This discussion grows out of an attempt to account for the presence among the Suku of Zaïre of a rather common but somewhat puzzling feature of African ‘ancestor cults.’ For all the importance of ancestors in African traditional life and thought, there is surprisingly little elaboration of the mode of their existence in the other world. In a masterly discussion of ‘ancestor worship’ in Africa, Fortes (1965: 126ff) notes this fact but does not attempt to explain it. To be sure, the issue is distinctly secondary to his main concern—the sociological matrix of ancestor cults. In sociological perspective, what matters about ancestors is their social role in this world, not their style of life in the next. This sociological perspective is in tune with African ethnographic fact: like Fortes, African informants are primarily interested in the social relationship of the ancestors with the living and they show little sympathy with the ethnographer's occasional curiosity about the details of the ancestors' own existence.

The idea that gods are made by men, not men by gods, is a sociological truism. It belongs very obviously to a detached and critical tradition of thought incompatible with faith in those gods. But Yoruba traditional religion contains built into it a very similar notion, and here, far from indicating scepticism or decline of belief, it seems to be a central impulse to devotion. The òrìṣà (‘gods’) are, according to Yoruba traditional thought, maintained and kept in existence by the attention of humans. Without the collaboration of their devotees, the òrìṣà would be betrayed, exposed and reduced to nothing. This notion seems to have been intrinsic to the religion since the earliest times. How can such an awareness be part of a devotee's ‘belief’? Rather than speculate abstractly, as Rodney Needham does (Needham 1972), about whether people of other cultures can be said to ‘believe’ at all, it seems more interesting to take a concrete case like the Yorba one where there is an unexpected–even apparently paradoxical–configuration of ideas, and to ask how these ideas are constituted. Only by looking at them as part of a particular kind of society, with particular kinds of social relationships, can one see why such a configuration is so persuasive. The notion that men make gods is by no means unique to Yoruba thought. It is present to some degree in a number of traditional West African religions, and in some, such as the Kalahari one, it can be seen in an even more explicit form than in the Yoruba one. A comparison may help to show how it is the constitution of social relationships which makes such a notion not just acceptable but central to the religious thought of the society.

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the large volume of monetary transactions and profits within the traditional sector of a farming community in West Africa. More specifically it deals with the production, distribution and pricing of local brews, points to the effect of beer making on farming, and relates this trade to contemporary developments in other spheres of social and economic life.

Kwaara banda daarey, hala ga kano, yeow s'a gar. The stranger (no matter how long he/she has lived in a town) will never possess the choicest fruit of the daarey tree behind the village.

The daarey tree (Ziziphus jujuba) is found in and around Songhay towns in the Republic of Niger. Since its sweet red fruit is coveted, the whereabouts of the finest daarey are never divulged to foreigners, lest they steal from the Songhay that which is most delicious in their communities. The proverb underscores just how careful the Songhay are in protecting from non-Songhay that which is their own. It also suggests that just as non-Songhay will never possess the choicest daarey fruits, so too they will neither marry the most beautiful Songhay maidens nor become influential in community affairs. The most beautiful maidens, like the best daarey trees, are kept from the sight of non-Songhay; the sociocultural knowledge which enables a person to be perceived as influential is never taught directly to those who have migrated to the lands of the Songhay.

In his recent review of Ivan Karp's Fields of Change among the Iteso of Kenya, (Africa 2, 1980,214-216) Paul Spencer questions Dr. Karp's historical account of the emergence of neighbourhoods among the Iteso during the colonial era and presents an alternative hypothesis for this development. Since Dr. Spencer devotes most of his review to this point and because the transformation of social forms during the colonial period is a topic of some interest for both historians and anthropologists, I would like to examine the historical facts related to this issue and use them to evaluate the merits and deficiencies of both positions.