This chapter looks into the circulation of Lisu gospel music through the “disc recording”—both VCDs (Video Compact Discs) and what is now commonly used, DVDs (Digital Video Discs)—which finds its parallel with several other minor recording industries in different parts of China's border regions: whether the cross-border trade in cassettes of Dai pop songs in Xishuangbanna in the 1990s (Davis 2005); the flows of Uyghur pop between the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and those in Turkey, the Central Asian states, and the exile community in the United States (Harris 2005, 2012); or the influence of Inner Mongolian pop music outside China (Baranovitch 2001). They share many similar features, including a relatively short history, the emergence of private studio production, the facilitation of technological progress, and the role of individual musicians’ appeal in the cross-border success.2 Regardless of all these similarities, the development of these minor recording industries differs from each other in terms of degrees of state control, impetus for music production, musical styles, and width of transmission (for a detailed analysis, see Diao 2015, 318–20).

In this chapter, I analyze the disc recordings’ medial qualities as a form of auditory technology and I consider the broader infrastructures that facilitate this technology's mediality and efficacy. At the end of the chapter, I turn to the mediating role of the Chinese social media, represented by WeChat. I should first clarify the reason why I chose to focus on the medium of the disc recording. Until the mid-2010s, Lisu gospel music had been distributed mainly through the exchange of physical copies rather than through online platforms, although combined usage of two publishing methods existed on smaller scales.

Between the late 1660s and early 1690s, the French navy underwent significant operational and administrative expansion. Naval minister and contrôleur général (finance minister) Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1665–83) and later his son, the marquis de Seignelay (1683–90), presided over a series of naval reforms in an effort to match Anglo-Dutch naval strength. Rebuilding the navy required not only the construction and acquisition of ships, but also the creation of a naval supply chain, investments in ports and arsenals at Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, the formation of a conscription system to supply the navy with over 40,000 sailors, and the oversight of a centralised, commission-based administrative system of maritime intendants and commissaires, the king's agents in the ports with a broad array of responsibilities. While Colbert's navy was built on a network of ‘fisco-financiers’, where administrative and subcontracting roles were often conflated, the growth of Louis XIV's navy echoed, it would seem, a wider determination by the king to reassert monarchical sovereignty and establish firm royal control over the armed forces.

With impressive speed, the navy increased in size and sophistication over the course of three decades, expanding from 18 ships in 1661 to 132 rated warships by January 1692. By 1676, when it gained an important victory over a combined Spanish-Dutch fleet at Palermo during the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78), the navy demonstrated its importance as an instrument of war by enabling the French monarchy to project its military power and influence beyond its immediate reach. The offshore bombardments of Algiers (1682–83), Genoa (1684), and Tripoli (1685) underscored not only the strategic value of a standing fleet, but also the devastating effect with which it could be deployed. On the surface, the results of the Colbertian naval reconstruction programme were decisive. France had a fleet capable of challenging the Anglo-Dutch navies both in terms of warship tonnage, and for relative strategic dominance of the Mediterranean between 1676 and 1693.

Yet, as the French navy reached the apogee of its numerical and operational strength during the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), Louis XIV's government was forced in 1694–95 to drawdown the fleet. The decades-long revival of the French navy came to a halt as fleet operations were suspended and Louis XIV's larger rated warships, emblematic of royal prestige and dynastic might, were laid up in Brest and Toulon. By 1695, the Atlantic fleet was no longer operating.

Introduction

Part II established the importance of the naval trésoriers to the crown's ability to fund the navy and outlined the financial risks of their responsibilities. Part III highlights the weaknesses of the financial controls in place to oversee and regulate the activities of the naval treasury in the 1700s. Chapter Six begins by outlining the three levels of accountability to which the trésoriers were theoretically subjected and then underscores how ineffective these accountability measures became when war strained the state's organisational capacities. Chapter Seven examines the challenges of holding the trésoriers to account in wartime as the naval administration failed to manage the flow of financial information. Chapter Eight then outlines the scale of misappropriation and fraudulent activity that certain trésoriers perpetrated. In practice, the trésoriers had long operated in an accountability void under Louis XIV. However, by the War of the Spanish Succession, the crown's inability to exercise tight control over the trésoriers’ operations allowed the trésoriers to prioritise their own financial positions over the navy's financial needs and prevented ministers from identifying financing problems as they developed.

The financial officers who constituted the naval treasury, the trésoriers généraux de la Marine, were an integral part of the navy's system of finance. Alongside the trésoriers of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, the navy's trésoriers were some of Louis XIV's most important paymasters, whose operations uniquely spanned virtually all of France's provinces and interacted with the wide range of industries and manpower resources that the navy relied on. Situated in the Marais and the quartier Richelieu in Paris, these office-holders were tightly integrated into the administrative and financial hub that financed and sustained the crown's military enterprises: these were the same locations where the administrative and social elite had established their grands hôtels, and leading officers, bankers, and financiers conducted their business. In the 1690s and 1700s, the growing indispensability of the position of trésorier to the navy's funding was the direct result of Louis XIV's increasingly expensive war effort and the deteriorating fiscal resources he could rely on to fund his military activities.

The fundamental purpose of the navy's paymasters was to fund the navy's operations by matching the royal revenues designated for its consumption to the navy's myriad expenses. Responsible for managing the navy's accounts, these comptables effectively operated as a central clearing house by receiving the navy's share of the crown's income and disbursing these funds on the government's request. Once the navy's funding allocation was decided at the start of the year, the authority to arrange payments to the navy's creditors resided principally with the king. Once aware of the specifics of the navy's needs, the secrétaire d’État de la Marine (naval minister) operating out of the naval bureau in Paris was responsible for drawing up a series of ordonnances de paiements, or payment orders, which then would have been presented to the contrôleur général des finances (finance minister) and, subsequently, the king for countersigning before they were issued to the trésoriers. The ordonnances de paiements formed the basis of a trésorier's operations, directing him to remit money to payees in the ports and other localities throughout France. Without possession of one of these payment orders, the trésorier was strictly forbidden from moving royal funds to acquit costs.

They survived. Malaria that attacked each person at least once in every three months. They survived. Drinking water from the muddy brown pond which served as the community's source of water; water that had guinea worm eggs which matured into live worms as they entered the human system. They survived measles, whooping cough, and countless cases of flu brought about by lack of immunization. They survived under-nutrition and a heavily carbohydrate-based diet. Egg was for adults, and any child that was raised eating eggs would steal in the future. They survived. Eating rice and stew only on Sundays. Because Sunday was a special day and they were a Christian family that went to church. After church, Mama would make rice and stew with tripe of cow and hides and skin. As the ‘things’ within the stew were shared according to seniority, you dared not choose out of turn or eat yours immediately. You wore the ‘towel’ on your finger and ran out to show other children the great feast that happened in your home. They survived the chiggers that burrowed into their shoeless feet as they did the ‘five-kilometre’ trek to their school and back every day. As Mama tenderly cut open the affected toe to pick out the flea, she rubbed hot sizzling oil into the wound and put a plaster on it. That foot must be protected from stones and from getting contaminated. Many a child died from tetanus infection. They survived poverty. So how did they not survive running the same prosperous business they had both contributed to nurturing?

They enjoyed the moonlight games and the tropical rains. They would run into the rain naked, glad that they could have a full bath without the hassle of fetching the water. They felt the biting wind and cold of the harmattan season when one would stand for several minutes wishing the cold water could miraculously turn to warm water before using it to bathe. But bath in the cold water, they must. So they began by testing a little with the feet and working up gradually to the head. That is if Kachi or Ogeri didn't mischievously pour some ice-cold water on them from behind.

Uche and Azu were born eight years apart to Papa and Mama Mkpume. Uche was the older. Between them were two sisters; Kachi and Ogeri.

A proper history of literature in the Xhosa language of South Africa has yet to be written. The majority of the few attempts at a coherent narrative tend to commence with original literature published in book form in the first decade of the twentieth century, usually with H.M Ndawo's novel Uhambo lukaGqoboka in 1909. My own research has served to extend the range of literary expression in Xhosa backwards, to 1837 in the case of literature in print, with the appearance of the first periodical, Umshumayeli wendaba, and potentially further still in the case of traditions of oral poetry, izibongo. What follows is a brief account of my journey, and its accomplishments in restoring the voices and reputations of major authors overlooked by African literature scholars in the past as well as in the present.

My journey as a scholar began with Arts and Science degrees in English and Mathematics from the University of Cape Town. Attracted by pre-Conquest English literature, I proceeded to MA and PhD degrees; my doctoral dissertation compared the South Slavic, Homeric, and Xhosa traditions of oral poetry, expressing my growing interest in the development of literatures from the oral to the written state. The Xhosa sections drew on fieldwork with Xhosa oral poets, iimbongi, commencing in 1969. The fieldwork and collection of oral poetry, izibongo, were initially designed to shed light on preliterate Anglo-Saxon poetry, but in time my focus shifted to the study and collection of oral Xhosa izibongo in its own right, an enterprise that continued through to 1988. As an adjunct to this research, I began to focus on izibongo in traditional form in published books, and this focus in turn extended in time to the study and collection of Xhosa poetry, and literature in general, in vernacular periodicals. My field recordings of oral performances of izibongo, and interviews with over a hundred iimbongi, together with books in Xhosa and copies of Xhosa literature culled from ephemeral publications, form the core of The Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature.

With the exception of A.C. Jordan's unfinished series of twelve articles, published in Africa South between 1957 and 1960 under the title ‘Towards an African Literature’, scant attention had been paid to newspapers as a vehicle of Xhosa literature. The copies of newspaper literature in my Collection were culled from surviving Xhosa or multilingual periodicals published between 1837 and the mid-1950s.

EONS BEFORE