous, undutiful, and arguably treasonous. Perhaps later at table, perhaps in drink, certainly in private, he was reported saying of King Charles, ‘he is to be carried any whither’, and then fumed aloud, ‘before God, he is no more fit to be king than Hickwright’, referring to ‘an old simple fellow who was then Mr Pyne's shepherd’ – as if fitness had anything to do with a monarch's right to reign and rule.

The politics of Ngugi in translation, especially in English, raises a number of questions, some of which are linked to his decision and reasons to abandon the English language and to write in Gikuyu. This chapter seeks to understand the implications of Ngugi’s translated works for his vision to write in his mother tongue, as both a political and an ideological strategy, and to stop enriching the English heritage at the expense of his mother tongue. And although Ngugi’s novels and essays have been translated into a number of languages across the globe, he has paid closer attention to the translation of his works into English almost immediately after their publication. It also forces us to ask what the straddling between mother tongue and English translation means for Ngugi’s imagined and targeted readers?

13th May 2021

‘Unconstitutional, null and void.’

With these words – which would soon go down in national folklore – the High Court of Kenya brought an ambitious project of constitutional overhaul to a juddering halt.

The origins of the words lay four years in the past. The 2017 General Election had seen a close and bitter contest between the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and his challenger Raila Odinga. The process had been so rife with irregularities that the Supreme Court of Kenya had taken the unprecedented step of declaring the election invalid and ordering a rerun. But a few weeks before the rerun, Raila Odinga stated that none of the reforms recommended by the Supreme Court had been implemented, and that he was, therefore, boycotting the second election. Kenyatta's re-election became a formality.

In office, President Kenyatta gradually moved towards political reconciliation. The public articulation of this was a famous handshake between the two erstwhile contenders, on the steps of Harambee House. The constitutional articulation was a proposed set of seventy-four amendments, collectively known as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Bill, which would be presented to the public as a package deal for constitutional reform. From altering the structure of the executive to increasing the number of constituencies, from creating a presidentially appointed judicial ombudsman to police reform, the BBI Bill contained a motley set of far-reaching changes to the Constitution.