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.

For Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the crises of post-independence Africa cannot be understood without an understanding of neo-colonialism as a political dynamic that sabotaged the freedom dreams of Africa and the Global South at large. This chapter reflects on neo-colonialism as a framework for understanding his insights on postcolonial African realities. I locate Ngugi’s views on neo-colonialism within the context of his dynamic intellectual biography, tracking the range of factors, agents, institutions and events that were instrumental in shaping his views of neo-colonialism and the postcolonial crises that haunt us – a core concern across his oeuvre. The first section of this chapter tracks the influences and trajectories of thought that shaped Ngugi’s views on the postcolonial context as a neo-colonial one. Section two turns to the imprint of postcolonial crises and neo-colonialism in Ngugi’s writing, noting the centrality of gender and the family in codifying his critique of postcolonial states as systems in the grip of neo-colonial control. The closing section underscores the continued relevance of Ngugi’s perspectives on neo-colonialism in making sense of contemporary postcolonial realities, through a brief exploration of the extractive impulse behind the romance of digital labour, as the latest iteration in neoliberal capital’s lengthy extractivist approach to African lifeworlds.

During this same half hour the countess was sitting at a desk at her balcony window, writing a letter to Fessler. She had taken her pen in hand a while ago, but the entrancing view before her caused her to set it back down again. High above the hillsides clad in vineyards and forests, silvery clouds were drifting, while in the valley below, the heat of the day had already settled in, growing more oppressive with every moment. A small pennant that marked the shooting range drooped from its flagpole and only stirred when there was a passing breeze. But suddenly came the sound of a single drum stroke, as if at random, and the countess, thus interrupted in her musings, took up her pen again and wrote:

Dear Friend,

There have been some changes to my existence here since last week, and since yesterday we have been living the high life. Egon Asperg arrived early in the morning and with him young Pejevics, who had been in England for several weeks for the racing, as you may know. I was heartily glad and resolved to spend a pleasant day with them, but would have failed in this, had I not been able to recruit as auxiliaries the two young ladies whom I mentioned to you recently. Two young actresses are naturally more interesting than an aunt of nearly seventy. And now more than ever. For those things which for us constitute life itself seem to have died out in the hearts of the current generation, more comprehensively than in the previous one. My brother treats them with mockery, at least; Count Egon, only with silence and indifference. But I am not accusing, only reporting.