This article is about the unseen world of war—the unrecorded consequences for children of large-scale horror. There are two parts to it. The first is on the need for healing: it is an account of children's suffering during Zimbabwe's War of Liberation and their part in the fight for freedom. The second describes the means for healing: it examines how traditional healers (n'anga) provided opportunities through ritual for reconciliation and the soothing of individual trauma.

RENAMO is a shadowy movement and ill-understood, save for its well-established genesis as a military artefact of the Rhodesians, then its transition in 1980 to South African patronage. Lacking all the features we have come to associate with successful insurgencies in Africa, such as a charismatic leadership or easily identifiable ideology, it has failed to develop a political identity commensurate with its military strength. It has no clearly defined regional base, relies on widespread forced recruitment, and behaves with notorious brutality towards the civilian population. Yet it operates throughout the length and breadth of Mozambique, and holds the state in virtual paralysis. Since it lacks rear bases and therefore depends upon local provisioning, it must be able to obtain compliance over large areas of rural Mozambique. That also implies effective organisation.

The Mau Mau movement used a campaign of ritualised oath-taking to gain the support and co-operation of the Gikuyu masses. The oaths remain a continuing source of controversy in the literature on Mau Mau, little of which is directly anthropological. This article offers a tentative resolution to that controversy through an anthropological analysis of Mau Mau oathing rituals in the light of contemporary theories on the relation of ritual to ideology. I argue that the oathing rituals are to be understood as part of the ideological apparatus of the movement, along with rallies and songs. The effectiveness of the oathing rituals lies not solely in their symbolic reference to 'traditional practice' as Buijtenhuijs (1982: 87) has suggested, nor in some inherent mystifying property of ritual communication (Bloch, 1974: 67–76). Although a continuity between the oathing rituals and those associated with the legitimation of traditional authority is strikingly apparent, the success of the former as a medium for political recruitment is to be explained in its relation to ideology, and in the essential ambiguity of the central tenets of that ideology—‘land’ and ‘freedom’.

Few dispute the proposition that the Second World War marked the beginning of the end of colonialism in Africa. The thesis developed by Hodgkin (1956), Crowder (1968, 1978) and Schachter-Morgenthau (1964)—that coalitions of African veterans, disgruntled planters, peasants and chiefs gave rise to anti-colonialist, nationalist political movements in the immediate post-war era—has not been seriously challenged. The general acceptance of this view has resulted in a neglect of the history of the colonies during the war years themselves. While there is now a growing interest in this subject, most studies of the independence movements begin with the emergence, in 1946, of recognisable political parties in British and French Africa. They take as starting points such visible events as the Brazzaville Conference, the 1946 French Constitution, the launching of the Convention Peoples Party in Ghana, or the founding of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africaine (RDA) in Bamako. What is needed now are thorough case studies of the specific policies and practices of the imperial powers during the Second World War and a consideration of the extent to which they acted as internal catalysts in the struggle for independence. This article, which is offered as a contribution to that end, looks at one chapter in the war experience of the Cote d'Ivoire.

Within the past decade, several major fires involving key government establishments have occurred in Nigeria. These included fires at: the 10-storey Federal Ministry of Education building (5 September 1980); the 11-storey Republic Building of the Ministry of External Affairs (14 December 1981); the 37-storey External Communication Building, NECON House (24 January 1983); the 13th floor of the 23-storey building housing the Defence Ministry (27 October 1983); the Accounts Department of the Cabinet Office (19 March 1984); the Finance and Accounts Division of the Post and Telegraphs (Ministry of Communications) headquarters (4 December 1984); and the 32-storey Cocoa House in Ibadan (8 January 1985). The latest of these fires engulfed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Headquarters in Lagos on 12 April 1986.

In his survey of abortion in 400 pre-industrial societies, Devereux (1955: 161) concludes:

…there is every indication that abortion is an absolutely universal phenomenon, and that it is impossible even to construct an imaginary social system in which no woman would ever feel at least impelled to abort.

Where the universality of abortion is equated with the urge to abort, one can hardly disagree with such a statement. The question, however, of whether or not abortion ever actually occurred—or still occurs—ubiquitously and to a demographically significant extent is difficult to answer. Among the Akan in Ghana, where I did anthropological fieldwork intermittently between 1969 and 1973, abortion was widespread, a practice which seemed to have roots in precolonial traditions. People referred to abortion as sɛe adeɛ (‘spoiling the thing’).

I went out to the Gold Coast as a teacher on the staff of the newly established Achimota College in October 1924, and a few weeks before I came back for my first leave, in April 1926, there came to the college a distinguished visitor, Major Hanns Vischer (later Sir Harms), the educational adviser to the Colonial Office in London. It was Major Vischer who told me about the project to establish an International African Institute.

Vischer was a remarkable and delightful character. I was told that he was of Swedish descent, which was why he spelt his name Harms instead of in the German form Hans. He had served in the British army through the First World War, but before the war he had served in Nigeria as a missionary for the Church Missionary Society. He spoke fluent Hausa, and (I was told) some other languages. He was certainly a skilled linguist, for he seemed equally at home in English, French and German. He spoke English with a slight foreign accent, which made it easy to believe in his Scandinavian origin; it was not a German accent. He stayed at Achimota for a week or so, and went on from the Gold Coast to visit Sierra Leone. He joined my homeward-bound steamer at Freetown; he remembered having met me at Accra, and told me about the projected institute. Whoever may have been responsible for starting the scheme, it was Vischer who was the driving force in organising its inaugural meeting.

Since 1985, when the International African Institute took the initiative of organising a one-day seminar entitled ‘The Book Famine in Africa’, awareness has grown of the difficulties African scholars face through lack of access to recently published books and journals. Scarcity of locally published material in specialised educational fields means that imported books are—and will remain for some time—the only way in which library collections can be sustained and developed. In countries experiencing economic decline and a shortage of foreign exchange, the role of international donors in tertiary-level library development becomes critical. It has not always been possible, however, for institutions to know whom to approach for assistance.