The history of the Basotho community now found in the Dewure Purchase Areas in Gutu District is intertwined with the history of evangelisation of the region. Most of the members of this community are descendants of the Basotho evangelists who migrated to present day Zimbabwe from South Africa in the late nineteenth century with missionaries who were carrying out evangelical work among the southern Shona. Upon their settlement in Southern Rhodesia the Basotho first purchased two farms in the Victoria area, Niekerk's Rust (in Harawe) and Erichsthal (in Chinhango). Having lived on these two farms for almost three decades they were evicted in the 1930s following the enactment of the Land Apportionment Act, after which they moved to the newly created Dewure Purchase Areas in Gutu. The history of these Basotho thus revolves around migration, evangelisation, ownership of freehold farms and struggles over belonging. The main objective of this chapter is to analyse the migration history of these Basotho, their relationships with missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church, the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society and the Berlin Missionary Society, and to examine how they used their position as owners of freehold land to negotiate belonging. It is argued that ownership of farms, and to some extent the presence of graves, have long been central to the Basotho's constructions of belonging and as a result they feature prominently in the Basotho memorialisation of their migration, displacement and settlement in their present farms. Religion, education and farm ownership were also central issues in the construction of the Basotho as progressive Africans.

MISSIONARIES AND AFRICAN INTERMEDIARIES

Although a number of African evangelists, among them Zulu, Venda and Xhosa, played a critical role in the evangelisation of the southern Shona to the north of the Limpopo River, the Basotho or Sotho speakers were arguably the ones who played the greatest role. The Basotho in particular had a longer history of participation in evangelisation work. As Weller and Linden argue:

The Basotho converts took the initiative to evangelise fellow Africans to Christianity.

A young Luso-African child slave named Esperança (Hope) arrived at England's Royal African Company (RAC) fort on James Island in the Gambia River in the early 1680s. Precisely who took her there, who gave her the name Esperança, and whether she was a captive or born into slavery, are all unknowns. We learn of her approximate age from English court and parish records, which suggest she was born in about 1675. She became a child slave of the RAC employee John Booker, whose time of arrival at the James Island fort is also uncertain. The first mention of him in the RAC account books comes in December 1680. A major change in staffing at the fort on 31 August 1683 brought Alexander Cleeve to the top position of company agent with Booker as his ‘second’, promotions that would situate both men at the centre of RAC trading operations on West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast. During the late seventeenth century, when the company enjoyed a monopoly of English trade in Africa, Anglo-African commerce in Upper Guinea was organised primarily by the James Island agent and his assistants. Atlantic commerce and the socially fluid, multi-cultural world it generated would mark in very particular ways the lives of Booker, his child slave Hope, and others living on and around the island. This chapter focuses on the life and travels of Hope and what her experiences can reveal about social and economic prospects and constraints faced by Euro-African women in the early modern era. Those who attained high status, designated by titles such as senhora or signare, illustrate the career paths open to women as merchants, property owners and slave holders in Atlantic Africa.

James Island

Lying barren and exposed at the mouth of the Gambia River, this small, rocky outcrop was highly prized by merchants from a number of European countries for its strategically important location. The Gambia was a major artery in local and Atlantic trade, connecting inland commercial markets with coastal and maritime traffic (Map 9). Taken into English hands in 1661, James Island developed into an inter-continental trading hub especially after 1677, as the newly formed RAC established a station there and began to staff and supply it regularly.

In 1862, the architect and literary editor James Thomas Knowles published a version of Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur for children: The Story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The first of its kind, Knowles's book was inspired by the then recent publication of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and dedicated to the poet ‘as a tribute of the sincerest and warmest respect’. Tennyson approved of Knowles's endeavour, and the two became close friends, with Knowles claiming at one point that Tennyson had said, ‘I know more about Arthur than any man in England, and I think you know next most.’ In his preface, Knowles noted that the Morte had ‘never been modernised or adapted for general circulation’, but that boys ‘would probably become the principal readers of the Arthur legends in a popular form’, eager to ‘devour its tales of adventure and daring and magic and conquest’. As testament to this apparently fundamental link between the Morte Darthur and the boy reader, Knowles cited the example of the poet Robert Southey, who recalled, ‘when I was a schoolboy I possessed a wretchedly imperfect copy of it, and there was no book except the “Fairy Queen” which I pressed so often or with such deep contentment’. The need to restore Malory to his rightful place among boy readers was apparently pressing: following the success of Tennyson's Idylls, Knowles claimed, ‘an outline of the noble story has almost become a necessary item of general information’. Knowles intended his book to fill this gap, to become ‘the introductory popular reading book on King Arthur – the Primer of the subject’ for a young audience. Underpinning this endeavour were anxieties about the moral influence of Malory's tale upon the impressionable young minds of the nineteenth century. An accessible version of the legend was necessary, Knowles claimed, ‘lest any part neglected should fall to baser meanings in unworthier hands’. Done properly, he predicted, the regeneration of Arthur would put down ‘the pandering cry of Art for Art's sake’, replacing it with ‘Art for Man's sake’, and bring Arthur back ‘to be a true King and Power among men’.

Castles, fortresses, alcázares originally held by Islamic forces, citadels, and walled towns all became part of the urban and rural landscape of Spain. All were fought over, besieged, and taken, frontier by frontier, kingdom by kingdom. Could Spain's urban and rural environment, could its historic memory of conquest and reconquest, have influenced understanding of the Virgin Mary, defender of Christians, in the medieval period?

Anglo-Norman and French writing incorporates architectural allegories of the Virgin as early as the twelfth century, when they begin to appear in homilies and liturgical texts. However, no comparable study has been made of the castle as an allegory of the Virgin in Hispanic writing. This chapter will take the first steps towards examining how and when Hispanic poets and authors in the Middle Ages began to employ castle imagery to symbolize the Virgin and what they believed this to signify. I will examine how the trope of the Virgin as a defensive power and a protective space develops over the Middle Ages.

Believers had begun to think of the Virgin as a protective space long before campaigns began to wrest territory from its occupying forces. The Virgin was the defender of those who called on her. Such belief had already taken root in the Christian faith in the earliest times and is apparent in an intercessory prayer addressed to the Virgin on a fragment of papyrus dating from late ancient Egypt, a very early version of the prayer Sub tuum praesidium: ‘We take refuge in your mercy, Theotokos. Do not disregard our prayers in troubling times, but deliver us from danger, O only pure one, only blessed one.’5 From this protective space, afforded by the Virgin's mercy, there was to develop an allegorical representation of her body as a castle, fortress, or tower, which sheltered the faithful from the onslaught of their enemies.

Castles have been described as ‘the best-known “secular” architecture of medieval religious literature’. Although castles appear in medieval writing, particularly in chivalry novels, they act as a backdrop against which the action takes place. Even so, they transmit certain attributes of place because of their setting: nobility of purpose, rituals of chivalric behaviour, and fortitude. Because of their capacity for protection when there was an onslaught from enemy forces, castles became a way of representing allegorically the virtuous body or the holy soul defending itself from sin.

Male inauguration prayers (K)

K1 Te invocamus domine sancte pater omnipotens aeterne deus

K2 Deus qui populis tuis virtute consulis et amore dominaris

K3 In diebus tuis oriatur omnibus aequitas et iustitia

K4 Omnipotens sempiterne deus creator ac gubernator caeli et terrae

K5 Christe perunge hunc regem in regimen unde unxisti sacerdotes reges

K6 Deus electorum fortitudo et humilium celsitudo

K7 Deus dei filius ihesus christus dominus noster

K8 Accipe anulum signaculum videlicet sanctae fidei

K9 Deus cuius est omnis potestas et dignitas

K10 Accipe hunc gladium cum dei benedictione tibi conlatum

K11 Deus qui prouidentia tua caelestia simul et terrena moderaris

K12 Coronet te deus corona glorie atque iustitiae

K13 Deus perpetuitatis dux virtutem cunctorum hostium victor

K14 Accipe sceptrum regiae potestatis insigne virgam scilicet rectam regni

K15 Omnium domine fons bonorum cunctorumque deus institutor profectuum

K16 Accipe virgam virtutis atque aequitatis qua intellegas mulcere pios

K17 Extendat omnipotens dominus dexteram suae benedictionis

K18 Benedic domine hunc praeelectum principem

K19 Sta et retine amodo statum quem huc usque paterna suggestion tenuisti

K20 Omnipotens det tibi deus de rore caeli et de pinguedine terrae

K21 Benedic domine fortitudinem principis et opera manuum illius suscipe

K22 Benedic domine hunc regem nostrum N. qui regna omnium moderaris

K23 Deus ineffabilis auctor mundi conditor generis humani

K24 Unguantur manus istae de oleo sanctificato unde uncti fuerunt reges

K25 Prospice omnipotens deus serenis optutibus hunc gloriosum regem

K26 Deus qui es iustorum gloria et misericordia peccatorum

K27 Accipe gladium per manus episcoporum licet indignas

K28 Accipe armillas sinceritatis et sapientiae

K29 Accipe pallium quattuor initiis formatum

K30 Deus tuorum corona fidelium qui in capitibus eorum ponis coronam

K31 Accipe regiae dignatis anulum et per hunc in te catholicae fidei signaculum

K32 Benedicat tibi deus custodiatque te

K33 Omnipotens sempiterne deus qui famulum tuum regni fastigio

K34 Deus qui scis genus humanum nulla virtute posse subsistere

K35 Omnipotens sempiterne deus caelestium terrestriumque moderator

K36 Spiritus sancti gratia humilitatis nostrae officio

K37 Accipe coronam regni quae licet ab indignis episcoporum

K38 Exaudi quesumus domine preces nostras

K39 Omnipotens sempiterne deus qui es cunctorum benedictio

K40 Deus in cuius manu corda regum sunt da famulo tuo

K41 Unde unxisti sacerdotes reges et prophetas quatinus iustitiam diligens

K42 Domine deus omnipotens cuius est omnis potestas

Introduction: Genre and Reception

In the hierarchical framework that has formed around Schubert's production of Lieder, the longer dramatic settings traditionally have been somewhat undervalued. Among these, ‘Adelwold und Emma’, D. 211 (1815), seems to have been particularly the victim of a classic vicious circle, neglected in performance and in scholarship – or despised by the critics when they have noticed it. At this point we might invoke Schumann's well-known epithet of ‘heavenly length’. This feature of Schubert's work has tended to arouse a response at opposite ends of the spectrum – either admiration or opprobrium – among the composer's devotees and critics. And length is the feature that informs the total substance of Richard Capell's commentary on ‘Adelwold und Emma’ in his Schubert's Songs, his comment merely being consigned to a footnote apropos mention of ‘some of the longest pieces’ among the extended ballads, with Capell observing of D. 211 only that it is ‘the longest of all … (26 pages)’.

Length is used by Capell as a means of setting up a prejudice against these early ballads. He introduces them thus: ‘[Among the songs of 1815] there are the numerous extended compositions in various movements. They are usually less inviting than the little strophic songs’; although he goes on to admit that ‘yet hardly one is without a beautiful page, whatever the inequalities of the whole’. Capell's comments on other ballads of 1815 include (on ‘Auf einen Kirchhof ’, D. 151): ‘Schubert has adopted a quasi-dramatic form and the song fails through excess of exertion’. Summing up the group of dramatic Lieder, he reiterates more forcefully the comparative stance he took at the start of the discussion: ‘It might have been thought that years separated such music from the masterpieces of the period. These compositions show Schubert in the act of practising his pen in the intervals between the visits of his genius’.