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.

The law of capture at sea probably had its beginnings in the eleventh century in the Mediterranean Il Consolato del Mare. This was a code of sea laws compiled by order of the ancient kings of Aragon. Originally written in the dialect of Catalonia, it has since been translated into every language of Europe. By this code, neutral goods in captured enemy ships were restored to their owners, and enemy goods in neutral ships could be seized, although neutral ships and neutral cargoes had to be restored. Encapsulated in this and recognised by all the States of Europe as a common instrument between them, was the question of prize, from the Old French ‘prise’ meaning ‘taken or seized’. In the Atlantic the Rôles d’Oléron, perhaps initiated by Eleanor of Aquitaine, were based on the maritime trade in wine from La Rochelle along the Atlantic coast from the end of the twelfth century, and were sanctioned by the immemorial usage and custom of the sea.

The earliest recorded judicial proceedings regarding the legality of capture of foreign goods or vessels took place in 1357, and later proclamations through the centuries repeated the basic principles of legal obligation preserved within the legal system. The laws of the sea were enshrined in Liber Niger Admiralitatis, originally in ancient French or Latin. The earliest manuscript version, held in the National Archives, dates from 1450. This was a medieval code of maritime law and included not just the Rolls of Oléron, but all the most important laws, ordinances, decisions and acts of the High Court of Admiralty. This code emerged as a separate entity probably after the battle of Sluys in 1340.

Institutions, like the materials contained within them, can have long histories of their own. Founded in 1613, the Bristol Library was not the first public library in Britain as was once assumed by its nineteenth-century librarian, being preceded by libraries in both Norwich (1608) and Ipswich (1612), but it could proudly boast of being one of only a couple of dozen active during the seventeenth century. Nor was it necessarily the first accessible library in Bristol, with one held and managed by the Guild of Kalendars at All Saints Church (see Map) and active from 1464. The earliest iteration of what would one day become Bristol Central Library began its existence as a small collection of books managed by the city's civic governance, the Corporation, on King Street, then situated on the western edge of the city close to an area of marsh. Throughout its history, this library existed within a wider ecosystem of public and private repositories and archives, including that of church, club, and university libraries. Over centuries, interactions across these institutions, whether motivated by civic benevolence or private interests, influenced the form, functions, building and collections of Bristol Central Library today. The first home of the Bristol Library was a ‘lodge’ on King Street, south of Bristol Bridge, donated to the city in 1613 by Robert Redwood, a local merchant, as a ‘place to put bookes for the furtherance of Learninge’. Redwood would augment his gift with a further bequest of ten pounds, in 1630, to fund the acquisition of books, but the earliest texts in the library were chiefly the donation of Tobias Matthew (c. 1544–1628), the Bristol-born Archbishop of York.

The act of reading literature or watching drama is partly also an act of (re-)construction: piecing together the meaning, or at least one possible meaning, of a literary or dramatic narrative, including constructing the fictional lives and history of that narrative's characters. In the case of Classical, medieval, and Early Modern texts, such interpretative reconstruction is usually dependent upon not just the reader's literary– critical judgement – a judgement Fiona Tolhurst so ably illustrated in everything she wrote — but also the textual–critical decisions of the editor who stands between the modern audience and the pre-modern artefact or manuscript. The manuscript editor and codicologist must also reconstruct meaning by recapturing or even reconstructing the voices of the past that are recorded in these manuscripts. In this sense, as Ralph Hanna notes, textual criticism is partly ‘an act of cultural recuperation’ that ‘attempts to effect an historical bridge between a lost productive past and a consuming present’. In the case of the textual and critical reception of Sir Thomas Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’, however, the bridge leading the modern reader to the medieval text is littered with warning signs. My current argument was written as a prefatory addendum to, and is not a précis or reproduction of, the work Tolhurst and I have been doing trying to recuperate Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’ and its most famous protagonists; by a happenstance of publishing timelines, however, this current chapter will appear in print as a preface to, or very close contemporary of, our previously finished ‘Trystram’ theses.

The sixain, expertly used by William Shakespeare and Robert Southwell in their bestselling works of poetry, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Saint Peters Complaint (1595), moved through the hands of an extraordinary multitude of poets in the early modern period, from the sacred to the profane. The six-line stanza form has become known for both its capacity to hold together the play of paradox and antithesis and its ability to test a poet's control of metre and metaphor. In this chapter I suggest that the sixain offers an ideal case study for thinking about what might make good and bad poetry and how we might connect critical judgements concerning the use and misuse of particular poetic forms to intertextual and marketable phenomena. In so doing, I build on recent work by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton that establishes a ‘genealogy of the sixain’ and contests the idea that the form is ‘Shakespearean’, as suggested by popular reference to it as the Venus and Adonis stanza; as they note, ‘between 1476 and 1603, some 2445 poems were written entirely or partly in this stanza (7.5% of the total poems published or transcribed in the period), confirming it as one of the most popular English verse forms’. In looking beyond the sixain's use in Venus and Adonis they propose recognition of a countertradition that associates the sixain with poetry written ‘in the complaint mode and expressing amatory (or religious) distress’.

In seeking to further the notion of a counter-history of poetic form, then, this chapter also builds on a research project led by Lukas Erne that had the aim of establishing a quantitative approach to the popularity of printed books of poetry during the period 1583–1622.

Menyetla: Individual agency, collective collapse

The menyetla described in this book demonstrate the agency of township residents who, far from being powerless and waiting for the delivery of constitutional promises, find ways in which to advance their interests. However, this book is no celebration of menyetla. Quite the opposite. I have used the term menyetla because it carries greater neutrality than the best English translation. But this is neutrality in terms of the lex lokasi. The impact of menyetla is not neutral but has consequences. A key point developed in the case studies is that menyetla provide short-term benefit for individuals, albeit accompanied by risk, but result in damaging long-term consequences for society when practised at scale.

Thus framed, we should reject the idea that menyetla should be applauded as challenging South Africa's inequality. By and large, the menyetla described do constitute distributional struggles within a complex configuration of class and race. But, as much as inequality is the fundamental fault line of South African society, the pursuit of these menyetla do not provide a viable response. Chapter 10 described the dramatic, if little reported, destruction of the Metrorail system as short-term gain trumped the long-term value of urban infrastructure serving the poor. The unchecked pursuit of menyetla leads not to transformation but disintegration.

The pursuit of menyetla reflects a collective action problem in which it is rational to pursue individual short-term interests even when this results in the undermining of social and economic institutions. Individuals, and confederacies, do what they can in the absence of leadership able to marshal progressive collective action.

Daniel O’Connell was and remained Paul Cullen’s political hero. This chapter traces Cullen’s involvement with O’Connell and his campaign for the Repeal of the Union.

In early 1323, abuses in the collection of taxes by the Flemish ruling elites had precipitated an uprising in coastal Flanders that soon spread from the countryside to other castellanies and urban centres like Bruges and Ypres, whose skilled artisans quickly made common cause with the rebellious peasantry. While some of the first rural riots were dispersed by the year's end, the general hatred felt towards the nobility, together with the pro-French stance of Louis I, count of Nevers (r.1322–46), who had recently succeeded his grandfather as count of Flanders, soon transformed this localised peasant insurrection into a full-scale rebellion supported by a much broader coalition drawn from across the social hierarchy. At first the rebels were mostly peasants but, by the end of 1323, they had been joined by a significant section of the urban nobility and artisanal classes. As townsmen and peasants fought alongside each other under the banner of Willem de Deken, the burgomaster of Bruges, the socially mixed insurgents quickly captured the cities of Nieuport, Veurne and Ypres. At Courtrai, they were even able to take Count Louis himself prisoner. In 1325, however, the rebels’ momentum diminished after their attempts to seize Ghent and Oudenaarde had failed despite two lengthy sieges. The king of France, Charles IV (r.1322–28), used this opportunity to intervene and negotiate the Peace of Arques, the terms of which included the release of the count of Flanders from captivity in February 1326. But the ceasefire broke down just a year later, prompting the rebels to take up arms once more.

After the end of the common stock annals c.892 we can more accurately refer to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the plural, as the work of many authors, revisers and scribes working in many different places across the following two-and-a-half centuries. The evidence of the surviving OE versions and other witnesses points to a pattern of dispersal, divergence and at times neglect of the annals across the following century, beside recurrent contact between the developing Chronicle texts. In various places, especially in relation to annals across the second half of the tenth century, points of contact provide evidence for the retrospective work of eleventh-century chronicle making.

This chapter explores the authoring and compilation the Chronicles across the tenth century, beginning with the annals of the so-called ‘First Continuation’ (893–96). This group of annals, authored c.900, takes up the story of the viking army that appeared in Wessex in 892 and is shared by ABC, but is also found in D as the result of a collation of a Northern Recension text with a *BC-type Chronicle. Other witnesses – the E Chronicle, the Mercian Register, Æthelweard's Chronicon and St Neots – present varying patterns of convergence and difference at this point, signalling a dispersal of copies of the common stock annals from the 890s. A, B and C continue to share annals as far as 914, after which A and *BC part company. A continues the annals of the reign of Edward the Elder as far as 920, after which this manuscript was neglected for some decades, until a revival of interest at Winchester in the middle of the tenth century.