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73807 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1209 of 3691

  • 6 - Composing after Wagner: The Music of Bruneau and Debussy, 1890–1902

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 175-224

  • Summary

    The operas of Alfred Bruneau (1857–1934) created a sensation in French musical circles during the 1890s. According to the critics, Le rêve (1891) and L'attaque du moulin (1893) offered the first truly French alternative to Wagnerian music drama. During the same period Claude Debussy began asserting his signature style in his first great works, such as Prélude à l'aprèsmidi d'un faune (1894), Nocturnes for orchestra (1899), and Pelléas et Mélisande (although the opera premièred in 1902, the short score for a substantial portion of the work was written between 1893 and 1895). In this essay I compare the works of Bruneau and Debussy during this decisive decade, paying particular attention to their musical language and poetic associations: the tonal symbolism of F-sharp major and C major in the operas; the conjuring up of dream worlds through whole-tone scales; rhythmic organization (abrupt contrasts combined with the use of liquidation and motivic elimination); and the use of offstage voices to create a sense of distance and stereophonic effects. Richard Langham Smith and Jean-Christophe Branger have both sensitively explored the parallels between Bruneau and Debussy. As they concentrated primarily on the connections between Le rêve and Pelléas et Mélisande, I seek to broaden the discussion: first, by examining a larger group of works, and second, by situating them more precisely within the context of composition in contemporary French music circles. I do not want to minimize the aesthetic differences that distinguish Debussy from Bruneau, or to reduce the former to a slavish imitator of the latter. Still, for a young composer in the 1890s seeking to escape the temptations of Wagnerism, Bruneau's operas would have stood out on account of their success and originality; we should not dismiss a priori the possibility that Debussy was inspired by these works.

    On a historiographical level, several studies have endeavored to contextualize Debussy's music in relation to composers and repertories that have since become canonic, such as Richard Wagner (1813–83) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), and the music of Java and other Far Eastern cultures presented at the 1889 Paris World's Fair.

  • 5 - The “Song Triptych”: Reflections on a Debussyan Genre

  • from Part Two - Style and Genre
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 127-174

  • Summary

    À quoi bon, vraiment, accorder la voix de Bilitis soit en majeur, soit en mineur puisqu'elle a la voix la plus persuasive du monde?—Tu me diras, “Pourquoi as-tu fait la musique?” Ça, vieux loup, c'est autre chose […] C'est pour autres décors.

    —Debussy, letter to Pierre Louÿs

    As is well known, Debussy significantly changed his approach to song composition around the years 1890–91. While he had been writing mélodies more or less continuously since his earliest student days, up to this point he had tended to set texts either singly or in various different groupings—for example, the six Ariettes, paysages belges et aquarelles of 1888 (later revised as Ariettes oubliées, 1903), and the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire of 1887–89. From around 1890 he was to conceive and present the vast majority of his mélodies in groups of three, often titled as such—as in one of the first, Trois mélodies de Paul Verlaine (composed 1891, published 1901), and the last, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913).

    By some measures, the total number of eight “song triptychs” that emerged across this span of more than two decades renders this genre (or subgenre) the one for which Debussy wrote most often. It is thus surprising how little analytical attention it has so far received in the literature. With a few significant exceptions, scholars have tended to treat Debussy's songs individually, in isolation from their composed and published companions. From such studies we have gained, by now, a rich and varied perspective on the approaches to text setting and vocal writing that characterized Debussy's distinct contribution to the history of French art song. But a closer investigation of his evolving approach to the tripartite collection of mélodies—for which he almost always brought together, into new succession, three texts by the same poet—can bring into view further questions of potentially wide implication for our understanding, on one hand, of the famously problematic genre of the “song cycle” and, on the other, of Debussy's own creative development across these two crucial creative decades.

    There was of course plenty of precedent for composing sets of three songs. Schubert and Schumann each wrote a few; a more proximate and relevant instance is possibly Gabriel Fauré's very first song cycle (and his only triptych), the 1878 Poèmes d'un jour, op. 21.

  • 17 - The Games of Jeux

  • from Part Four - Theoretical Issues
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 476-510

  • Summary

    The story is a familiar one: a ballet is premièred in Paris in the spring of 1913 by the Ballets Russes with choreography by Nijinsky. The ballet is considered the composer's most modern work to date and soon viewed as one of the seminal works of the early century. After 1950 it elicits a number of analytic inquiries. These scholarly essays seek to find coherence through a variety of technical means but concentrate on the ballet score alone. One recent writer made this last point explicitly by basing his study solely on the “musical construction” since, as he argued, the interdisciplinary aspects of the work were soon forgotten after its première. This approach prompted another scholar—the former's “public adversary, private pal”—to question such studies of “the music itself” and to champion hermeneutics. It will be clear that I have been describing the première of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, though before this point in the story, the description could have applied equally well to the première of Debussy's Jeux. To continue the similarities between these two ballets, scholarly inquiry into Jeux has concentrated on the musical score alone with little, if any, reference to ostensibly external factors. This study will instead be both analytical and hermeneutical, with the goal of showing that the formal organization of the ballet gains insight from the study not only of the music, but also of the stage directions, as well as of the contemporary events in Debussy's personal life.

    An examination of Debussy's life in the context of a study of Jeux might initially seem a fruitless line of inquiry. Debussy's friendship with Stravinsky, however, turns out to have been a major event in the French composer's life. Although the musical relationship between these two composers has most frequently been approached in terms of what Stravinsky learned from Debussy, this musical influence actually worked both ways. This is to say that Stravinskian fingerprints appear in Debussy's compositions beginning in 1910. For example, Howat has noted “a methodical exploration of octatonic techniques” after 1910, the year the two composers met. This reaction was undoubtedly the result of Debussy's unequivocally positive reaction to Petrushka, which prompted him to incorporate the Petrushka chord, using the same triads in the same inversions, into his little-known ballet Khamma (see ex. 17.1).

  • 16 - Debussy's G♯/A♭ Complex: The Adventures of a Pitch-Class from the Suite bergamasque to the Douze études

  • from Part Four - Theoretical Issues
    • By Boyd Pomeroy, University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music.
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 435-475

  • Summary

    A Pitch-Specific Association

    This paper explores a peculiar feature of Debussy's musical vocabulary, running through his works from early to late, namely an evident attraction to a certain “complex” of harmonic and contrapuntal habits or routines in conjunction with bass pedal points on G♯/A♭. This pitch-specific association often seems to arise independently of a given piece's larger tonal context, and furthermore, in connection with specific formal contexts and expressive content.

    These passages present an intriguing challenge to the analyst in their balance of, or tension between, the evocative resonance of pitch-specific associations and the competing demands of tonal-syntactical coherence in a given tonal-formal context. Although some interesting precedents for this kind of compositional thinking can be found in earlier tonal music of the commonpractice period, it is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, enabled by a post-common-practice approach to tonal form.

    From the perspective of compositional chronology, this “G♯/A♭ complex” might be thought of as a stream or thread running through many of Debussy's works, from early maturity (the Suite bergamasque, ca. 1890) to new departures in late neoclassicism (the Violin Sonata, 1916–17)—though its most elaborate manifestation comes a little earlier, in the (1915) étude “Pour les sonorités opposées,” which it completely dominates, and within which it finds a final resolution of sorts. Although it seems to be mainly associated with his instrumental works, it also makes an occasional appearance in the vocal music.

    Composers’ Tonal Habits

    The G♯/A♭ complex represents an intriguing nexus, or coming together of, certain aspects of musical expression with elements of formal design, in turn conjuring a very specific sound world of harmony, counterpoint, and schemas for elaboration, at a singular transposition level. Some relevant historical precedents for such compositional thinking might include:

  • technical “tonal habits” with historical resonance in particular keys— e.g., the chromatically filled-in interval of a fourth, from its pitchspecific origins in Baroque musical figures and unequal keyboard temperament.

  • tactile associations, especially pianistic ones—specific harmonic, melodic, or contrapuntal idioms associated with the idiomatic (whitekey/ black-key) feel of playing in a particular key, an example of this being what William Rothstein has identified as a “B-major complex” in the music of Chopin.

  • 1 - Debussy Fifty Years Later: Has the Barrel Run Dry?

  • from Part One - Historiographical and Editorial Issues
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 19-37

  • Summary

    Perhaps a useful focus for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Debussy's birth should be on what has happened since its centenary in 1962, a few years before my own interest in the composer developed, alongside that of several British colleagues. Any serious young student at that time, searching for materials, would find a complex web of patchy information with as many lacunae as there were concrete sources. In the 1960s Debussy scholarship was frankly in its infancy: there were few robust analytical approaches to his music, no critical editions, and precious few commentaries of much worth. The scattered publications of the composer's correspondence and his collected writings were incomplete and, although the early biographies contained some important information here and there, they were opinionated, biased, and debatable, and there was little literature that tied the music to any context.

    Fresh on the library shelves was the new two-volume tome by Edward Lockspeiser, who, incidentally, became my supervisor and friend. This was Debussy: His Life and Mind, complementing his single volume Debussy written in the 1930s and many times reedited. The two-tome work was meant to coincide with the centenary but was running a little late. Essentially it contained little commentary on the music itself, though Lockspeiser was forced to write an appendix addressing it in more detail, a task he took on reluctantly and which—many will agree—he was not very good at. More concentration on the music per se was coming into fashion, and journalistic commentary, laden as it was with value judgments, was beginning to be yesterday's news. There can be no doubt that Lockspeiser appended commentary on the music with some trepidation because he believed that approaching music through its techniques was simply not the way to a composer's heart—not that he wasn't skilled at marshalling notes on manuscript paper; indeed, he bequeathed a substantial mountain of compositions from the time when he studied both composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music in London. His strength in the Life and Mind volumes was to explore context, especially of the neighboring arts, rather than to expose “kitchen secrets.” He was dissatisfied with the binary opposition that had plagued Debussy throughout the middle years of the twentieth century: “Was Debussy an Impressionist, or was he a Symbolist?”

  • 11 - “Les sons … tournent”: Debussy, the Waltz, and Embodied Hermeneutics

  • from Part Three - History and Hermeneutics
  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 326-352

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Claude Debussy's prelude no. 4, book 1, often referred to by the epigraph “Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir” (hereafter, “Les sons”), is shown in example 11.1. The opening measures exhibit generic markers of the waltz, nineteenth-century Europe's most popular dance. The low A on the downbeat followed by chords in the middle register of the piano on beats two and three realize the conventional waltz accompaniment. The arch contour and rhythm of the melody, too, are signatures of the genre. All three features can be found in numerous waltzes from the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Schubert's Valse noble no. 6 and the first theme of Chopin's Grande valse brillante, op. 18, shown in examples 11.2 and 11.3. Still, “Les sons” can hardly be considered a waltz in a generic sense. Unlike Chopin's op. 18, which also begins in a state of metrical ambiguity but soon falls into recognizable patterns, “Les sons” fails to establish and maintain the triple meter essential to the waltz. Indeed, the meter becomes more obscure over the course of the opening eight measures. Other factors mitigating conscious perception of the waltz include tempos that push and pull irregularly, phrases of irregular lengths, interruption of textures by caesurae, and harmonic structures at odds with the tonal norms that reinforce the phrasing and form of nineteenth-century waltzes.

    The tension between features of “Les sons” that derive recognizably from the waltz and features that resist assimilation to the dance's generic norms has informed recent interpretations of the prelude. In order to reconcile these apparently divergent musical elements, such interpretations employ a hermeneutic strategy that posits “Les sons” as a kind of phenomenological transcript of another listener's experience. This other listener remembers, imagines, or perhaps distractedly attends to a waltz, hearing it as something other than what it actually is. In turn, we hear only what presents itself to this listener's consciousness, e.g., a “faded, half-grasped memory,” or an “interpenetration of perception and remembrance.” Baudelaire's poem “Harmonie du soir,” from which Debussy drew the piece's epigraph, is then enlisted as support for the general mnemonic conceit and the particulars of each interpretation.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by François de Médicis, Steven Huebner
  • Book:
    Debussy's Resonance
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 December 2018, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    As the figure of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) relentlessly recedes into the past and we arrive at the centennial of his death, an ever abundant harvest of documents surrounding his life and work continues to bear fruit: the moment seems ripe, almost ideal, to dedicate a new research volume to him. Beyond the occasion of the anniversary, the composer maintains a preeminent status in accounts of musical modernity at the fin de siècle and early twentieth century— and without his music having lost any of its freshness.

    Debussy is still a major presence in the performing canon. Among the pioneers of modernism, his music has always attracted the largest number of listeners. But what about the current state of research? In his valuable Claude Debussy: A Guide to Research, published in 1990, James Briscoe was able to identify and describe 910 secondary sources. Work on the critical edition had just begun a few years before and publication of the complete letters, the Correspondance (1872–1918) by François Lesure and Denis Herlin, was still many years off. There had nonetheless been considerable research activity since 1945: in his contribution to our essay collection relating to the historiography of Debussy research Richard Langham Smith offers much insight into Debussy scholarship in the post-World War II era, including (on the Anglo-American side of things) the key role played by Edward Lockspeiser. Now a perusal of RILM under the subject heading “Debussy” from the year of Briscoe's volume to the present shows no fewer than 2,271 entries, a staggering increase of activity that shows no signs of abating. This is more than double the number produced in the entire century before, and it makes for a persuasive statistic to encourage the production of a second edition of Briscoe's volume. Readers with a penchant for figures will savor the RILM yield in the period 1990–2015 for other composers: Beethoven (6,675), Wagner (7,870), Schoenberg (4,171), Stravinsky (2,629), Bartók (2,215). With all the activity related to Debussy, Richard Langham Smith asks in the title of his essay for the present volume “Has the barrel run dry?” We might also reflect upon how the current state of Debussy's research should be judged. Are we still puzzling, searching, and trying to make sense of a music that remains out of reach, out of firm grasp?

  • 17 - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: A True Story

  • from Part II - Memories, Recollections & Tributes
  • Edited by Simon Gikandi, Ndirangu Wachanga
  • Book:
    Ngugi
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018, pp 97-101

  • Summary

    This story, let us call it a ‘story’ only because I can think of no better term, has no proper beginning. Whether or not it has proper ending, well, that is a matter that has not yet been decided. Let us try for a beginning, then.

    My colleague in the Program in Literature at Duke University, V. Y. Mudimbe, invited Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o to present a series of lectures at our institution. On one of these afternoons, a couple of hours before he was scheduled to deliver his talk, I spotted Ngũgĩ on an East Campus bench, enjoying the warm Durham sunshine. I walked over to him, introduced myself, and proceeded to tell my story. He smiled, good naturedly; in his modesty, however, he scoffed at my account.

    ‘I'll bring you a book tomorrow,’ I said, ‘to show you that it's true.’ My promise of proof, in hindsight, is more like an ending – an ending of sorts, anyway – than a beginning.

    So, let me try again.

    It wasn't until I was in ‘Standard Nine’ (today it would be called ‘Eleventh Grade’ in South Africa, the equivalent of being a high school ‘Junior’ in the US) at Livingstone High School in Cape Town, a school designated for Coloureds only, that I first read any South African literature. Other, that is, than Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, which I'd picked off the shelves of my local library. Livingstone H.S., I should be clear, was a singular institutional animal in apartheid South Africa. The teachers, for the most part, were incredibly committed, no matter their race. Livingstone H.S. was a school that prided itself on educating its student body in two senses of the term: it taught the apartheid curriculum as rigorously as though us Coloured boys and girls were being instructed by Plato in Athens, no matter the discrepancy in resources, no matter the ideological strictures imposed by the apartheid regime's educational arm. (I should say, there were other schools such as Livingstone, Trafalgar and South Peninsula foremost among them. But Livingstone had one distinct advantage.) And, Livingstone's political and philosophical ethos was steeped in Marxist thought, most notably the work of Leon Trotsky.

  • Appendix D - Intellectuals, European & African Languages: Between Enslavement & Empowerment

  • from Appendixes
    • By Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
  • Edited by Simon Gikandi, Ndirangu Wachanga
  • Book:
    Ngugi
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018, pp 214-220

  • Summary

    I want to look at the genealogy of the African intellectual relationship to African and European languages, English in particular. This is particularly relevant today when most of Africa is celebrating their fiftieth years of independence from colonial rule.

    The intellectual is not a new creation in Africa, every society has had its intellectuals, intellectual here defined as a worker in ideas. They may do other things but their primary social significance and visibility was as workers in ideas. African healers, seers, artisans, including builders, would be in this category. The intellectual was an integral part of the old Egyptian, Ethiopic, Zimbabwean, and Songhai civilizations. A most important component of this pre-colonial intellectual was the poet who often combined the role of the historian, moralist and seer. In West Africa they call him the griot. Swahili civilization is replete with poets, leaders of thought, spanning centuries. A book edited by Abdilatif Abdalla and published by Mkuki na Nyota, Kale ya Washairi wa Pemba, lists quite a few including Fumo wa Liyongo. In total, Liyongo wa Baury in the twelfth century, Muyaka bin Haji in the eighteenth century, and Suudbin Said Al-Maamiriy in the nineteenth century. These poet-intellectuals largely saw themselves as voices of the people and seekers of justice. It may seem needless to say, but it is important to emphasize that these intellectuals, from Egyptian to Ungozi/Uswahili times, used the languages of their society. The pre-colonial African intellectual was rooted among their community.

    Today I want to focus at the modern African intellectual, particularly. I am talking of course of the intellectual who has been to a modern school and for whom European languages have been means of his education. There have been two faces and phases of these African intellectuals, and these phases are almost contradictory.

    The intellectuals of the anti-colonial struggle used European languages to get what they carried and then took it back to African languages, enriching them. They went into European languages as scouts.

Ngugi
  • Reflections on his Life of Writing
  • Edited by Simon Gikandi, Ndirangu Wachanga
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018
  • First-hand accounts of how Ngugi wa Thiong'o's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century.

  • 31 - Kwa Grant Kamenju: Hotuba ya Kuipokea Digrii ya Heshima ya Uzamifu Kutoka Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam

  • from Part V - The Other Ngũgĩ
    • By Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
  • Edited by Simon Gikandi, Ndirangu Wachanga
  • Book:
    Ngugi
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018, pp 183-185

  • Summary

    Mwaka 2004 nilialikwa na Chuo Kikuu cha Transkei ambacho sasa kinaitwa Chuo Kikuu cha Walter Sisulu, Africa Kusini, ili kupokea digrii ya heshima ya uzamifu (au ya udaktari wa falsafa), pamoja na Nelson Mandela na Ali Mazrui. Hafla hiyo ilikuwa pia ni ya kuadhimisha kubadilishwa jina la zamani la Chuo Kikuu hicho, na kupewa jina hilo jipya. Jina lake la zamani, yaani Transkei, lilikuwa na kumbukumbu za utawala wa ubaguzi wa rangi wa kuigawa nchi. Na hilo jina la sasa lina uhusiano na shujaa wa taifa.

    Nikiwa pamoja na mke wangu na watoto wawili, tuliwasili kwenye maeneo ya Chuo ambako kulikuwa kumetundikwa mabango yaliyoandikwa HOMECOMING (yaani KURUDI NYUMBANI/ KARIBU NYUMBANI) Niliguswa moyoni: Hiyo ilikuwa ni digrii yangu ya kwanza ya heshima niliyotunukiwa na chuo kikuu cha Afrika, baada ya nyingine kadhaa nilizotunukiwa na vyuo vikuu vya Ulaya na Marekani. Lakini hilo bango la HOMECOMING – ambalo ni jina la kitabu changu kimojawapo – lilikuwa na maana nyingine muhimu. Nilikuwa ninarudi nyumbani Kenya, kwa kupitia Afrika ya Kusini, baada ya kulazimika kuishi uhamishoni kwa miaka ishirini na mbili. Huko kurudi nyumbani kwa kupitia Afrika ya Kusini, kilele chake kilikuwa kiwe Kenya; watoto wangu wawili waliozaliwa uhamishoni walikuwa hawajaigusa ardhi ya Kenya.

    Yaliyotokea baada ya siku kumi na moja tangu kurudi nchini kwangu kwa furaha kuu, pamoja na digrii niliyotunukiwa Afrika nikiwa njiani kurudi nyumbani, sasa ni historia. Kurudi kwangu nyumbani kukageuka kuwa ni jinamizi. Mimi na mke wangu tuliponea chupuchupu, baada ya kuvamiwa na watu wanne wenye bunduki/ bastola.

    Si makosa ya Afrika ya Kusini, kwamba digrii yangu ya kwanza ya heshima kutoka Afrika pia ina kumbukumbu za ugaidi. Hii ya leo ni digrii ya kwanza ya heshima tangu usiku ule wa ugaidi.

    Makamu Mkuu wa Chuo: Mimi ni mwandishi; yaani mimi ni mhunzi wa maneno (au mfua maneno). Lakini nimekosa maneno muwafaka ya kueleza jinsi heshima hii – ambayo Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam imenipa leo – ilivyo na maana kubwa kwangu. Si kwa sababu tu ya kwamba ni matumaini yangu kuwa nitaweza kuisherehekea digrii hii kutoka Afrika bila ya furaha yangu kufujika; lakini hasa ni kwa sababu ya hadhi ya Chuo Kikuu hiki katika usomi na siasa za Afrika.

  • 30 - Muthoni's Afterlives

  • from Part IV - The Writer, the Critic & the World
    • By Grace A. Musila, associate professor in the English Department, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
  • Edited by Simon Gikandi, Ndirangu Wachanga
  • Book:
    Ngugi
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 July 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018, pp 172-180

  • Summary

    My fear of South African taxi drivers goes back to an encounter in my early days in Johannesburg in the early 2000s. I was in a taxi van on Jan Smuts Avenue, going to Braamfontein, in Johannesburg. I needed to be at WITS University by 12.30 for a meeting. It was 11.15, and there was a stop near Braamfontein Centre on Jan Smuts, right across from one of the University entrances. I was confident I would be on time for my meeting, having made this trip countless times before. By the time we got to my stop, I was the only passenger left in the taxi. I asked the driver to please drop me at Braamfontein Centre, to which he responded, ‘yhini hawukhulumi?’

    ‘I understand, but I can't speak isiZulu’, I said.

    ‘Mna, angizwa ukhulumani sisi’, (I don't understand what you are saying, sister), he shot back, as he drove past my stop.

    I suddenly remembered a Facebook status update by a well-known radio presenter on an English medium radio station, who had posted one morning: ‘Today, I don't feel like speaking English, I am #unableToCan speak today. Akhant.’

    As we drove deeper into the Johannesburg CBD towards the notorious Hillbrow precinct, well known to many foreign students as a no-go area, a cold panic started settling in my stomach at not only missing my meeting, but also being stranded in Hillbrow with all its reputed horrors. I begged him to drop me, but he just calmly kept asking why I was speaking English. Was I not Black? He stopped somewhere in Hillbrow, and dropped me off, with a firm word of advice: ‘learn your language!’

    When I told my friends about the encounter, they asked me why I hadn't responded in Kiswahili. This bit of wisdom has saved me many taxi crises since. In situations that hover towards an accusation of being a ‘coconut’—black on the outside, white inside—I simply respond in Kiswahili ‘sielewi unachosema’ (‘I don't understand what you are saying’). My response works wonders. The tone of these conversations changes from aggressive to curious.

  • Charities and Voluntary Aid (1914–1918)

  • Richard Batten
  • Book:
    A Lord Lieutenant in Wartime
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 March 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018, pp 221-232

  • Summary

    DHC: 1262M/0/O/LD/113/127

    TYPED LETTER FROM FORTESCUE HEADED DEVONSHIRE PATRIOTIC FUND

    Rough Draft

    15, High Street,

    Exeter.

    28th April, 1915

    Dear Sir,

    I beg to forward an audited Statement of the Receipts and Expenditure to 31st March last.

    The Expenditure on Relief of Families would have been infinitely greater but for the changes made by the Government in regard to separation allowance. I may remind you that the Wife of a Seaman, who last August got nothing beyond her Husband's allotment, now receives 6/- a week, provided the Husband makes an allotment of £1 per month; and the Wife of a private Soldier, with three children, now receives 19/6 per week, as against 14/9, in addition to her Husband's minimum allotment of 6d. per day.

    Notwithstanding this, the local sub-committees who investigate and report on cases still find that Grants amounting in all to a substantial sum per week are required to keep from want some of the relatives of those who are fighting our battles; and the need for assistance in relieving the sufferings of the sick and wounded cannot, I fear, fail to increase the continued increase of the number of men who are putting into the field.

    Under these circumstances, even if we knew how long the War would last, it would be impossible to form any reliable estimate as to the sum likely to remain in hand at the end of it.

    The generosity of the public continues, and subscriptions are still coming in, and though they do not keep pace with the expenditure, it is likely that there will be a balance–perhaps a considerable one–unexpended on the termination of hostilities. It is idle to suggest any scheme for the disposal of this yet. All that can usefully be said is that we believe there will be no difficulty in finding good use for any money that remains in supplementing Pensions and Grants to some of the disabled men, widows, etc., for whom the provision made by the necessary inelastic rules of the Government is in their circumstances inadequate.

    Yours faithfully,

    Fortescue

    President

    DHC: 1262M/0/O/LD/139/1

    PAMPHLET ON THE HISTORY OF

    THE DEVON AND CORNWALL WAR REFUGEES COMMITTEE.

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