This article is a West African case-study of the nutritional history of everyday poverty. It draws on unusually rich statistical evidence collected in northeastern Ghana. In the 1930s, pioneer colonial surveys revealed that seasonal poor diet was pervasive, by contrast with undernourishment. They pave the way for constructing a new set of anthropometric data in Nangodi, a savanna polity where John Hunter completed a classic study of seasonal hunger in the 1960s. A re-survey of the same sections and lineages c. 2000, during a full agricultural cycle, shows a significant improvement in nutritional statuses, notably for women.

This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.

This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the ‘mania of 1911’, which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this ‘psychic epidemic’ and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria. This use of medical and psychological language in primarily non-medical contexts serves to highlight the intellectual and political roles psychiatric ideas played in colonial governance. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, charismatic leadership and a proliferation of East African prophetic movements. This article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic or suffering from ‘religious mania’.

This article examines three incidents in the history of early colonial Natal in which colonial forces under Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone attacked subject chiefs, deposed them and seized their herds. These incidents, which presaged the later conflict with Langalibalele, constituted in local African terms ‘eating up’, a practice whereby a chief confiscated the property of a subject convicted of conspiring against him through witchcraft. Close examination of these incidents shows how the early colonial state's rule over African subjects was inevitably imbued with African understandings of power and authority.

This article demonstrates that black British West Indians and black South Africans in post-First World War Cape Town viewed ‘American Negroes’ as divinely ordained liberators from South African white supremacy. These South-African based Garveyites articulated a prophetic Garveyist Christianity that provided common ideological ground for Africans and diasporic blacks through leading black South African organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU). This study utilizes a ‘homeland and diaspora’ model that simultaneously offers an expansive framework for African history, redresses the relative neglect of Africa and Africans in African diaspora studies and demonstrates the impact of Garveyism on the country's interwar black freedom struggle.

WRITING African History pays homage to Daniel McCall's pioneering text, Africa in Time Perspective: A Discussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources, published at the dawn of the era of modern African history in 1964. Surprisingly, given subsequent developments in the field, there has been no comparable text since, making this volume especially welcome. But it also bears a heavy burden if it is to become the authoritative text for the next generations of students and scholars. Does it meet this difficult test?

Ce double numéro du Journal des Africanistes est issu d'un séminaire organisé entre 1999 et 2002 par l'équipe Afrique du laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative de l'Université de Paris 10 Nanterre. II regroupe 18 contributions d'anthropologues et d'historiens français qui interrogent à partir d'études de cas le fonctionnement du pouvoir local ou ‘le statut politique des localités en Afrique’ (p. 11)avec, en point de mire, deux objets principaux: la ville et la cité. Cette dernière fait l'objet d'une discussion théorique dans les deux chapitres introductifs de l'ouvrage. Jean-Jacques Glassner propose effectivement une recension fort utile des variations sémantiques de la notion de Cité-Etat sur différents continents à différentes périodes. Gilles Holder et Anne-Marie Peatrik s'interrogent pour leur part sur la Cité-Etat et la cité dans le contexte africain. Cette dernière associerait trois types d'espace: l'enceinte (matérielle ou symbolique), l'arrière-pays qui nourrit la cité, et ‘l'outre-pays’, néologisme proposé par les auteurs pour désigner des espaces non dépendants de la cité mais avec lesquels celle-ci entretient des liens économiques, politiques ou religieux (p. 14). Cette définition large permet aux auteurs ne pas opposer d'emblée ville et campagne et de pas dissocier a priori la ville de la cité et la cité de la Cité-Etat. Elle inclut donc des échelles d'analyse plus grandes et plus petites. On pourra en revanche s'étonner de l'absence d'une définition liminaire de la ville (proposée ensuite par différents auteurs), d'une bibliographie qui ne tient pas compte du renouvellement conséquent de l'histoire urbaine, notamment dans le monde anglophone, et de quelques cadrages chronologiques hasardeux (l'intérêt des historiens pour les villes d'Afrique a émergé au début des années 1980 et non au cours de la dernière décennie, p. 10).

The profile of African urban history has risen considerably of late, with the appearance of a number of important monographs and edited collections. What is more, with the plethora of younger scholars as well as more established historians now exploring Africa's urban pasts, its profile is set to rise further. African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective represents the latest contribution to this emerging sub-field. A companion volume, Urbanization and African Cultures, is of a more interdisciplinary character. Both are drawn from contributions to a 2003 University of Texas conference.

African Urban Spaces will be of more interest to readers of this journal, not only because of its historical focus but also its higher quality and greater cohesion. It covers an impressive geographical and temporal range, with chapters on primary and secondary cities throughout Africa, spanning the precolonial past to the present. It is introduced by one of the pioneers of Africa's urban history, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, who teases themes from the collection and signals promising avenues for future research. However, poor referencing mars the introduction, a symptom of the apparently loose editorial role exercised over the book as a whole. Greater intervention could have strengthened the collection considerably: not only to ensure consistent referencing (authors variously adopt endnotes and social science/intratext systems) and to minimize typographical errors, but more seriously to tighten the sloppier passages and chapters. The quality of the chapters varies considerably, some representing useful scholarly contributions, others being pedestrian accounts offering little or nothing new.