Introduction

It is a known fact that the court system in Nigeria is currently congested and the time frame it takes to get justice from the courts is fast becoming more of a mirage than reality to the common man (Umegbolu 2021). The collaboration of the Lagos State judiciary and Negotiation Conflict and Management Group (NCMG) conceived the Lagos Multi-Door Courthouse (LMDC) in a bid to proffer a solution. In simple terms, LMDC connotes the enhancement of dispute resolution practices with the integration of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in the court system. Certainly, this approach has enhanced access to justice for a large percentage of the populace. However, it is rather unfortunate that there are no proper considerations for the disabled communities, including the disabled in Nigeria, to benefit from this laudable innovation. In this respect, the following viewpoints were informed from data collection in Lagos and Enugu. Indeed, the question that comes to mind is if the non-disabled citizens rights are not fully met, how then does the justice system seek to protect and preserve the rights of the non-disabled persons? To begin with, this chapter seeks to engage with the idea of defining Access to justice, which is distinct from availability of access or accessibility (Cambridge Dictionary 1995). In so doing, the chapter will point out the main traits and characteristics that contribute to hindering access to justice for disabled citizens.

Access to Justice and Accessibility

Access to justice simply means the common man having the unequivocal right to access the court without obstruction (Onyema 2012). In other words, the fundamental nature of true access to justice is undoubtedly hinged on the availability of its access to all. Hence, the denial of access to justice by any means whatsoever, whether by failure of the system to make alternative provisions in relation to high cost of litigation to support the indigent in the society or by any form of discrimination or exclusion of certain categories of persons from getting access to justice, then the system is a monumental failure.

The above viewpoint is backed by Section 36 (1) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which stipulated

NAMES

Anle Princess 安樂公主

Bai (Bo) Juyi 白居易

Bai Tieyu 白鐵余

Ban Zhao 班昭 (Lady of Handsome Fairness Ban 班婕妤)

Bi Gan 比干

Boast Father 夸父/誇父

Bole 伯樂 (Sun Yang 孫陽)

Cai Heng 蔡衡

Cao Huaishun 曹懷舜

Chang’E 嫦娥

Chen Anping 陳安平

Chen Cangqi 陳藏器

Chen Huaiqing 陳懷卿

Chen Lingying 陳令英

Chen Ximin 陳希閔

Chen Yuanguang 陳元光

Chen Zangqi 陳藏器

Chen Ziang 陳子昂

Cheng Wuting 程務挺

Cheng Xingmou 程行謀

Chuan Huangzhong 傅黃中

Confucius 孔子

Cui Hun 崔渾

Cui Jian 崔簡

Cui Rizhi 崔日知

Cui Shi 崔湜

Cui Wu 崔務

Cui Xuansheng 崔玄升

Deng You 鄧祐

Di Renjie 狄仁傑

Dong Xingcheng 董行成

Dong Yan 董偃

Dongfang Zha 東方虬

Dou Zhifan 竇知範

Double Ears (Duke Wen of Jin) 重耳, 晉文公

Dragon-son Liu 劉籠子

Du Jingquan 杜景佺 (Du Yuanfang 元方)

Duan Jin 段瑾

Duan Zan 段瓚

Duke Mu of Qin 秦穆公

Empress Wang 王后

Empress Wei 韋后 (Traitor Wei 逆韋, Commoner Wei 韋庶人, Miss Wei 韋氏, Missy Wei 阿韋)

Erzhu Jiu 爾朱九

Fan Wen 樊文

Fan Qinben 樊欽賁

Fang Xuanling 房玄齡

Feng Yi 馮毅

Feng Zidu 馮子都

Fu Yue 傅說

Gao Rui 高睿

Gao Yi 高嶷

Gao Zan 高瓚

Gong Siye 弓嗣業

Grannie He 何婆

Grannie Lai 阿來

Gu Zong 顧琮

Guanyin 觀音

Guo Ba 郭霸

Guo Chun 郭純

Guo Wujing 郭務靜

Guo Zhengyi 郭正一

Han Linggui 韓令珪

Han Xun 韓珣

He Axiao 何阿小

He Qiao 和嶠

He Ruojin 賀若瑾

Heichi Changzhi 黑齒常之

Introduction

African memoirs are read not just as works of critical literary writing but also understood as writings that inspire achievements. African memoirists often use the concepts of the self, the other, and the community. These three are interwoven to the point that in telling the stories of the other and a specific community, the authors recount their own stories. Therefore, in reading an African memoir, one cannot grasp all the goals set by the author for the audience without examining the interrelation of the self and the other. African memoirs are sites to display the ontological, moral, and communal interrelations of the self and the other, which are central to this book. The narratives in the memoirs examined in this book highlight the essence of the relationship between the writers and their communities. These accounts share the experiences of the writers and those of others, as well as the influence of others on the writers. As explained in this work, each narration in an African memoir is told for different purposes, and at the center is the self (writer), who is greatly influenced by the other (community of others). Important to each memoir is the writer’s identity, as he/she is the focal point, the one who is reminiscing, recollecting the memories from the past, and reflecting on the general implications of lessons from the past. This work aims to thoroughly analyze the experiences shared in memoirs written by Africans, particularly the various psychological, sociological, and sociopolitical underpinnings of the writers’ narrations.

Therefore, it is important to lay the foundation of this work on theoretical frameworks, as one must conceptually analyze key concepts and theories such as the other, the self, personal identity, and social identity. By doing so, readers will understand the basis of many of the arguments, explications, and statements in this work. Issues about politics, activism, communitarianism, and so on should not be read in the seclusion of the self, the other, personal identity, and social identity. This is because the essence of this work can only be fully grasped through a critical understanding of how the writers are looking at societies to frame their experiences.

Introduction

Austerity measures in the United Kingdom have re-shaped and diminished many of the domains of welfare that comprise the ‘youth welfare State’. The impact of prolonged austerity (since 2010) has continually impacted the efficacy and range of social policy responses in areas such as youth justice, youth work, welfare and support, housing, health and education. As a result, contemporary youth is experiencing generational social harm and a significant social ‘othering’ that is often manifest in the denial of a voice in the society they live in and can, in turn, result in new forms of social (in) justice. Moreover, these developments have been made worse by the COVID-19 epidemic which has further decreased living standards for all young people, prompting concerns about the marginalisation of young people from relevant social and political structures. Negative portrayals of young people framed around ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘risky behaviours’ contradict evidence that demonstrates the opposite. Rather, many young people seek to volunteer and support others whilst encountering significant forms of social harm. As a result, contemporary global youth are currently experiencing generational social harm(s) and social othering whilst often being denied a voice in the societies they live in. If truth be told, the youth of today are experiencing new forms of social injustice and, to add insult to injury, these developments have become worse as the COVID-19 epidemic has persistently decreased living standards for many young people around the world.

This chapter examines to what extent the youth welfare State has been pushed back, reflecting on emergent forms of social harm, ‘othering’ and marginalisation. It will reflect on some of the prolonged impact of COVID-19 and how we can support young people in the future through increased forms of social justice-based provision. It will include several case studies that exemplify how the youth welfare State has become smaller: focusing on social harms and the youth labour market. Specifically, these have been selected because they exemplify the significant problems that emerge when the youth welfare State is compromised through different forms of social harm (Dorling et al. 2008). Furthermore, the chapter will argue that new forms of injustice are emerging in light of recent retrenchment in the youth welfare State and recommend several social justice-framed solutions.

A woman wakes up drowsily on an operating table. Her eyes widen as she looks around furtively. She has been prepped for an operation: surgical clamps dangle from her head dressing, and she bears a dotted-line marking around her face detailing a pathway for the surgeon’s blade. She makes an initial attempt to get up, but finds that she is strapped to the surgical table. The increasing awareness of her shocking situation causes Paulette (Béatrice Altariba) to whimper as she struggles harder to free herself. Freedom may be the goal here, as she twists and writhes, seeking escape, but the quiet proximity of the camera to her face, the rustling of surgical fabric, the precision tracing inscribed on her skin, provoke a tactile response in the audience somewhere in between the surface of her bound body and the freedom that lies presumably beyond the camera frame. The film cuts to the face of a woman, staring from behind an uncanny white mask. The mask is blank but spectral—even ghastly—but also oddly benevolent, obscuring the emotions and intentions of the woman behind it. The woman behind the white mask in a surgical setting above is of course from the final scene of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face/Les Yeux sans Visage (1960). Much has been written about the woman’s stare behind the mask, as eyes are often perceived as a “window to the soul,” but this is not only a film about eyes. It is a film about skin, or about skinning in fact as the film forcefully shows in an earlier gory moment of surgical trauma. Docteur Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) obsessively skins young women in order to fix the disfigurement of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) caused by a car crash for which he is responsible. The film decidedly brings together hints of incest with surgical torture in a thematic, affective and sensorial universe of what I will call in this post-representational study “Grand-Guignol cinema.”

Masking is not a novelty of horror cinema as it cuts across many movements and traditions, both literary and cinematic, but in Grand-Guignol cinema it is often linked to disfigurement.

Keeping in mind the current epistemic, partisan and existential division that professional journalism now operates in I shift from political theories of consensus and conflict-based democracy to sociological theories of domination, culture and actor networks and how the different approaches apply to media sociology and journalism. Contemporary theoretical currents in sociology are not merely the continuation of the main trends of thought established by the classics. Notwithstanding their differences, classics all agreed that their object of study was society. For contemporary sociology surging global information systems as well as neoliberal economic, political and social imperatives render the sense of a unified societal culture increasingly problematic. A hard cultural turn has come about to try and account for fragmentation, the multiple discourses of power, identity and difference, and recurring crises over expanding inequality, individual versus collective rights and environment. Although sociologists are still talking about society, ironically general theories are less concerned with the understanding, description, explanation or critique of society writ large than with everyday interaction across fields, spheres or networks.

This chapter compares and contrasts three competing approaches in contemporary sociology, and the orientation they bring to media sociology and the study of journalism: Critical Sociology, Cultural Sociology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Each approaches societal-cultural worlds from a particular set of interests and types of critique. Each has a different way of understanding meaning, the status of cultural production or performance and of defining its particular object of study, appropriate method and expected outcome. Critical sociology looks to emancipate actors from enduring structures of domination and exploitation. Mainstream journalism is defined as a weak field of forces that rely on audience commodities for revenue but demonstrates strength in choosing and framing content from agents in other fields. Cultural Sociology places a practical emphasis on understanding meaning and affect to explain the impact of the civil sphere on democratic structures. It looks to understand how journalism performs meaning and affect and how its professional culture endures and contributes to the civil sphere. The interest in ANT is in the agency of things and in the description of group formation as itself an explanation of the shift toward a new climate regime and version of democracy as a parliament of things.

Introduction

Society’s conception that disabled people are unable to be productive is ingrained in the very language ‘dis-abled’. Disabled people are considered to need and deserve charity. And the very stigma that bars disabled people from employment feeds the need to give. Disabled people are assumed to lack productivity by nature of their bodies, henceforth, they are not guilty of being ‘lazy’ for not working. Economically disadvantaged by this productivity stigma, disabled people often have to resort to begging instead of wage labour. Begging on the street means a passer-by may donate in exchange for the feeling of having contributed and met their social obligation. This population is sustained by neither wage labour nor government-sanctioned social protections. As such, workers give, and beggars beg. Supply equals demand.

Individuals often respond to street-beggars through the lenses of pity and contempt. Institutions surrounding street-begging account for this. The financial incentives to spend often rely on public pity. Criminal law surrounding street-begging often exists to manage and distribute public contempt. Institutions surrounding street-begging will be interrogated for their role in explaining the persistence of this livelihood. But due to the complexities of local customs and shifting contexts and response shifting public perceptions over time, I cannot interrogate all of these factors in detail.

There are many reasons that people resort to begging, and I do not want to oversimplify such a complex, nuanced and difficult situation in just a few sentences. I am not going to undertake the endeavour to craft a treatise as to why begging is good or evil, on the part of the beggar or society, that is for others to do. Most particularly, it is for disabled street-beggars to narrate their own stories.

Literature usually treats disabled beggars as numbers, deviants from institutions – people left behind by the economy, rather than an assumed or at least extant part of local economies across the world. As a subclass of unemployed people in functioning economies, unable to participate in formal employment, disabled people often make their livelihood informally. One of those informal mechanisms is begging.

Participating in street begging is not a problem of select individuals or deviance of human nature.

Human trafficking and modern slavery in the present day is defined as the transportation or concealment of an individual or group of persons against their will by means of force, kidnapping or coercion (Bondt et al. 2010). Despite increased freedoms and civil rights in the modern day, human trafficking is a considerably ubiquitous form of organised crime, primarily due to being the second most lucrative crime today (Sheinis 2012). With human trafficking being called one of the most prevalent types of organised crime activities in the European Union (EU) (Hughes 2014), it is thus important to review how and why this criminal activity remains today. Historically, forms of human trafficking, such as the slave trade, have drastically impacted upon whole cultures and societies in spite of being formally abolished. However, this legal abolition has not totally put a stop to the unlawful incarceration of individuals within contemporary communities (Truong 2001).

In the sphere of organised crime, human trafficking can be categorised in numerous forms. Forced labour, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude are but three examples (Truong 2001). This chapter will, as a consequence, focus on the sexual exploitation and forced transportation of women and children into sex work. Sexual exploitation, by means of human trafficking, is a global issue with millions of victims forced into the sex trade worldwide. And when modern slavery is viewed in the context of organised crime, it is – first and foremost – an association made up of numerous individuals who work to abduct or transport men, women or children for the purpose of financial gain by means of inflicting harm or terror (Bondt et al. 2010).

A specific example of criminally organised trafficking in the United Kingdom (UK), which will be discussed in conjunction with the wider case study of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, is the Rotherham child exploitation scandal which stretched from the 1980s to 2013 where a locally organised group were trafficking and sexually abusing thousands of children in the North of England (Meyer 2015). Overall, then, this chapter will undertake an important, much needed discussion on how neglect of the fundamental issues at a local level can implicate the UK in the encouragement of organised crime.

What Does the Dragon Want?

Years ago, when I still used air transport, I was flying home from Canberra at sunset early one evening. I was gazing out the window as the plane passed over snow-powdered alps. The mountains stretched on and on to the curved horizon, unpeopled, the ribbon of a rare road showing up only now and then. The landscape was wrapped in pink haze, deepening to a glowing rose around the edges of the world, without any line at all between land and sky. I gazed and gazed, in nameless reverie. Feelings I could not identify moved in me, a sense that the presence I was forever seeking yet which remained just out of sight, just out of reach, was there. In my reverie I imagined that the wild vista on which I was gazing was populated by dragons and sages in caves – that mystery still dwelt down there. I imagined that I was separated from that mystery, or its larger source, only by an invisible veil. There lay the enchanted world, as real and beautiful as it could be, but I was looking at it from within the bubble of modernity, the aeroplane with its packaged food, plastic cups, glossy commercial magazines along with its cargo of trussed-up moderns.

Thinking about it today, I wonder if the question that architect, William McDonough, did not quite ask offers an opening through that veil: what do those mountains and the rivers running through them and the rosy fields of light in which they float want from us? Imagine the river-dragon slipping down from its alpine sources towards the sea, its tail trailing out into the Milky Way. Imagine it lifting its long neck and looking about as it streams along. It sees peaks and gullies sculpting the fields of energy through which it swims. There are tall trees and riparian groves and upland cress-fields and pastures drinking up dragon water and breathing out plumes of atmosphere, cascades of weather. Birds as bright as berries light up the woods, greeting one another from the little sanctuaries they have spun in the trees on the dragon’s flanks. Furred creatures sleep and wake, climb and hop and yearn as the dragon passes.

IN STAFFING HER COURT, WU ZHAO abruptly appointed men and quickly promoted them; however, she removed or demoted with equal alacrity officials who proved venal, inept, or worse, disloyal. Though unpredictable and at times arbitrary, she sought and assembled men of talent. She was an enthusiastic patron of institutes of learning and played a significant role in the early development of the examination system. One of her reforms to the system was ordering that the names of test-takers be covered, so that examiners would not be influenced by family pedigree or connections, a practice that continued in later eras. One motive underlying Wu Zhao’s dramatic expansion of the examination system was to curtail the influence of great aristocratic clans, who, through long-established networks of privilege and nepotism, filled the upper ranks of the court. Even as empress, she sponsored reforms that greatly increased the volume of successful examination candidates and provided them a fast-track to bureaucratic positions. These new candidates, often men of more humble background, felt beholden to Wu Zhao rather than to highborn relatives and friends in court. Under her patronage and support, the examination system grew dramatically during her half-century as empress, grand dowager, and emperor.

Though wary of the prestige of the old aristocracy that had sought to hinder her ascendancy, Wu Zhao was no social revolutionary; her court was anything but a simple meritocracy. She bolstered her own position while grand dowager and emperor, liberally awarding Wu kinsmen titles and offices as she diligently fashioned an elaborate aristocratic backstory to elevate herself and her clan (see Chapter 1). One episode in Court and Country clearly displays Wu Zhao’s deep-seated classism, describing her reluctance to allow a man who had risen from a position outside the nine ranks to enter the uppermost echelons of the bureaucracy:

Introduction

This reflective-cum-refractive chapter is geared toward an examination of A.B. Assensoh’s reflections on some major discourses in his memoir, A Matter of Sharing, in which the memoirist reflected on so many issues, as well as matters that he deemed worthy of sharing, coupled with the experiences that have shaped his life and the world around him. One of the issues he shared and reflected on is the indispensability of the mother’s influence on her child. Meanwhile, this chapter will investigate the author’s reflections on the memoir on different issues: his personal life story, experiences, political, and historical matters that have impacted his life and career. In Assensoh’s own words:

Interestingly, Assensoh’s memoir reflects his thoughts on salient issues that have impacted his life, education, and career. This chapter will further explore and investigate his reminiscences on politics and history, which sometimes intersect in the memoir. Also, this chapter will interrogate and expound on the conceptualization of reflection and its implication for the thematic exercise. The chapter is divided into four intersecting categories: the personal, the historical, the political, and the literary. In it, the personal category will capture the author’s reflections on his family, birth, parentage, and career. In this part of the chapter, the exploration of the author’s outlook on life—as a reflection of his childhood experiences, education, and career—will be discussed. The implication of examining this aspect will connect the chapter to his view of other matters or discourses in the memoir. His education and career will be viewed as the connecting map to his reflection on salient discourses with international import.

The historic part of the chapter is yoked to the author’s reflection on African politics and political growth.

Why do people marry? Or better: Why do they couple? While marriage and coupling practices seem to correspond with obvious biological and social necessities, a more targeted question might include: Why do they choose to couple or marry with the people that they do? And, what happens when they marry someone who is perceived as different from themselves?

Admittedly, such overgeneralized questions are, of course, accompanied by the underpinning assumption that the modern, Western social practice of marriage is largely accepted as a contract between two individuals based on both their free will and their affection for or commitment to one another. However, the cultural normative characterizations of both marital practices and courtship rituals show great variability in different historical contexts, and as Stephanie Coontz shows in her work, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, marriage as an emotion-based, state-sanctioned union is a relatively recent social invention. This leaves the task of defining marriage a difficult one. Over time, courtship and marital practices have taken many forms. In some contexts, to marry was a privilege, in others a necessity. Even in the present time, the tension between its dual meaning—both as a legal contract and as an emotional relationship— persists, and academic definitions vary. Anthropologist, Edmund Leach, for example, defines marriage as “a set of legal rules” that largely determines inheritance between generations. Coontz, by contrast, notes the limitations of this definition and goes further to define it instead as a social practice that “determines rights and obligations connected to sexuality, gender roles, relationships with in-laws, and the legitimacy of children.” However, no matter the changing legal or social characterizations, the practice of marriage has always, at its core, represented the connectedness of individuals—connectedness between participants, between families, between larger kinship and social networks, and even between societies. The marriages that make up the subject of this work transcended national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and connected individuals across the Atlantic.

Introduction

Varying day-to-day activities that humans experience at different times are important and pivotal to their existence, many of which are also valuable when shared with others. Advancing the course of society requires that people are intimated with the activities of individuals whose existence is especially rich with educative exploits from which others can learn. Therefore, storytelling by individuals or groups is essential because it foregrounds the experiences of the ones telling them and how their relationship with each story affects them and their society. The consequence is that people are enlightened about many of the steps they will eventually take, making it possible for them to predict the outcome of any decision to advance their individual or collective course. Although telling a story demands that the narrator has reliable memory that would not fail when regurgitating past experiences, this is usually cardinal to record-keeping because a story told without any regard for genuineness will lose its narratorial value. It is important that stories are told strictly by experts who understand the art of organizing historical events in ways that will appeal to the readers.

It is pertinent to state that the memoirs I engage with reveal a considerate attempt to explore autobiographical writing and theory regarding relational and autonomous lives in communal spaces. The memoirs discussed in this book demonstrate that the authors engage in an autonomous, singular, and unitary narration with themselves while simultaneously emphasizing their narratives as they interpenetrate and mutually cross with others to create a whole new dimension of experiences. The memoirs that will be investigated in this writing are authored by individuals who experienced the colonial power play and the eventual postcolonial realities that have continued to widely shape the lives of the African people.

Types of Stories

There are several types and forms of stories, having definitive qualities that separate them from the arrays of others. For example, there are biographies, autobiographies, fiction, and even memoirs, all of which have varying characteristics that differentiate them from others. In a memoir, there is a thin distinction that makes it different from an autobiography. While the latter is about the chronological experiences of the writer, the former dwells essentially on a part of the person’s history, giving enough information about that particular experience.