This chapter analyses a set of rarely utilised recorded interviews produced by linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. This chapter argues that through using oral history and memory studies methods, recorded testimonies provide historians with unique opportunities to consider formerly enslaved people’s memories about, and feelings towards, slavery. In their interviews, the elderly African Americans evidenced the complex long-term emotional legacy of slavery: the lingering emotional impact of violence, the communal fear of slavery’s return, the anger about exploitative labour regimes and the pride they felt in their labour achievements. Despite this complex emotional legacy, the interviewees composed their memories with statements of survival and hope, utilising these emotions as scaffolds to create a coherent narrative of their life from slavery into freedom. In doing so, formerly enslaved people created their own emotional framework to understand and document slavery’s impact, counteracting white people’s continued attempts to present slavery as a benevolent institution and restrict African Americans’ emotional expressions.

The number seven was important in the Middle Ages because it represented the creation of the days of the week, the Virgin's holy day on Saturday, and the seven subjects of the liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, and logic of the trivium, and music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy of the quadrivium. The Espill's male readers would have been well aware of its significance because many of them were both religious and learned. This is why I have chosen to end my book with seven theses that encapsulate what I understand to be the consequences of readers’ evidence when it is examined critically from a feminist perspective and in dialogue with Isabel de Villena's Vita Christi. The number seven is a reminder of maternity's radical meaning and potential for women's liberation in the devotional model of creation, and is also distinctly connected to scholarship and study, through which many women have achieved freedom from sociopolitical constraints.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

I have argued that readers’ annotations in the Espill's printed copies constitute evidence of how misogyny persists in society. The annotations do not indicate that readers rejected the book's antifeminist material and tone. Ignorance is bliss, and ignoring, minimizing, or explaining the Espill's misogyny through satire and irony allows for its continuation in the present and the future.

An American genre whose origins lie in Black musical traditions, country music got national exposure when a 1920s budding record industry and radio broadcasts made it available to mass audiences. The Grand Ole Opry helped to spread the sound and launched similar barn dance radio programs. An evolving music shaped a new culture – “honky-tonk” – that addressed postwar changes: male artists mourned the loss of mythologized domesticity, and women artists responded about their changing identities. Simultaneously, country music competed with and incorporated the new forms of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues, often resulting in “outlaw” country music that expressed rebellion and alienation. In the 1960s–1970s, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton became legendary figures bringing a gendered element to lyrics and performances. Country music dynamically continues through today, incorporating greater diversity and musical styles while playing out a duality of expressing and appropriating Black music.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o encountered Lamming and Brathwaite in his twenties and recognised in them a model for his development as an African writer. Their influence was formative. Lamming’s appeal to the black writer to get to know his world intimately first before moving outward, and Brathwaite’s vision of the University of the West Indies as a site of self-knowledge, powered Ngugi’s move to place African literature at the centre of literary studies at the University of Nairobi. Inspired by their commitment to create an aesthetic reconnecting West Indian literature to its spiritual heartland, Ngugi set himself the radical task of spearheading an African literature written in African languages. Fanon’s ideas about the psychology of colonialism and his call for liberation through political and cultural mobilisation first came to Ngugi through Lamming and, in some instances, through Brathwaite. Like Lamming, Ngugi became a harsh critic of cultural imperialism and middle-class obstructors of decolonisation. Impressed by Lamming’s portrayal of the centrality of people in history, Ngugi magnified the community’s prominence in his works. Like Brathwaite, who strove to reverse the erasure of African history and tradition in the Caribbean, Ngugi reconnected the past to the present as a basis for the future, thus ‘re-membering’ Africa. Lamming and Brathwaite stimulated the liberatory thrust of Ngugi’s work.

Introduction

Over the last few chapters, we have examined the interrelationship between rivers and development in Africa. In these chapters, we explored how rivers facilitate the transformation of human society through their immense contributions to urbanization, ecotourism, geopolitical development, and environmental and climatic changes. Meanwhile, the focus of this present chapter is on the interrelationship between rivers and industrialization. In this chapter, we seek to explore the role of rivers in the development of the African continent through its contributions to industrialization. Industrialization has been defined as a “socioeconomic process through which a society will change from pre-industrialization into industrialization,” a part of a broad-spectrum modernization process through the development and utilization of modern technologies. From the above definitions, it is evident that the importance of industrialization is premised on how it opens pathways for modernization and development. A thorough analysis of the interaction between industrialization and rivers has revealed that industrialization has a significant impact on river ecosystems, in addition to the important functions that rivers play in it. Because they are sources of hydropower energy, infrastructure for industrial operations, and routes for the transit of goods, rivers are essential to Africa's industrialization. On the other hand, serious environmental risks, including eutrophication, biomagnification, habitat destruction in aquatic environments, modifications to hydrological processes, and even changes in climate, are mostly brought on by fast industrialization. Developing sustainable methods for river use has become essential, considering the need to safeguard the environment while promoting industrial development.

This chapter analyses the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o to examine how the East African novel of decolonisation critiques the homogenising impulses of official nation-building discourse. The nationalist impulse to construct a unified history and identity often results in the marginalisation of alternative histories and suppresses pluralistic identity formations. In the Kenyan context, this dynamic is evident in the reconfiguration of anti-colonial resistance as a minor narrative, subordinated to a state-authored nationalist history. As the symbolic legitimacy of the postcolonial nation erodes under neo-colonial conditions, the state increasingly relies on coercion to enforce allegiance to the nation, thereby transforming nation-building into authoritarianism. Focusing particularly on the novel Matigari, this chapter examines how literature functions as a site of resistance through the imagining of counter-nations and alternative political futures. Matigari, with its Gikuyu composition and oral narrative structure, is presented as a radical intervention in Kenya’s political discourse. Ngugi’s aesthetic choices in Matigari, along with its resonance among the popular classes, mark it as a pivotal text in his liberationist project. The novel’s portrayal of the Kenyan nation-state as a neo-colony and a betrayer of genuine nationalist ideals positions it as a powerful critique of post-independence statehood and its failed promises.

In Chapter 2 I examined how genealogy as a memorial structure was used politically in works such as Walter Bower's Scotichronicon to encourage ways of thinking about national independence and identity. I suggested that Bower and other writers conceived of composition as an act of memory; rewriting the past became a crucial element of their process of creating a sense of collective identity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century northern England and Scotland. While this chapter continues to examine the intersection of memory and historiography, I move away from discussions of genealogy to analyse how Bower remembered English acts of aggression in Scotland. I suggest that these memories were used within a proto-nationalist framework to disseminate a shared history that was understood to be representative of Scotland's struggle for identity and independence. The focus of this discussion is the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon, a shorter version of Bower's longer text. I argue that, within the Coupar Angus version of his history, Bower privileges particular moments of Anglo-Scottish conflict by entreating his readers to remember certain events of the Wars of Independence as formative moments of Scottish distinctiveness.

In the Middle Ages, memory, in the form of recollection, was a ‘task of composition’ rather than simply a means of retention: a creative tool of the mind, providing a basis for active contemplation. This creative aspect of memory – remembrance – points to the fact that memories are not only actively made, but that they are open to being repeatedly remade in myriad contexts. Through a close examination of the Coupar Angus Prologue, this process of historical reconstruction becomes distinctly apparent and increasingly political.

…from the tenth century on queens emerged in their own right. Whereas prior to that time the terminology used was “the queen of the king of Tara”, after that point the usage was simply “the queen of Tara”. Ó Corráin (1978) sees this as reflecting a major rise in the status of women. The queens of this time exercised considerable political and social influence (ibid.). It is clear from this that female images – whether they were goddesses or actual living people who took on a legendary character – were seen as powerful. Indeed women were believed to have special powers that men did not have (O hOgain, op. cit.).

Passed down orally from generation to generation and dating well into the Christian era, some goddesses were “gentle and protective” while others “instilled terror and panic in the opponent through magical powers and by their very presence”. Notable examples include: the sexual goddess of Connaught, Queen Maeve; the “pirate queen” Grainne Mhaol; and the goddesses of sovereignty who symbolised the land of Ireland. Although Gaelic society was certainly patriarchal during this time, the use of Brehon laws provided some freedoms to women. As noted by Fine-Davis, “women were granted extensive rights during this period, particularly with regard to marriage, divorce and property rights”. Partially overturned by the Norman invasion in the late twelfth century, Irish society was split into two communities: the Gaelic people who continued to live under forms of Brehon law; and Anglo-Normans who lived under the English Common Law.

A series of theses demonstrates continuities across the medieval/modern divide. Thesis 1 concerns fundamental theology, specifically the relation between divine grace and human free will. Theses 10 on marriage and 12 on baptism also address doctrine and the interface between belief and positive law. The link between confession, repentance and indulgences forms the theme of thesis 6. The borderline between clerical and lay status is treated in theses 3 and 11, while thesis 5 examines the relation between the ‘secular’ and the ‘regular’ clergy. ‘Reform’, that endemic preoccupation of the Latin Church, is the theme of thesis 4, which considers ferocious measures against simony, and of thesis 7, on the visitation of monasteries. Thesis 9 addresses the continuity of missionary impulse, and thesis 8 the continuity of the delegate system. Thesis 2, on the management of the benefice system, is directed towards the material basis of the whole structure. Linking the theses is the argument that the pope functioned as regulator of relations between evolving subsets, the helpdesk that resolved recurrent incompatibilities, the ‘maintenance man of the systems of the Church’.