From Senegalese author Ousmane Soce's early novel Mirages de Paris (1937) to contemporary works such as Leonora Miano's Tel des astres éteints (2009) and Blues pour Élise (2010), and Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2014), Francophone African novels repeatedly return to jazz as an idea, a contested site, a formation, through and around which these authors negotiate notions of race and identity. Indeed, no other musical form has so consistently appeared in this literary tradition. At the same time, these writers’ relationship to the music has, with few exceptions, never been merely celebratory or simple. Though attitudes have changed over time, Francophone African texts contending with jazz repeatedly treat the music with equal measures of awed respect and notable suspicion. To understand why this is the case, one has to examine the very specific circumstances of jazz's reception in France, particularly between the interwar period, and how that reception in a sense produced a particular – and particularly French – iteration of this diaspora musical form that has impacted every Francophone African author wishing to engage with music – while also making the music an important waypoint on the path towards a fully constituted Francophone African subjectivity. The almost unavoidable negotiation with jazz stems from its particular intersection with writing and race during the interwar period, the very time when Francophone African subjects began their most sustained push towards emancipation. Thus, what they were fighting and also being trained by was a racialized universe, at the heart of which lay a musical genre that the French avant-garde fetishized as the exemplary expression of blackness. That which Francophone authors are contending with is the manner in which, through a long series of processes that this study will examine in some detail, jazz became a trope in French writing, overdetermined by historically and epistemologically established ideas of music, writing, and race.

The historical moment between the wars, when jazz took on its outsized function in the French intellectual and artistic world, has generated a rapidly growing critical library.

Prior to the most recent Country Guidance on Eritrea, eighty­seven per cent of those who were refused under the Home Office Country Information and Guidance, Eritrea: National (incl. Military) Service, August 2016 and Country Information Guidance Eritrea—Illegal Exit, September 2016, had their refusals overturned on appeal. In October 2016, the Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) in a country guidance case—MST and Others (national service – risk categories) Eritrea CG [2016] UKUT 00443 (IAC) rejected the much-criticised UK Home Office policy on Eritrean asylum-seekers by concluding:

The UKHome Office Countryof Origin Information, whichinfluencesthe decisions of judges and case workers was based on the flawed assumption originating from the much­criticised and discredited Danish Immigration Service report on Eritrea which concluded that if an Eritrean deserter from the ENS or draft evader who exited from the country illegally signed a repentance letter and paid the 2 per cent diaspora tax, he or she is free to return to Eritrea without facing any risk of persecution. The UK Upper Tribunal categorically rejected this flawed conclusion stating in para. 334:

Expanding on the theme of personal relationships across religious boundaries, this chapter offers an overview of attitudes and experiences that reflect and shape relations between Muslims, Christians and traditionalists in Ede. Its main source is an ethnographic survey carried out in Ede between April and June 2012, which focused on the role of religion and religious difference in the private and professional lives of our respondents, and which explored their attitudes towards religious difference. The survey included both qualitative and quantitative questions, and it was accompanied by the production of field notes and diaries in order to allow for later questioning. The aim of this survey was to offer an insight into the relative importance of a range of features of Yoruba life that have been associated with the peaceful coexistence of religions, and survey work was also accompanied by a significant number of qualitative interviews focusing on people's everyday experience and engagement with religious difference.

Based on an evaluation of just under 300 survey responses, this chapter offers an overview of Ede's religious landscape. Confirming Ede's strong Muslim majority, the chapter also points to the different social bases associated with Islam and Christianity. As we discuss, our survey data shows that Muslims in Ede are more likely than Christians to be indigenes of the town, and they tend to have a lower degree of education than Christians. This confirms the widely held impression, discussed in several previous chapters, that while Islam is the town's established majority religion, it is subject to challenges associated with immigration and the dominance of Christianity in the education sector. Exploring the incidence and direction of conversion in Ede, we also look at the fact that our survey indicated a higher number of converts to Christianity than to Islam. We explore converts’ reasons for changing their religion as well as their thoughts on the conversion of others. However, despite the recent growth of Christianity in Ede associated with immigration and educational expansion, the town nonetheless maintains its very large Muslim majority.

And so ‘I … got into my old trade of man-a-waring, and also in a hungry condition fit for such work’. So wrote the Dover seaman, Edward Coxere, recalling his time on the Cromwellian warship Kent, fighting the Spaniards. It was to prove merely another brief phase in his adventures at sea. Sailing to the Straits in a merchant vessel, Coxere had been enslaved by the Barbary corsairs for five months before being freed by an English naval expedition. Serving in the Kent, he fought bravely, indeed wildly, plundering Spanish prizes to replace the money and clothes he had lost. But before long he was a prisoner of the Spaniards, his possessions lost once more. When he finally reached home after escaping and yet more adventures, he had only the clothes on his back to show after nineteen months away. Coxere's picaresque experiences were by no means exceptional. Life at sea, for naval and merchant seamen alike, was hard, dangerous and, above all, unpredictable. These realities shaped the mindset of the seafaring community, summed up in their proverbs, ‘a merry life and a short’, and ‘longest liver takes all’. One sailor, reflecting on the miserable prospect of growing old as a seaman, reminded himself that very few sailors reached old age.

For most seventeenth-century seamen, naval service was episodic. The navy expanded dramatically whenever war broke out and contracted when peace returned; even in wartime, it shrank during the winter months, when weather conditions limited large-scale operations. Manpower needs fluctuated accordingly. There were roughly 40–50,000 seamen and fishermen in Restoration England, several thousand of whom would be serving in foreign (mainly Dutch) vessels at any given time. The Restoration navy, in peacetime, needed only 3–4,000 men. But a major naval war, such as the three wars with the Dutch in the 1650s, 1660s and 1670s, required up to 25,000 seamen to be recruited within a matter of weeks. The much longer wars against France in the 1690s and early 1700s called for still larger numbers. The naval campaign of 1695 required a huge total of 48,514 seamen and marines.

Located in the heart of the Yoruba-speaking south-west of Nigeria, Ede is a town with a distinctive military, political and religious history. A former outpost of the powerful Oyo Empire, the town remains an important centre of political activity in south-west Nigeria today. Ede also has a traditional administration headed by a ruler, or ọba, who holds the title of Àgbàlé Ọlọ́fà Iná, or Tìmì. The current Tìmì, HRM Ọba Muniru Adesola Lawal, Laminisa I, is assisted by a council of twelve traditional chiefs whose members represent the main traditional quarters of the town. Building on a multi-layered history of religious change and transformation, Tìmì Lawal presides over a town whose complex ritual and religious life was largely shaped by his predecessors.

Today, Ede is famous for its flamboyant annual celebration of the traditional deity Ṣàngó, which is associated with the reign of Ede's powerful ọba, Tìmì Ajeniju Bamigbaye (c.1780–1843), who is widely believed to have been born as a follower of Ṣàngó. But thanks to the efforts of Tìmì Sangolami Abibu Lagunju (1847–1900), a Muslim convert also held by some to have been predestined to adopt Islam, Ede today is a predominantly Muslim town. In addition to the worship of Ṣàngó and Islam, the town also has a significant Christian minority, which was much strengthened during the reign of Tìmì John Adetoyese Laoye (1946–75), Ede's first – and only – Christian ọba.

Offering an introduction to Ede's history through the activities of its rulers, this chapter focuses on the religious politics of the three Tìmì whose names are today associated with the popularisation of Ṣàngó worship, Islam and Christianity. Exploring the different historical and political processes mobilised by these three rulers, the chapter reflects on the importance of royal success and destiny in the justification of religious change. As all Yoruba ọbas are considered to hold spiritual power that they must use for the good of the whole community, an ọba – and especially an ọba fated to follow a particular religion – is certainly able to provide religious leadership to his subjects. Reflecting on the difficulties experienced especially by the two later Tìmì, the chapter also considers the popular expectations that shaped these rulers’ engagement with religion.

AT the time of Langdon Colborne's death in 1889, Charles Lee Williams had been in post at Gloucester for seven years, and William Done at Worcester for forty-five. Both men were, in their different ways, much liked and respected: Done, quietly persuasive and undemonstrative; Williams, clear in his purpose and firm but diplomatic. The new man appointed to Hereford was of a very different personality.

George Robertson Sinclair (1863–1917) was born at 3 Devonshire Villas, Sydenham Road, Croydon, on 28 October 1863. His ancestors were of Scottish descent but had for several generations been settled in Ireland, at Killiney, near Dublin. His father, Dr Robert Sharpe Sinclair, held the appointment of Director of Public Education in Bombay, and it was owing to the temporary residence of his mother in England that Sinclair happened to be born in Croydon. But he was extremely proud to call himself an Irishman, proclaiming his nationality during the Hereford Festival week by hoisting the Irish flag outside his house.

At the age of eight Sinclair entered the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he studied under Sir Robert Stewart, who was an old friend of his father's and of Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley. Thus, in 1873, young Sinclair – aged ten – gained a choral scholarship at St Michael's College, Tenbury, where he was the only boy known to have been taught personally by Ouseley. His parents intended that he should take Holy Orders; but the death of his father when Sinclair was seventeen threw him upon his own resources. When Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Benson, of Truro, asked Ouseley to recommend him an organist for the proposed Cornish cathedral, he at once nominated Sinclair

THE interwar years were, above all, the years of the ‘Elgar Festivals’. At a time when his music was out of fashion elsewhere in the country, Elgar was lionised at Three Choirs, and he in turn honoured the Festivals by regular appearances, usually conducting his own works. As the Musical Times put it in 1921, ‘his world-wide fame finds its focus in the Three Choirs Festival, and if he owed something to them in his youth, he is now paying back the debt with interest’. But worldwide fame and popularity are different things. Britain chose to neglect Elgar. Following a 1922 performance of The Apostles in a half-empty Queen's Hall, George Bernard Shaw, writing to the Daily News, apologised ‘to posterity for living in a country where the capacity and tastes of schoolboys and sporting costermongers are the measure of metropolitan culture’:

On the other hand, Three Choirs audiences for Gerontius, The Apostles and The Kingdom frequently exceeded in number those for Elijah and even Messiah. Nowhere else were Elgar's works performed with quite such dedication, and nowhere else so regularly under his own direction. At no other national festival or concert venue could performers and public alike mingle socially and meet so easily with leading composers – and the familiar figure of Elgar, often in company with his friend and champion Bernard Shaw, could hardly be missed, especially when he chose to wear full court dress with orders.

FOLLOWING the first known Three Choirs performance in 1736(G) of one of his Te Deums, the music of Handel rapidly rose into a position of absolute command at the Music Meetings. Alexander's Feast was repeated, and L'Allegro, Il Penseroso introduced at Gloucester in 1751. In the following year the Worcester Journal gave a detailed programme for the 1752(W) Meeting:

The Te Deum and Jubilate of Purcell would be that in D, which he wrote for St Cecilia's Day 1694, the year before his death. Handel wrote a set of four anthems for the coronation of George II in 1727, but the ‘celebrated’ one is most likely to have been either of the two most popular: ‘The King shall rejoice’ or ‘Zadok the Priest’. Handel's Te Deum and Jubilate could have been either that written in 1713 for the Treaty of Utrecht or, more likely, that written in 1743 for the victory of Dettingen which, according to Lysons, was introduced to the Music Meetings at Gloucester in 1748. But, as Watkins Shaw has pointed out:

The anthem by Boyce would have been either Lord, thou has been our refuge or Blessed is he that considereth the poor. But it was the performance of Samson which incurred the greatest expense.