This essay explores the varied ways so-called ‘witchcraft’ powers are implicated today in an African society, the Tuareg of the Republic of Niger. There is analysis of the interplay of these powers and dangers in case studies and vignettes, suggesting that recent assertions of ‘witch-like’ powers are grounded in moral discourse that addresses negotiated social relationships rather than linear temporal transformations from ‘tradition’ into ‘modernity’. A comparative analysis of these powers in diverse contexts reveals that witchcraft discourses are multiple and invite less a lineal temporal question of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’, more a question of how moral discourses are reconfigured from cultural referents in intrinsically diverse repertoires.

This paper is an investigation of the relationship between identity, politics, and rumours in Jimma, Ethiopia. The introduction of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia after the fall of the Marxist Derg regime in 1991 has been the topic of a significant amount of academic discussion, but little attention has been given to the day-to-day experience of this change. Consequently, post-1991 Ethiopian politics have been viewed primarily in terms of ethnic power struggles. An analysis of rumours that are circulated through casual conversation enables a better understanding of popular reactions to ethnic federalism. In particular, rumours regarding the drinking habits of Oromo Muslims and the political behaviour of Protestants reveal that ethnicity is closely intertwined with religion and nationalism. This analysis also demonstrates how a particularly Ethiopian form of discourse functions as a means both of resisting and coping with loss of political power and economic decline. Finally, it explores how international news media coverage of Christian–Muslim conflict and anxieties about globalisation are interrelated with local power struggles. In this paper, rumours are treated as a discourse that provides a window into the worldview of the speaker in order to explore how individuals negotiate political change and construct difference at the everyday level.

The introduction of dry-season vegetable cultivation on a large scale in Brikama, The Gambia in the early 1970s has led to the development of a new labour system amongst female farmers whereby strangers or clients are given access to land primarily in the dry season for vegetable cultivation in exchange for providing unremunerated labour for hosts for the cultivation of rice in the rainy season. Hosts, who either claim descent from the founding families or have married into founding families, have access to land and control its distribution for women's crops. This article examines the way in which social difference is played out in the acquisition of land and labour through the establishment of agrarian clientelist relations. Agrarian clientelist relations are about the maintenance of host–stranger distinctions and the management of social difference within a rapidly changing Gambian political economy. The nature of these clientelist relations is changing because of the changing relations of agrarian production, related in turn to the introduction of cooperative gardens in the region, the increasing scarcity of farming land and the increasing political power of strangers on a local and national level. The youth, particularly those who are educated, are moving out of farming altogether. Consequently, female hosts are increasingly reliant on their clients' labour. I argue that female hosts attempt to manage these processes of change out of a need to maintain the particular power relations that form the basis for host–stranger distinctions and their existing claims to land and labour. The article examines the tensions and the intra-gender struggles that emerge between female hosts and their client-strangers. In refusing to take the initiative to set up cooperative gardens, female hosts have maintained what they see as their rightful claims to their land and their clients' labour. Hegemonic notions of ‘the correctness of practices’, associated with host–stranger identities, have informed hosts' behaviour and that of their clients, and ultimately influenced the nature of resource allocation.

The practice of entrustment is a form of voluntary allegiance for the sake of protection, one which historically lies at the core of host–stranger relationships along the River Gambia. Deeply woven into the social fabric of local communities, it was appropriated by various historical subjects during the twentieth century in order to construct networks of political confidence and mutual assistance at a local and national level. This article traces this dynamic process of re-elaboration. In so doing, it takes into account the history of a Mandinka commercial settlement in eastern Gambia from the late nineteenth century to post-Independence times, and questions the shifts that occurred in the political significance of entrustment with changing social and economic scenarios. Contextualised in the longue durée, the practice of karafoo shows its relevance as a cultural resource encouraging the creation of networks of trust and interdependence in social settings historically characterised by seasonal and more stable forms of migration.

This case study of youth cultural production in Cameroon examines how lycée students introduce idioms of tradition and the ancestral past into the lycée context by creating a club modelled on a dance society popular in the region. In pre-colonial rural Tupuriland, the gurna society was a key site for the moral–sexual socialisation of youth and a cultural–political arena where competition was staged between individuals and villages during death celebrations. Today, the gurna remains popular in Tupuri villages, though it has been recreated in urban contexts and modern institutions where members use its forms to mediate new social relations and modern realities. This paper explores the meanings, functions, and effects of the creation of the ‘Gurna Club’ by students in the Lycée de Doukoula, by examining students' Youth Day dance performances, vibrant song discourse, and nostalgia for earlier forms of indigenous socialisation (e.g. the gurna, youth initiation, and wrestling). By inserting the communal poetics of the gurna into the lycée, Tupuri youth seek to yoke multiple facets of their identity, making visible their desire to be gurna, even as they pursue their civic obligations as students. In creating the Gurna Club, students begin to participate in an increasing trend in Cameroon toward the use of idioms of parochialism (such as ethnically based elite associations) as strategies for garnering national power and recognition.

The existence of the Ogoni ethnic group is taken for granted in the literature that has grown out of the minority rights and environmentalist campaigns of the 1990s. This article departs from this tradition by engaging the historical development of the Ogoni ethnic group, taking as its point of departure elite politics in the context of colonial categories and post-colonial politics. With comparative data on the development of ethnic groups in Nigeria, it shows how elite politics and state structures and administrative decisions influenced the development of the Ogoni ethnic group and the identity it purveys. It also shows that differing interests in oil with unequal power bases spurred rigid positions that served to facilitate or constrain the execution of the Ogoni identity-building project.