In the last twenty years the number of smiths and the range of their activity have greatly increased in Tamale, the principal city of northern Ghana. The evolution of the national economy and the particular situation of Tamale in the geography of Ghana explain this development and the contribution that the city's smiths make to the economy, national as well as local.

This article explores why, despite its diminished popularity, Afro-Cuban music remains among the most performed musics in Senegalese music clubs. Since the Second World War, many Senegalese have associated Afro-Cuban music with cosmopolitanism and modernity. In particular, Senegalese who came of age during the Independence era associate Latin music with a new model of sociability that emphasized ‘correct’ behaviour – elegant attire and self-discipline. Participating in an emerging ‘café society’ was especially important. The rise of m'balax music in the late 1970s, deemed more culturally ‘authentic’ by a younger generation coming into its own, challenged many of the values associated with Senegalese salsa. As an enlarged Senegalese public embraced m'balax, the older generation stopped going out to Dakar's nightclubs where they felt increasingly uncomfortable. However, the model of sociability this generation has championed calls for public displays of distinction and refinement. In fin-de-siècle Dakar, a number of venues emerged where Afro-Cuban music is played and powerful older Dakarois congregate, even if less frequently than formally. This article describes these venues and documents their patrons and the performances that take place there.

In its modernization garb, development has come to mean the inculcation of foreign values resulting in the fundamental transformation of modernizing nations. Ironically, little attention is being drawn to the consequences of modernizing influences. This is the core of the article. Through qualitative research methodology consisting of in-depth interviews (IDIs), participant observation and informal interviews, the article examines the emergence and ascendancy of fast foods in Ibadan, Nigeria. Our finding is that the middle class, the youth and children, as conveyors of imported cultures (into which they have been socialized), are the major customers whose values are projected through marketing strategies by the fast food outfits. Unfortunately, the health implications of these foods have not been properly grasped by these consumers, and neither have the market operators attempted to sensitize them. The article concludes that even when modernization influences are to be incorporated in the globalizing world, their initiatives must be well contextualized, comprehended and their contours managed for objective development to be achieved and sustained.

In the new South Africa, the promise of land restitution raised millennial-style expectations amongst dispossessed and dispersed former landholders. Partly prompted by emerging policy discourses, iconic tropes of localized cultural experience such as grave sites, initiation lodges and cattle byres acquired new significance. Because they proved what the Land Claims Commission calls ‘informal rights’ to land, they became verifiable evidence of effective possession, and thus grounds on which to claim the restoration of such land. The meaning of land, the nature of ownership and the legitimacy of its restoration were all matters contested between claimants, policy makers and human rights lawyers. They were also contested by those at different levels in the hierarchical social order of the new South Africa. Members of the African nationalist political elite, in dialogue with lawyers, cherished one set of understandings, while ordinary migrant/country-dwellers tended to hold to another. Both, however, were mediated through the new discourse on informal rights. It is neither purely through the activities of cosmopolitan elites with their ‘political demand for land’ nor through the unmediated localist experience of less sophisticated country-dwellers with more practical orientations that the significance of land becomes evident, but in the interaction between the two. Based on local understandings, transformed in the course of thirty years of ‘land back’ struggles, and finally negotiated over the course of the last ten years, a new diasporic consensus on what ‘the land’ signifies has been established.

In this article, mimesis and mimicry are used as analytical concepts to explore dynamics of state and identity formation in Somaliland and Puntland since the early 1990s. Mimesis captures endeavours to imitate well-established models of social and political organization. Mimicry involves the deceptive imitation of such models in order to reach a certain aim. In the particular setting of northern Somalia, miming and mimicking in state and identity formation are also related to conflict escalation. The article first presents relevant political and legal positions on state collapse and secession. This helps to grasp the theoretical and policy implications of the empirical material. Then, the establishment of Somaliland and Puntland through mimesis and mimicry is sketched. The outline of the repeated military confrontations between both sides, particularly the last round of fighting in and around the town of Laascaanood in late 2007, indicates the relation of state and identity formation to military conflict. These localized dynamics are embedded into the continuing conflict in southern Somalia that involves a number of internal and external actors. The article concludes that miming and mimicking underlie many of Somaliland's and Puntland's internal developments and their conflictive relationship. Moreover, since the conflict in northern Somalia concerns state formation, it might have far-reaching consequences for the future of Somalia as a whole. This finally leads to the suggestion that the international norms regarding state collapse and secession have to be re-evaluated in the light of the empirical realities at hand.

Children's rights activists contend that corporal punishment in schools is a form of child abuse which hinders children's learning. Yet most parents and teachers in Maasailand, Kenya consider corporal punishment, if properly employed, to be one of the most effective ways to instil the discipline necessary for children to learn and grow well. Responding to calls for a more empirical anthropology of rights, this article provides an ethnographic analysis of the practice of corporal punishment in domestic and primary school settings, exploring its pedagogical, developmental and social significance, and illuminating its role in the production and negotiation of identities and personhood.