Two related problems are raised: (1) why the persistence, and increase in scale, of funeral rites (with consequently much greater expenditure) both colonially and post-colonially; (2) what is the effect of this greater funeral expenditure on the economy of today's Asante? It is suggested that present-day funeral rites have only superficial religious significance; it is their economic and social importance that explains the vigour with which they are still performed. Far from being economically wasteful, they fuel economic activities that are on balance beneficial. It is the combination of economic and social utility that sustains, even enhances, the scale of the performance of the rites.

In many parts of Africa, discourses on witchcraft and sorcery seem to follow a mod-ernisation process of their own. There are striking regional variations in the ways in which these discourses are articulated with State formation and the emergence of new modes of accumulation. A common denominator remains, however, the close connection between witchcraft and aggression from within the ‘house’. In many respects, witchcraft is still the dark side of kinship, even in modern settings.

It is against this background that this article explores the implications of a new type of witchcraft trial in the Eastern Province of Cameroon. Since 1980 State courts have started to convict ‘witches’ mainly on the basis of the expertise of the witch-doctors. This seems to be accompanied by the emergence of a ‘modern’ type of witch-doctor, more intent on punishing than on healing, who try to recruit their clients in very aggressive ways. In other parts of Cameroon the articulation of local witchcraft beliefs and State authority seems to follow different trajectories.

A feature of the ethnography of eastern and southern African cattle-keeping peoples is a high level of contradiction in the assessment of the status of women. Better understanding of the house-property complex, the property and inheritance system characteristic of these peoples, can resolve some seeming contradictions. In this system, all property (especially livestock) held by a polygynous family is divided and held separately by the nuclear family of each wife. Sons inherit from the property of their own mother's house rather than from a general pool of their father's property.

The article analyses variations in the norms of the house-property complex from one society to another. The institution is said to be ‘highly developed’ if more cattle are allocated as house property than are retained in men's residual herds, if women's rights in their house property are thought of as inalienable, if wives have some recourse should their husbands appropriate their house property, and if rules preventing redistribution of property or bridewealth between houses are rarely violated.

A frequently overlooked aspect of this property system is that it gives women well denned rights in property, despite public ideologies (often overstated, especially by male informants) that cattle belong to men. There are actually, in at least some societies, several named categories of cattle. In each category, different individuals have predominant rights. Women actively defend their interests in cattle in which their rights predominate, and manipulate those rights to gain their ends in social interaction. These points are illustrated with case material from Nandi District, Kenya.

The degree to which women have some control over property is obscured both by culturally endorsed simplifications and by the ethnographic situation in which male ethnographers historically interviewed male informants about property holding. Nevertheless, clues to women's participation in property management may be found in many classic ethnographies, and are cited in the article.

This article is a reinterpretation of blood brotherhood in three East African societies based on a reading of three ethnographic accounts, Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, Roscoe on the Baganda and Beidelman on the Kaguru. It argues against a construction of blood brotherhood as a single institution with one meaning, suggesting instead that the blood pact should be seen as a mechanism by which men formed ties of filiation with other men, in part on the basis of the kinds of relationships they idealised. In this way, blood was sometimes a magical substance and sometimes a fluid of reproductive power. This article suggests that scholars should look not only at the fluid of the blood pact but also at the part of the body from which blood is taken, in order to see the kinds of relationships men sought to establish with one another. Thus when the blood of blood brotherhood was taken from near the navel, or the chest, it suggested the intimacy of uterine ties, or the closeness of infant and nursing mother. When blood was mediated by cooked meat, it suggested a dilution of the power of blood and its association with the fluids of biological relationship.

Water control has long appeared an attractive technological solution to risky farming i n zones dependent on rain-fed cropping systems, especially in semi-arid regions. From the early twentieth century, European technicians and administrators sought to develop irrigated agriculture in African colonies. In the French Soudan the earliest colonial waterworks date back to the 1920s, just outside Bamako, in the vicinity of Baguineda. From Baguineda the French went on to develop a much larger-scale irrigation project north of Segou known as the Office du Niger. This study uses archival documents to show that a new system of crop production was imposed on peasants by the colonial state. Using labour requisitions and in some cases forced resettlement, the colony introduced new crops and technology for rapid intensification, and in so doing organised a new agricultural system oriented primarily towards the market. The Baguineda project began as, and remained, an enclave, spatially distinct from the surrounding dryland grain and pulse cropping system oriented primarily towards lineage reproduction. In common with many subsequent introduced agricultural development projects in Africa, its lack of success was due in part to the conflicting interests of poor peasant workers and powerful foreign promoters.

A school of thought sees the African communal system of land ownership as an inherently conservative arrangement which does not adapt or adapts only slowly to economic opportunity and, therefore, acts as a constraint on development. However, this view, which partly underlies the call for radical land reform measures such as nationalisation, is, generally, not borne out by the performance of the Ghanaian system as assessed on the basis of historical evidence and the findings of a recent survey of peasant oil palm farming. In the nineteenth century, when there was a substantial increase in demand for land for the oil palm against a background of relative land abundance in Ghana, the system responded with land sales, tenancy and other temporary transfers which allowed enterprising migrant farmers, notably Krobo farmers, access to land, while sufficient parcels were retained for use by the communal owners, including the Akyem people, the major vendors of land for oil palm and cocoa farming in the forest zone. This response pattern was repeated in subsequent periods characterised by greater demand for land for the cultivation of cocoa, which supplanted the oil palm as the premier export early in the present century. Further evidence of the adaptability of the communal system is provided by its response to the renewed demand for land in respect of the remarkable post-1970 oil palm boom. A recent sample study of oil palm farming in the Kade, Twifo Praso and Pretsea - Adum Banso areas in the heart of the oil palm belt found that the communal system had been responding to the renewed demand for land associated with the crop's growing profitability, mainly by temporary transfer arrangements to the almost total exclusion of outright sale, apparently to protect the sovereign interest of the community of owners and to secure land for their own use in the wake of rapidly expanding population, urbanisation and attendant increasing land scarcity. But the communal system as traditionally organised continues to be characterised by the insecurity of the tenure granted, especially to stranger farmers, while there are signs that the number of inequitable tenancies is on the increase. These problems might be minimised and land development enhanced by greater enforcement of the new land title registration law, and byflexibletenancy and other land-holding regulatory measures within the general framework of a free market system.