Before turning to the second kind of imitation, which consists, as I have already said, in reproducing the tone of passions and feelings, and even in reproducing in music the image of objects that are only visible, I shall say a few more words about physical imitation.

This kind of imitation, according to M. Carpani, was taken to such an excess in seventeenth-century Italy that the composer Melani, in his opera Le Bailli de Coloniola, set to music the following words and asked his orchestra to take on the roles of the animals mentioned below:

Sometimes the frog in the mud Sings cheerfully: kouà kouà rà; The cricket goes: tri tri tri, And the little lamb: bè bè; The nightingale goes: kiou kiou kiou, And the cock: couri ki ki.

But long before Melani, in antiquity this kind of imitation was employed by the Greeks in their plays, as in Aristophanes's The Frogs and The Birds. Although Haydn was careful and discerning about using it in his famous oratorios, one can't help regretting that the subjects he chose often led him to embrace such childishness. No doubt he judged them at their true worth, and perhaps he found place for them in his scores merely to please certain amateurs of the kind one finds in society, who are more taken by such instrumental tours de force than by feats of sublime inspiration. Baron van Swieten, among others, bullied the great composer to include frogs.

Both of John Skelton's famous anti-Wolsey satires, Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, begin with extended passages mocking his own style. These passages operate differently: in Collyn Clout, the characterisation of the speaker as an unlearned fool implicates the poem in the fool convention, inviting Wolsey to respond appropriately, that is graciously; whereas the excursus on age at the opening of Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, positioned after Skelton's screed against niggardly patrons, aligns the speaker with his subject – two old men, neither one of them welcome at the centre. Both passages also illustrate something important about the mechanics or praxis of Skelton's poetry, the means by which he achieves his distinctive style. Collyn Clout foregrounds the materiality of language:

Sey this and sey that: ‘His heed is so fat He wottyth never what Ne whereof he speketh.’ ‘He cryeth and he creketh, He pryeth and he preketh, he chydeth and he chatters, He prayeth and he patters; He clyttreth and he clatters, He medleth and he smatters, He gloseth and he flatters.’ Or yf he speke playne, Than he lacketh brayne[.]

The accumulation here of vaguely onomatopoeic verbs, all disparagingly describing and enacting the fool's trivial speech, simultaneously emphasises the productivity of Skelton's language and its negligibility. Indeed, what makes Skelton's writing so negligible is precisely its profusion, the way in which words propagate seemingly under their proper power, without adding anything to the sense. As Bassanio will later say of Gratiano, he ‘speakes an infinite deale of nothing.’

As political authority in the German kingdom grew increasingly fragmented over the course of the thirteenth century, many cities began to develop military institutions to defend their citizens and interests. The opponents, and potential opponents, of these cities included competitors for the German throne, their own bishops, local aristocrats and even other cities. Many cities took steps to improve their mural defenses, institute civic militias, develop arsenals and establish taxes to pay for these new military burdens. Many of these aspects of urban military organization have received extensive attention from scholars. However, one important element of urban military organization that has not yet benefitted from significant attention was the practice of authorities in many Germany cities to establish military contracts with local aristocrats. These contracts took a variety of forms, including the prohibition on these men and their supporters from joining the enemies of the city as well as the actual recruitment of secular magnates to serve in the defense of the city or even to participate in the city's own expeditionary campaigns. One common thread among the various types of military contracts with local aristocrats was their designation as Mitbürger of the citizens in a particular city, with all of the rights of urban citizenship. This essay will examine the various military agreements made by cities in the Rhineland with the aristocrats living in their hinterlands over the course of the thirteenth century.

From 1239 to 1254 the Staufen kings of Germany, Frederick II (1212–50) and his son Conrad IV (1237–54), were engaged in a titanic struggle against the papacy.

It may initially strike the reader as otiose to follow Berlioz's demolition of Duponchel with another, but this article is crucial in providing chapter and verse for the composer's discontent.

This evening will remain in my memory as the saddest I’ve attended since the memorable benefit performance given on the same stage for Mlle Falcon. I can't imagine that the public who were present at the musical agony of that young and beautiful singer, whom it surrounded with so much love and passionate admiration, suffered more on that occasion than at the recent spectacle of Duprez's fanatical, ferocious devotion to the theatre of which he was for so long the glory and support. The fact is (and it needs to be said in favour of our Parisian public who are so fickle and ungrateful in general towards its one-time idols) that certain artists enjoy the rare privilege of retaining their unalloyed sympathies for years on end, and as passionately as ever. Duprez is one of these. Here, then, is the position he has come to assume.

The Opéra is sick, the Opéra is dying. It's undeniably easier and more straightforward to regain the interest of a public who are bored, discontented, and discouraged by means of a striking artist, a young talent, original, seductive, and exceptional, who takes control and carries everything before him, than it is by the impact of a fine ensemble, a majestic, faithful and lively production of the great works in its repertoire, a grandeur that can be achieved only through intelligent and constant care, well directed efforts, and dedication that is even painful, supported by a true and deep love of music. As a result, it was decided to turn almost exclusively to this brave singer capable of preventing so many disasters, this diamond who's able to carry so much paste.

This quotation, taken from a radio broadcast delivered on Sunday 13 September 1941 by Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster, is a reminder of the important and enduring relationship between the Catholic Church in Britain and the Central European state of Poland. It was spoken in the context of the Second World War and the continuing devastation caused by the German occupation of the country that had begun two years previously, but it remained applicable to the Catholic Church's attitude in the period following that war, when the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe fell under the control of Soviet-influenced communist governments. Poles, along with Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Latvians and Lithuanians, fled their homelands to escape from religious persecution, arriving in Britain in their thousands during the late 1940s and 1950s. Many lay Catholic associations, independent from hierarchical control, took it upon themselves to organise initiatives and raise funds for these exiles. This article will examine the role played by one such lay society, the Newman Association, in supporting the tertiary education of Polish exiles in Britain in the Second World War and its aftermath.

The manuscript now known as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, first came to public attention in the mid-nineteenth century. An initial list of the contents of ‘MS Porkington 10’ furnished by Thomas Phillipps was quickly extended by Frederic Madden, and both their descriptive efforts informed the report prepared by Alfred J. Horwood for the Historic Manuscripts Commission. All three scholars focussed on the identification of the small volume's multiple texts and made no mention of its copyists beyond noting the inscription ‘H. Hattun’, which Madden believed was the name of the scribe or compiler. The manuscript's scribal production received no investigation until the 1950s when Auvo Kurvinen posited a multiplicity of scribes to match its multiple textual contents. Kurvinen identified nineteen hands and provided a table of scribal stints labelled A–S, aligned to the manuscript's foliation and to a numbered catalogue of fifty-five texts; the latter helpfully extended the nineteenth-century descriptions by including transcriptions of many shorter texts and bibliographical references, but the account of the scribal hands lacked substantiating detail.

Such a large number of scribes seems inherently improbable for such a small volume, and Kurvinen noted that some hands looked very similar, yet her estimation has not been much questioned. Gisela Guddat-Figge accepted the total of nineteen while repeating the caveat about the similarity of some hands.

Onomatopoeia does not necessarily make for bad poetry, but it frequently elicits bad criticism. Indeed, on one occasion, over-analysis of onomatopoeia proved so bad that it helped foment an entire counter-critical movement in exasperated response: New Criticism, demanding higher standards of close-reading as its characteristic mode, was vitalised by one such exasperated encounter. In his merciless review of ‘woman critic’ Elizabeth Atkins’ ‘not distinguished’ critical biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay – an ‘unintellectual’ ‘woman poet’ suffering a ‘deficiency in masculinity’ who ‘fascinates the male reviewer but at the same time horrifies him a little too’ – New Criticism's founding father John Crowe Ransom offered an extended and acerbic evaluation of Atkins’ critical acumen (which was, admittedly, limited by her reactionary readerly-response to any modernising poetics from Hopkins to Eliot, rejected tout court as nihilist ‘crossword puzzle[s]’). Throughout his meticulously brutal review – ‘which I hope was not objectionable’ (it was) – Ransom repeatedly balks at what he describes as Atkins’ ‘absurd’ predilection for ‘acts of fancy’ when engaged in practical criticism, at which moments, he insists, she betrays a propensity for one particular ‘ill-advised’ scholarly ‘fallacy …

which is common, and … of a venerable lineage:’ the literary-critical tendency towards over-reading onomatopoeia (here understood both narrowly as the lexical mimicry of a sound – the imitative etymology of ‘murmur,’ for instance, in Tennyson's much-cited ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees’ – or more diffusely as the imitative quality of poetry's verbal texture generated, for instance, by ‘immemorial’ and ‘innumerable,’ neither of which are themselves etymologically echoic but which sustain an onomatopoeic hum).

How varied are the forms of human misery! How inexhaustible is this treasure trove for the poet, who feels urged, more by his conscience than vanity and self-interest, to stimulate the numbed nerves of pity in his fellow citizens for a hundred wretches whom our fashionable philosophy rejects with cruel smiles! We live in a century where compassion and sensitivity are no longer uncommon: so how is it that one finds so many unfortunate people among us? Are they always unworthy, those who appear as such to us, with our mental faculties enriched by brighter prospects in morality? Alas! I am afraid we too often neglect to take the time to consider this. Because the more beautifully we learn to cover up our injustices, the more our excessive human fellowship becomes inflexible misanthropy. Finally, we will no longer be able to discover the slightest moral beauty in anything but ourselves. Consequently, we will believe ourselves justified in only loving the human race for its species, not its individuals.

The following story, which was taken from the estate of a master of philosophy in Leipzig, will, I hope, reveal various new paths on the great map of human destinies that none of our travel writers have yet thought to warn about, although our hero was not the first to be shipwrecked on them.

Zerbin was a young man from Berlin with a bold, glowing imagination and a heart that promised to make something of itself.

It's cheering to find how excited Berlioz is to be able, for once, to offer almost unstinted praise to a singer, in this case Delphine Ugalde.

It's rather a good idea to set the opera in the capital of French Africa. From this bizarre mixture of manners and costumes emerge comical contrasts and situations likely to lend unexpectedness and variety to the musical style. But these contrasts, piquant though they may be, cannot exempt the librettist from attaching an interesting plot to them and inventing a theme that is piquant and original. Unfortunately, it seems as though he said to himself: ‘Here's a frame, the composer will add the picture’. So, here's this frame in two acts, a gilt frame, decorated with pearls, muslin, lovely Arab heads, and French moustaches, not to mention the heads of Negros, a eunuch, and a muezzin.

I’m afraid I may commit more than one mistake in this analysis. Despite all my concentration, I took a long time to understand what was happening; words reached me only indistinctly or didn't reach me at all. The dialogue, written in verse, unlike the general usage of the Opéra-Comique, added to my puzzlement.

Clearly, in its physiognomy and comic nature, the opera is close to two works that have brought popularity to M. Grisar: L’Eau merveilleuse and Gilles le ravisseur, not forgetting Le Tableau parlant which Grétry was not alone in painting, and whose libretto did not merely make a frame. Here's what I thought was the plot of Le Caïd:

The curtain goes up, it's a square in Algiers, it's still dark with no sun in the sky. A small troupe of Arabs, marching in step, utters this familiar cry: ‘Be quiet! Let's hide! No movement! Let's be silent!’ (in verse, naturally). We gather that they’re stalking somebody and that they don't want to be spotted.

Berlioz's article ‘De l’Imitation musicale’, published in the RGM (1 and 8 January 1837), has twice been published in English translation: by Jacques Barzun, but with cuts, and the same translation with cuts restored and translated by Edward T. Cone. But given that Cone's version dates from over fortyfive years ago, and Barzun's from over seventy, I feel it is worth bringing out a new version of this important essay. Why Berlioz should have chosen this subject in 1837 is uncertain: it would seem unlikely that anyone had complained, some six years after the first performance of Symphonie fantastique, about the noise of the guillotine. But the idea of imitation in music continued to exercise composers and critics for years, with many declaring the innate superiority of ‘pure’ music. Satie's quip on the first movement (‘From dawn to midday at sea’) in Debussy's La Mer, that ‘there was especially a little moment between half-past ten and a quarter to eleven that I found amazing’, took aim at the composer's chronological exactitude. Likewise, Ravel in 1922 refused to accept a widespread reaction that La Valse tapped into the violence of World War I, saying, ‘You should see in it only what comes from the music’.

I’m not talking here about imitation in the sense generally accepted in connection with the writing of fugues but about the reproduction of certain sounds, and also about the description or musical painting of things whose existence is revealed to us only by our eyes.

This chapter traces the historical developments of conservation practices in southern Africa in order to situate the chronic liminality witnessed around the cases. A picture is built that portrays the systematic dispossession of local people of their rights over forest resources across South Africa and Zimbabwe. In this chapter, the conundrums presented in the Introduction that facilitated the loss of rights and access are examined in relation to how they came about. As such, emphasis is placed on the separation of nature (forests) from people, the evolution of the modern African state and state agencies in managing protected areas, as well as the entrenchment of introduced property relations on local people around forests. Each of these conundrums is examined from the time of the first reservation of forests for conservation in the late 19th century. For each, the conundrum that has entrenched the loss of rights and access is situated and located within the political economy of each country, in order to set the context of the dimensions of the politics that will follow from each case in subsequent chapters. The period that this chapter covers is rather long and, as such, the focus is restricted to major developments around each of the conservation practices that I trace for the argument made in the book. The rest of the chapter is organised into two major sections for each of the different countries, covering specific periods and outlining significant developments under review. First, the period from 1870 to 1930 – constituting the early colonial dispossession, followed by the period between 1930 and 1980, the main colonial and apartheid period, and lastly, the period between 1980 and 1994. For South Africa, the last period marked the end of apartheid and the ushering in of a democratic dispensation, while for Zimbabwe, the period marked the post-independence era filled with many expectations for people within and around forests.

Palpable fear

In July 2021 a wave of looting, targeting shopping malls and retail distribution centres, erupted across KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng provinces following the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma. The death toll reached 350, many trampled underfoot as looting crowds panicked, some killed by community members defending their neighbourhoods. The economic damage was eventually estimated at R50 billion. The July Unrest, as it came to be known, was on a far larger scale than the looting of the Metrorail during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Whereas the looting of the Metrorail went largely unnoticed in the media, the July Unrest convulsed the nation.

News24 journalists documented this in their book Eight Days in July. Burning tires, rocks, and hijacked lorries blocked major roads in KwaZulu Natal on Friday 9 July, the day after Zuma's incarceration. The government's initial response was to play down events, but by Monday 12 July there was palpable fear that social order was teetering. Supply chains were disrupted and there was panic buying. My abiding memory of that morning is two elderly ladies driving at dangerously high speed out of a suburban shopping centre, the back seat of their car piled high with loaves of bread.

That afternoon I joined a citizen's crisis committee in Sophiatown, a predominantly coloured neighbourhood next to my own, to defend the local shopping centre. Describing it as a committee implies a level of structure that was absent. It was based around those who took the initiative and took a stand.

Introduction

Africa, undoubtedly, remains one of the continents adorned with numerous natural resources, and water is one of the major natural resources that occupies the continent. Like other people in different parts of the world, Africans depend on water for domestic, commercial, agricultural, and ecological purposes. However, these are only the barest uses of water. Research has shown water's social, political, and spiritual significance in African societies – indigenous and modern. The undeniable uses and significance of water resources notwithstanding, there are many problems affecting the effective use and management of water in Africa. Reported observations in the media and literature have pointed out the prevalence of wet and arid areas in Africa and how this affects management. There are also problems of environmental flooding, lack of access to water resources, and degradation, among others. In resolving the challenges associated with access and management of water resources, some scholars have pointed out the need to pay attention to river development. One author postulates that “rivers are most amenable for development and use, whether for human survival or economic advantage.” Meanwhile, studying rivers and their management and development has become essential in modern research because of their relevance in addressing challenges of access and management of water resources.

Rivers constitute an essential component of Africa and culture. As rivers all over the world are a vital component of Earth's hydrological cycle, African rivers shape landscapes, support ecosystems, and sustain human lives on the continent.