‘Anglicana ecclesia libera sit’ was a mantra that the English clergy clung to throughout the later medieval period. Enshrined in chapter one of Magna Carta, it was a convincing statement of English ecclesiastical autonomy, of a Church theoretically free from the constraints of the laity. Yet, this freedom was vague. Though English kings were bound by their coronation oath to uphold the liberty of the English Church (along with maintaining good law and dispensing justice), libertas ecclesie was easily circumvented by kings unwilling to cede authority. Even statutes that predominantly confirmed ecclesiastical rights and liberties, such as the Articuli Cleri of 1316, could include passages that asserted the king's interests over those of the Church. To remedy this, kings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, often at the behest of the English clergy, sought to quantify this abstract ‘freedom of the English Church’ so that it could be upheld and enforced. In 1286, the royal writ circumspecte agatis outlined which types of dispute were ecclesiastical in nature. In 1316, the Articuli Cleri – granted by Edward II as a response to thirteen specific clerical grievances – addressed English ecclesiastical concerns and provided confirmation of several Church freedoms. Edward III followed suit in 1344, enacting a statute exempting prelates from secular jurisdiction, followed in 1352 by his statute Pro Clero, which further defined this exemption. However, attaching the ‘freedom of the English Church’ to specific liberties and grievances limited its scope. Although libertas ecclesie was an incontrovertible right, it was only the individual agreed-upon privileges that could be enforced. Additionally, these specific privileges required royal approval, often through statutory legislation. Anglicana ecclesia was undoubtedly free from secular jurisdiction, but it was the king that authorised and defined the extent of this freedom. With each statute and royal charter that confirmed ecclesiastical liberties the king's authority over the English Church was tacitly approved.

During the fifteenth century libertas ecclesie continued to be invoked to defend specific freedoms. The Canterbury convocations in 1434 and 1439, for example, were summoned by Henry Chichele to right a number of wrongs that threatened the liberty of Holy Church. But anything decided in convocation had to receive secular confirmation from the king, often through parliament, in order to enforce these liberties.

This started as a work of commemoration and celebration. The two of us had been working on Ngũgĩ's works for many years from different directions— Simon Gikandi as a literary critic and historian; Ndirangu Wachanga as a journalist and documentarist. In the course of our lives and work, we had had many encounters with Ngũgĩ and knew him well in different contexts. On January 5, 2018, the author, one of the most eminent writers to have come out of Africa in the modern period, would be celebrating his 80th birthday. We thought it would be a good occasion to reflect on Ngũgĩ's life in writing, and to think through his work from the perspective of those who had known him either personally or through reading and commenting on his texts. Our goal was to put together a collection of short essays, poems, and stories that reflect on the life of the writer, his world, and his works. We were particularly interested in imaginative pieces that would reveal the different, and sometimes complex, layers that had gone into the making of the writer; and we wanted to go beyond his well-established institutional image and to probe how what might initially have appeared to be minor episodes in his life provided vistas into his coming into being as a writer, as an intellectual of decolonization, and a major figure in conversations about human rights and justice in the long twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. We were also interested in Ngũgĩ's role outside the academy in the world of education, the mass media, community theater, and activism, places where we had encountered him many times. The works collected here are reflections of this desire to celebrate the writer in his prime.

The story of Ngũgĩ's life and its intersection between his experiences and education is well known. His interviews over the years, and his memoirs in late career, have given us a complex image of the writer in his various iterations; but what we see in this collection is both an extension and complication of this well-established narrative. Ngũgĩ means different things to different people, but one of the themes running through the collection is how he is both rooted in a very specific Gĩkũyũ and Kenyan realm from which he has spread his wings to the world.

In June 1474 the Irish Council in Dublin dispatched a number of messengers in ‘enbassade’ to King Edward IV of England. Led by Sir Gilbert Debenham (d.1500), their mission was to deliver a report to the king and his council outlining the ‘myserable state’ of the colony as well as the need for immediate royal intervention in Ireland for the ‘relef and socour of his said land’. Most striking among the items listed in the report was the fear that a Scottish invasion of Ireland was imminent and that the Scottish king, James III, ‘havyng in … mynd the grete conquast that Bruce some tyme sens the kyng of Scotts made in the same land’ planned to ‘reduce all thye [i.e. Edward IV’s] land to the obeysuance of the king of Scotts’. No such invasion occurred, however. The rather exaggerated belief that ‘10,000 and more’ Scottish troops ‘had entred and dwellen in Ullester’ more than likely reflected the increased Scottish military presence in western Scotland and the Firth of Clyde in the lead-up to James III's forfeiture of the earldom of Ross – the title to which was then held by the fourth (and last) Lord of the Isles, John MacDonald (d.1503). These security concerns were nevertheless not completely unfounded. Instead, English anxieties regarding the possibility of Scottish intervention in Ireland were symptomatic not only of an active royal Scottish interest in Ireland but also of much older and established geopolitical concerns.

By the late fourteenth century England, despite being the most powerful kingdom, financially, economically and militarily, could no longer dominate insular politics. Under Edward I the ‘first English empire’ had reached its zenith by the year 1300; the king's wars of conquest in Scotland, however, resulted in the destabilisation and eventual reorientation of ‘British’ politics. Not only was the pan-insular aristocratic nexus that had bound communities of Anglo-Norman ancestry in relative stability since the early thirteenth century now shattered, the establishment of the Bruce monarchy and the strengthening of Franco-Scottish ties greatly increased England’s vulnerability within the wider archipelagic context. The outbreak and course of the Hundred Years War served to ingrain political alliances in western Europe and by the late fourteenth century the English had suffered a number of major reverses in the continental war, becoming entangled in France and the Iberian peninsula.

In reflecting on Weep Not, Child, I think it is important to first talk about James Ngũgĩ who became James Thiong'o Ngũgĩ in 1960 then later Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. I think it is also useful to build the context of the definition of key literary concerns in the East African region that revolved around the publication of Weep Not, Child, including a summary appraisal of Ngũgĩ's time at Makerere University College in the East Africa of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ngũgĩ himself has said a lot about this time in his essays and memoirs. In fact, because he takes this time as definitive for himself as an author, he has now written a memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, specifically remembering his time at Makerere. Ngũgĩ has made his attachment to Makerere a public matter, and many of us know that whenever it is possible for him to come back to visit Makerere, however briefly, he does so. He visited Makerere University again in July 2013 to celebrate 50 years of the University of East Africa. My own impression is that while Ngũgĩ has traveled and his literary work has gone places, his time at Makerere remains important to him as a writer. During Ngũgĩ's time, as he humorously commented in his keynote address at Makerere University in 2013, denying someone entry to Makerere was like denying him a wife. It was that fundamental.

I have read some of the materials on Ngũgĩ's time at Makerere in the University library's archive, and these reveal the vibrant spirit of the period and the power of the sense of change in the 1960s. There is also an abundance of comments on Ngũgĩ in this archive. In a letter of recommendation written on 13th November, 1963, a year before the publication of Weep Not, Child, Professor G. Walton, the then Head of the English Department, describes Ngũgĩ as

What was it like being in the same class with Ngũgĩ?

Being in the same class as Ngũgĩ was not a problem but a joy. Once I had graduated, I wanted to learn things by myself. I did not want to continue studying formally but to learn. That is why I went to teach at St Mary's College, Kisubi. One of the best ways of learning is by teaching. I was the first Asian to teach at St Mary's, as far as I know.

When Ngũgĩ and I attended classes together [at Leeds], we attended what at the University of Iowa are called ‘electives’, namely, courses we wanted to take. We both attended lectures by Arnold Kettle and also attended a seminar on the novel. Both of us thought that Kettle's courses were the best of the best. Kettle's two-volume book on the novel [An Introduction to the English Novel] was brilliant. Ngũgĩ was a very humble man and so knowledgeable. After the classes and the seminar, Ngũgĩ and I used to discuss what we had learned.

Did you know Ngũgĩ as a writer?

Ngũgĩ was a visionary, a political thinker, a person who keeps growing, who is persistent. It is not easy to be a novelist. And when everyone thinks you are done, you write a novel [Wizard of the Crow] of a thousand-plus pages (edited to seven hundred and sixty-eight pages), a novel which is funny and deep and readable. I taught the novel in my African literature class this Spring and students loved Ngũgĩ's novel. They did not find it difficult to read. The essay published on this novel, Wizard of the Crow, [in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o] edited by Oliver Lovesey is by my former student, Steve Ellerhoff.

Ngũgĩ taught us how to pursue our visions without staying at one point. This is both strategy and growth. I said to Ngũgĩ when we met some years ago that ninety per cent of what I teach my students is what I taught myself. ‘That is the best way’, said Ngũgĩ.

Thus starts the account of the funeral in London of Antoine de Pierrepont, seigneur of La Motte d’Arisolles, which is preserved in the British Library. It is a short (just under 400 words) and seemingly incomplete account in the hand of Sir Thomas Writhe alias Wriothesley, Garter king of arms. At the top right-hand corner of folio 159v, above the text, Wriothesley has drawn Pierrepont's pennon (the long triangular flag) and coat of arms (a helm, a supporter and a crest). The document names Pierrepont's executors and some of the mourners and describes the order of the funeral procession from Crosby Place to the church and the seating arrangements there.

What makes this document and the event even more interesting is that we also have a French description of Pierrepont's funeral. It is to be found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Entitled ‘Lordre de linhumacion et enterement fait du corps de feu monsieur le mareschal darisolles enbassadeur du Roy en engleterre audit lieu d’engleterre ou Il morut’, it is a much longer (over 1,000 words) and more detailed report. It tells of who took part in the procession, how they were dressed, in which order they walked; it gives the name of the church (St. Clement Eastcheap) and describes the two-day ceremony that took place there and also the meal served on the evening of the first day. The account is anonymous but both documents mention the presence of a French king of arms in the procession, whom Wriothesley names as Normandie (Gabriel Le Forestier). It was the duty of the king of arms to record funerals so we can reasonably assert that Normandie is the anonymous author, and his detailed description of the heraldic devices and the order of precedence would seem to corroborate such an attribution. These two documents are, as far as I know, the only accounts we have of a foreign ambassador's funeral in London in the sixteenth century and, furthermore, the only ones in two different languages.

Anne Adams

In Globalectics, a book from 2012 on postcolonial literature, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o invokes Johan Wolfgang von Goethe to make the assertion that ‘the postcolonial is at the heart of the constitution of Goethe's world literature’ (55). He quotes Goethe's claim from the early nineteenth century that ‘ “[T]he epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” ’ (44). Ngũgĩ himself comments further:

Ngũgĩ does acknowledge, of course, that Germany's most revered poet ‘may have been thinking of Europe’. Indeed, if we regard Goethe's continued reiteration of the ‘world-literature’ concept up to the end of his life, we see that he clearly was equating ‘world’ with Europe: In the draft for one issue of his Kunst und Alterthum (1829), he wrote ‘Erste Fassung: “Weltliteratur.” Zweite Fassung: “Europaische, d.h. Welt-Literatur” ’ (‘First version: “World Literature.” Second version: “European, i.e. World Literature” ’).

Taking the liberty myself to extend the reflections of the twenty-first-century Kenyan being celebrated today on the ideas of the nineteenth-century celebrated German, I would add another Goethe statement on world literature, which adds a bit more substance to the concept, although this time, addressing journals (1828):

Violence in its many forms – warfare, murder, manslaughter or assault – was an omnipresent phenomenon in medieval society. It was especially linked to lay society, but members of the clergy were not immune to it either. Medieval sources – court records, annals, treatises and many others – tell about clergymen involved in violent events. In these sources clergymen are typically victims of a violent act committed by a layperson. But, even though the ecclesiastical legislation strictly forbade members of the clergy from acting violently, medieval sources also contain a lot of information about clergymen who committed violent crimes. Particularly good source material for the study of clerical violence comes from the register series of the apostolic penitentiary, which contains numerous petitions from clergymen all over Christendom asking for pardon because of violent behaviour.

The aim of this chapter, which is based on the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century penitentiary documentation, is to examine what kinds of strategy the clergymen who turned to the penitentiary applied in order to get their consciences cleansed. In particular, it analyses the wording that the clients of the penitentiary accused of homicide used in their petitions in order to convince papal officials of their innocence.

Canon Law and Violent Clergy

According to the principle of the fifth commandment (‘Thou shalt not kill’, Ex. 20:13), the ecclesiastical norms did not tolerate any form of violence or killing. Since members of the clergy were supposed to act as models for laypeople, the ecclesiastical norms required clergymen to abstain from violence. In order to protect the peaceful clergymen from lay violence the Second Lateran Council (1139) stipulated in its constitution no. 15 – known as Si quis suadente – that anyone who laid violent hands on the members of the clergy or on men or women in monastic vocation incurred automatic excommunication, which could be lifted only by a papal absolution. This constitution became part of what is now known as privilegium canonis and refers to the special protection of clergymen against any kind of assault. As Peter Clarke has pointed out, this was not the only way the Church tried to protect its officials. The Church introduced also another privilege, privilegium fori, according to which only a clergyman could judge the misdeeds of another clergyman. In practice, this privilege meant that the crimes committed by clergymen had to be judged in ecclesiastical tribunals.

In contemporary society, e-petitioning faces criticism on the grounds of accessibility; as documents that are easy to set up and to sign, they are viewed as potentially encouraging the promotion of frivolous causes or of ‘slacktivism’, political activism that has very little chance of achieving real-life impact and is largely aimed at promoting a feeling of well-being in the supporter. In the words of one journalist: ‘Opening a link, clicking on a send button … can anyone possibly take this seriously as a way of engaging in debate on any subject that matters? It's effortless moral outrage, requiring neither understanding nor commitment on the part of the clickers.’ By contrast, for the medieval petitioner, we would assume that understanding and commitment were prerequisites; no-one would go to the trouble of having a petition drawn up and presented who did not have a real grievance or belief that a particular issue required redress. The basis for comparison between medieval and modern petitioning is clearly very slight, but serves to underline the importance of accessibility and the role of the mediator. In contrast to petitioning today, the medieval petitioner required the services of a trained scribe who would be able to structure their request according to the appropriate forms. This chapter addresses the question of identity of these scribes, their role in the petitionary process and the implications this has for our understanding of petitioning as a means of accessing medieval justice. It draws on examples from petitions addressed to the highest English secular authorities: the king, parliament and chancellor.

The status of petitions is somewhat ambiguous; as Dodd has observed, ‘they fit comfortably neither into the category of records produced by the Crown nor into the designation of “local” documents written independently of influence from the royal secretariat’. Previously, several commentators have argued that the petitions surviving in The National Archives are not themselves the originals, but copies drawn up by the chancery clerks. This is now generally agreed to be a false supposition; however, the identity of those scribes responsible for drafting petitions remains a matter of debate. There are a number of potential scenarios in which petitions were drawn up.

In 1977, I was invited by Ngũgĩ to join him in the production of Ngaahika Ndeenda at Kamĩrĩĩthũ, his home village. At that time I knew very little about the history of Kenya other than the text book school versions and even less about viewing the history from the point of the majority of Kenyans who are the peasants and workers. Fresh from Europe, I was a starry eyed young man eager to engage with ‘African culture’ and particularly the culture of the ‘grassroots’ ethnicities of Kenya, my place of birth.

I was a junior researcher at the Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi and out in the field a lot working on material culture. It was in the field that my eyes opened up to the atrocities of the Kenyatta regime and the gruesome poverty experienced by many Kenyans. I used to cross over to the Northern Frontier District (NFD) military zone where no journalist was allowed, and I saw places where there were Mau Mau type concentration camps. I witnessed humiliation of the rural citizens by the regime's forces and the administration. I saw that the pogroms against the intellectuals that followed both the performance of Ngaahika Ndeenda and Maitũ Njugĩra and the detentions and exiles were not different from those in the rural north of Kenya and later among the Pokot and Turkana peoples. In the city where I lived, I saw police brutality waged on students and passers-by. This was the reality of the non-elites in everyday Kenya. These sights made a tremendous impact on me and gradually I began to understand what Ngũgĩ was saying, why the regime needed to be confronted, and how he was doing it. Ngũgĩ addressed the peasant farmers, students and workers from around like those from the Bata shoe factory. He addressed them in their own language and music. Poverty was the context and dictatorship the reason for the risk of taking Ngaahika Ndeenda and later Maitũ Njugĩra to the public forum.

I began reading about the Mau Mau.