The introduction seeks to provide bold outlines of Ngugi’s complex contexts and point to how these offer new paths to his fiction. While acknowledging that scant attention has been paid to the context in which Ngugi’s works are produced, we are also seeking to understand how this context has been mediated by Ngugi’s discourse. To do this is to suggest that Ngugi as a writer of praxis also generates his context and enters into dialogue with familial and historical events, intellectual climate and other layers of institutional practices that have helped him disrupt received knowledges and histories. The contexts, far from offering some objective and reified source of knowledge, are an engagement with a society and historical moment in flux and in need of reinterpretation. One aim of this introduction is to displace our notion of context as a reified site of retrieval; another is to see how context offers readers a handle on new and disruptive ways of rereading Ngugi’s texts. I argue that contexts, whether one is thinking of family, mission education or Mau Mau emergency and related colonial experiences, are not muted sites of knowledge, nor are they self-evident sources of meaning and meaning-making, but a seething site of creativity and meaning-making.

Most South African readers will be members of a medical aid scheme providing access to private healthcare. There are a wide range of schemes available offering different levels of benefits which are paid for by members’ monthly contributions. “Day-to-day” medication and treatment benefits smooth what would otherwise be payments made by the member directly. Schemes also provide cover for more serious health problems requiring hospitalisation, operations, or other major expenses. Having medical aid means not having to use South Africa's public healthcare system characterised by long queues, rundown facilities, limited treatment, and indifferent service.

Medical aid membership is not cheap, even for the most basic schemes. Under 20 per cent of the population can afford the comfort and convenience that private health cover provides. The rise of an African middle class in postapartheid South Africa has diversified the racial profile of scheme membership. However, there are township residents who have medical aid despite their salaries not being close to professional levels. This is because they work for private or public organisations that require membership as a condition of service. In public sector organisations there has been significant growth in medical aid membership, even as the percentage of the population with membership has changed little over the last twenty years.

For medical aid to be affordable for non-professional workers, the employer must subsidise monthly contributions. Yet, even with subsidisation and when employees are on cheaper schemes, contributions nevertheless represent a significant deduction from pay packets.

Contributions cover a capped day-to-day set of benefits as well as possible major expenses, including the statutorily required prescribed minimum benefits that must be offered by medical aids, as well as the administrative costs of the scheme.

In December 1808, Joseph Atkinson published verses in the Cyclopaedian Magazine to mark the season of ‘Private Theatricals’ held in Kilkenny during the previous October. Atkinson duly acknowledged both the participation of Thomas Moore in these theatricals and the nascent fame of Moore's Irish Melodies, the first volume of which had appeared in April that year:

The girls and the boys of Kilkenny have long Tun’d Erin's sweet harp and enraptur’d her song… Then Moore came the lyre of Apollo to string, And give us pure draughts of the Helicon spring; And the banks of the Nore shall long echo the lays That his melodies breathe to record Erin's praise.

Atkinson's poetic vein may have been slight (not to say ephemeral and metrically cumbrous), but the compound of classical and Irish metaphors engaged in these lines to celebrate Moore is striking nevertheless: the ‘sweet harp’ of Erin and the ‘lyre of Apollo’ are in close apposition, and so too (by extension) are the ‘banks of the Nore’ (in Kilkenny) and the slopes and springs of Mount Helicon (in Greece). Although the Melodies had only recently begun to appear (their serial publication would continue until 1834), Moore in these lines is all but the Bard of Erin already, at least to judge by the enthusiastic tone of Atkinson's encomium and the fame it predicts for the songs themselves.

The items in this concert of 21 March were Mozart's Symphony no. 40 in G minor (K.550), two movements from Mendelssohn's oratorio Saint Paul, a concertino by Vogt for oboe and orchestra, played by Verroust, the ‘Dies irae’ from Cherubini's Requiem in C minor and Beethoven's Second Symphony.

Mozart's Symphony in G minor, as usual, gave the greatest pleasure, and the minuet was encored. The excerpts from Mendelssohn's oratorio Saint Paul were as yet unknown to me, and I’m at a loss to understand why there's been such a delay in bringing this fine work to Paris when England, Germany, and even some cities in regional France have given complete performances of it some time ago. Whatever the reason, the two extracts brought to us last Sunday are admirable compositions. The first chorus in E-flat, accompanied by a repeated pattern on the first violins, is couched in a calm and a purity that are truly angelic; if this is not religious music, then such a thing has never existed. The harmony is silky, the style of the melody, tender and suave, lends a further charm to the timbre of the cellos, and the incessant accompaniment of the first violins decorates the ensemble, without disturbing its gentle gravity. The form of the work is also highly distinguished: the orchestra and choir are not always combined, sometimes the orchestra is silent, allowing the voices to sing unaccompanied, and sometimes on the contrary it's the orchestra that's heard on its own. Then there are those effects of half-tint and pianissimo which only the greatest composers know how to obtain from such large forces. In a word, this choral work is, in my view, a true masterpiece, a product of inspiration and technique, beautiful, irreproachable, complete.

Irish traditional music is performed by people of all genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and abilities, but a quick perusal of a festival lineup, an array of CDs, or a few live instrumental music sessions would imply that the craft is primarily the preserve of white heterosexual cisgender men. This book will correct that error in perception. In any study of a contemporary music scene, readers deserve the authority of one whose status is that of long-time participant-observer. Joanne Cusack, a gifted performer on the button accordion and long-time participant in multiple Irish music scenes, has used her skills in observation, description, and analysis to understand the multiple approaches that women have taken to be heard and to connect with other musicians.

Women in Irish Traditional Music is very much of-the-moment in terms of its analysis. It does so with compelling, effective language that clearly grasps the specific policies and social mechanisms holding women in an uneasy in-between position regardless of their playing abilities or their status within the community. Everyone who has been to an instrumental music session has observed or experienced some of what Joanne Cusack describes, but few know the specifics of how the professional Irish traditional music world works from an educated insider viewpoint.

What sets this book apart from others is its focus on specific case studies concerning women, its direct engagement of the reader, and its refreshing look at some of the unique challenges faced by women.

In the 1820s, newspapers, religious tracts, pamphlets, magazines, and books became available in vast, affordable quantities to Americans across all classes. This print revolution occurred because of expanding literacy rates, new industrial technologies for mass production, population growth, new transportation modes for wider distribution, and the new Jacksonian ideology of populist democracy. Fiction became especially popular in book form and serialized in magazines and newspapers. After the Civil War, the publishing industry consolidated, and an efficient, interlocked network of syndicates, subscription sales, and door-to-door salesmen popularized the leading authors of the day. Perhaps more germane to the “democratizing” role of nineteenth-century publishing were the penny press and the dime novel. Each offered newspapers or books for cheap prices, making their literature available to urban working classes. This rich, diverse volume of nineteenth-century print culture established the dynamics of American popular culture.

Coastal policing – firmly focused on the idea of ‘prevention’ – was a set of institutions and actors designed to deal with contingencies, that is to say, incidences and potential events beyond the immediate grasp of central authorities, such as smuggling or military invasion. This, however, is not to say that these incidences were not to some extent directly or indirectly influenced by policies implemented by these same authorities. In terms of imperial policies (both within the British archipelago and beyond) and relative to the politics of warfare, many effects materially – though often unintentionally – interfered with regular arrangements of coastal policing. Trade politics and tariff systems directly affected Customs business in the ports of Ireland, Scotland and England. Underneath these fiscal concerns, these policies also impacted on the forms and patterns of Customs activity. Imperial trading routes, the channelling of goods by mercantilist policies, and the micro-logistics of their transport (both lawful and clandestine) and their warehousing affected both the spatial organization and the practical requirements of Customs policing and control in technical and procedural terms. This is also true for the repercussions of wartime arrangements throughout the period. Concerns over coastal defences in particular reordered government priorities vis-à-vis the coast to the disadvantage of the regular peacetime functions and arrangements of the Customs. At the same time, preventive officers became themselves part of the war machinery for the purposes of anti-espionage provisions, the works of the press gangs, or – in the case of the cruisers conscripted by the Admiralty – naval combat.

Graph bootstrap percolation is a discrete-time process capturing the spread of a virus on the edges of Kn. Given an initial set G ⊆ Kn of infected edges, the transmission of the virus is governed by a fixed graph H: in each round of the process, any edge e of Kn that is the last uninfected edge in a copy of H in Kn gets infected as well. Once infected, edges remain infected forever. The process was introduced by Bollobás in 1968 in the context of weak saturation and has since inspired a vast array of beautiful mathematics. The main focus of this survey is the extremal question of how long the infection process can last before stabilising. We give an exposition of our recent systematic study of this maximum running time and the inuence of the infection rule H. The topic turns out to possess a wide variety of interesting behaviour, with connections to additive, extremal, and probabilistic combinatorics. Along the way, we encounter a number of surprises and attractive open problems.

In this chapter, I test the book’s first two hypotheses regarding which leaders contribute to regional security operations and receive support from co-members in return. I expect that leaders with the greatest need for RIOs’ protective benefits – heads of state facing high coup risk – are the most motivated to remain in good standing with co-members who are able to intervene on their side during security crises. In statistical analyses at the RIO-state-year level of analysis, I find that leaders most prone to irregular removal through coups are indeed more likely to deploy security personnel in support of co-members. The chapter also presents tests of the second hypothesis derived from the theory: that leaders who contribute personnel to support RIO co-members increase their odds of receiving protection. Quantitative tests again provide evidence consistent with the theory. The RIO co-members are more likely to deploy troops in support of leaders with prior records of security cooperation in these four RIOs with mutual defense pacts.

This chapter explores how Ngugi in his creative works draws on the Mau Mau war for content and inspiration not only because it affected him directly but also due to its symbolic significance in the pursuit of human dignity and the solidarity that it built among Kenyan communities. By looking back at the effects of colonialism and the experiences of the struggle for independence, the chapter argues, Ngugi tries to make sense of that past because he was a product of that violent history. The chapter explores what it has meant for Ngugi to write under the shadow of nationalism and to fictionalise the traumatic experiences of his childhood. In the process, the chapter shows how the narrative of Mau Mau recurs in the postcolonial period and how Ngugi’s understanding of nationalism changes over time even as the organising principles of land, freedom and justice have remained constant.

Chapter 1 outlines how mental models – cognitive frameworks for interpreting the political economy – shape policy preferences. It contrasts the Economist Mental Model (EMM), marked by a strong grasp of fundamental economic concepts and economic reasoning tools, with Alternative Mental Models (AMMs), which lack systematic economic reasoning. Equipped with tools like cost–benefit analysis, EMM adopters recognize intertemporal trade-offs, possible positive-sum outcomes, and distributional impacts, aligning decisions more effectively with aggregate welfare. In contrast, AMM users focus on immediate, visible effects and often adopt zero-sum thinking, leading to policies that cater to short-term priorities but diminish aggregate welfare over time. Crucially, Chapter 1 stresses that the EMM does not imply different values; rather, it shapes how individuals perceive trade-offs. The chapter also predicts that those with the EMM are more likely to update their views based on new economic information, while AMM users often rely on simplified cues, reinforcing existing misconceptions.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central puzzle: why some electoral management bodies earn public trust and develop real autonomy while others remain vulnerable to manipulation. It argues that formal institutional design alone cannot explain cross-national variation. Instead, de facto autonomy emerges through political negotiation, transparency, accountability practices, and structured partisan engagement. Drawing on fieldwork, elite interviews, and archival research across Latin America and Africa, the chapter outlines a new theoretical framework centered on partisan inclusion within administrative processes that can foster legitimacy, reduce uncertainty, and strengthen electoral integrity. The chapter also introduces the book’s cross-regional comparative strategy, explains case selection, and previews how the empirical chapters illustrate the mechanisms through which party consultation, institutional sequencing, and administrative practices jointly shape election quality. The chapter positions the book within broader debates on democratic resilience, institutional trust, and the conditions under which electoral authorities acquire real independence.

INTRODUCTION

This case arose in the parish of Bo’ness (Borrowstounness, formerly Kinneil). Much of it concerned healing rituals and prognosis. Janet Drysdale was a magical practitioner, described as a ‘wife’ who ‘could cure’ Janet Barclay's sick child. She used some conventional (if perhaps magical) rituals for this, notably involving south-running water, of which various details were given. She added a further dimension of magical beliefs with the ‘good nightbours’ – the fairies. These fairies were dangerous. Barclay's servant Katherine Currie ritually buried the sick child's shirt as Drysdale instructed, but heard ‘much speaking’ above her head, and afterwards became feverish with fear. Drysdale told another woman that Currie could have been ‘torn to pieces’, and added advice about the ‘blasting’ that had caused the child's illness. However, she said, the ‘speaking’ indicated that the child would recover – which he did.

But someone told the kirk session about the healing of Barclay's child with a ‘charme’ – a term that the church authorities often regarded as designating a superstitious practice or worse. The minister, John Brand, questioned Barclay, who in turn told him about Drysdale. This led to an elaborate enquiry. The minister and elders visited, summoned and questioned various servants and neighbours, and of course Drysdale herself, in order to piece together all the details of the story as thoroughly as they could. Then they referred the case up to the presbytery.

Neither the kirk session nor the presbytery used the word ‘witchcraft’. The one thing that makes Drysdale's case into a ‘witchcraft’ case is the presbytery’s reported recommendation at this point to ‘give her up to the magistrate’, evidently for criminal prosecution that must have been intended to be for witchcraft.