In an age so overwhelmingly dominated by the planner, statistics and statisticians have come to assume a crucial importance; and so seriously have the latter taken their new responsibility that, in recent times, a veritable flood of data on every conceivable aspect of socio-economic behaviour has engulfed us. In the newly emergent nations this task of collecting and collating information, spurred on no doubt by the knowledge that much remains to be done, has proceeded with a rare enthusiasm, and in all of them the periodic ‘Digest of Statistics’ has become a familiar document.

Students of West African rice agriculture (cf. Dresch 1949, Mohr 1969) often distinguish between the Upper Guinea coast, where wet rice has been grown for centuries in permanent swamp fields recovered from the mangrove, and a more extensive area further inland, where the predominant form has been dry or mountain rice grown by shifting agriculturalists (fig. 1). The Diola of Senegal (Pélissier 1966, Linares 1970), the Balanta of Guinea Bissau (Espírito Santo 1949), and the Baga of coastal Guinea (Paulme 1957), belong to the first category. They transplant rice in inundated fields that are desalinated, diked, ridged and irrigated. In contrast, the Mande-speaking peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia are mostly ‘upland’ farmers. They broadcast rice on rain-fed fields that are rotated and fallowed.

Although for reasons of a misguided economy a Native Census was not undertaken in 1931 and consequently complete statistics for the Native population of South Africa are entirely lacking, the available evidence points to a marked increase in the Native urban population. The 1921 census revealed the fact that Native women also were settling in town in much larger numbers than had previously been the case, and all indications point to a much greater increase in this section of the urban population since then. This growing inclination of the Native to settle his wife and children in the urban centre where he earns his livelihood indicates a tendency on his part to divorce himself from his rural bonds and to regard the town as his permanent home and not as the place of his solely temporary employment. The children of these families will, in all likelihood, eventually form a permanent and stable urban population, entirely dissociated from a rural background. Many of them—the potential citizens of a town—have been reared in a slum yard. Such yards represent for many Natives their first, and perhaps only, experience of a home.

On that day if you had seen me, you would not have known me; dirty cap with feathers and a long stick, since doesn't fear send a walking stick forward? I put dirty clothes on and I looked like ‘massa’ [my husband]. I even wore plant leaves around my neck so as to make all men [people] put their minds to this [problem].…Today fombuen doesn't march because there isn't trouble but if cows come again they will join! Women know the sound of the whistle and they will leave their cooking pots on the fire. [A Kedjom Ketinguh woman who participated in the 1958 fombuen march to Bamenda]

War has ravaged Acholiland in northern Uganda since 1986. The Ugandan army is fighting the Lord's ResistanceMovement/Army (LRM/A) rebels. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the article aims at exemplifying the ways in which non-combatant people's experiences of war and violence are domesticated in cosmological terms as strategies of coping, and it relates tales of wars in the past to experiences of violent death and war in the present. There has been a politicized debate in Uganda over whether or not the LRM/A rebels have the elders' ceremonial warfare blessing. In sketching this debate, the article interprets the possible warfare blessing – which some informants interpreted as having turned into a curse on Acholiland – as a critical event that benefits from further deliberation, regardless of its existence or non-existence. It is argued that no warfare blessing can be regarded as the mere utterance of words. Rather, a blessing is performed within the framework of the local moral world. It is finally argued that the issue of the warfare blessing is a lived consequence of the conflict, but, nevertheless, cannot be used as an explanatory model for the cause of the conflict.

This article examines the ways in which young men in the city of Inhambane, southern Mozambique, harness communication to express and address experiences of constrained physical and social mobility. It starts with an analysis of a highly valued form of oral communication – bater papo – that youth, especially young men, engage in on a daily basis before turning to mobile phone use. Tying these different forms of communication together is a profound desire to claim membership of, and to participate in, a world that remains elusive for most. However, if mobile phone communication builds on pre-existent forms of communication, it takes on particular aesthetic qualities that speak of, rather than resolve, exclusion. The article argues that, while helping bridge distances in significant ways, mobile phone communication nonetheless, and somewhat ironically, also betrays young men's immobility.

Parmi les Kapsiki/Higi des montagnes Mandara, la division entre les forgerons et les non-forgerons s'élargit au sein de la société. Les forgerons dominent les spécialisations techniques et rituelles—y compris la forge—et parce qu'ils sont associés à l'idée de la mort, ils sont tenus pour des gens sales. Une des façons par laquelle cette opposition se manifeste apparaît à travers la caractérisation de l'odeur.

Utilisant des idéophones, les Kapsiki distinguent quatorze types d'odeur; chaque type est associé à des objets, des animaux ou des individus particuliers possédant une odeur (par exemple, les forgerons). La distinction des odeurs par les forgerons est néanmoins différente de celle donnée par les non-forgerons; de même, les femmes de chaque caste déterminent l'odeur différemment des hommes. Alors que ces derniers utilisent la définition de l'odeur pour accentuer le fossé séparant forgerons et non-forgerons, les femmes tendent à prendre une position médiatrice dans cette division.

Dans la culture Kapsiki, l'odeur n'est pas associée aux notions de diable ou de sorcellerie. Elle est néanmoins liée à la cérémonie funèbre, qui, dans la culture Kapsiki, comporte l'exposition prolongée du cadavre jusqu'à sa décomposition. La relation forgeron-cadavre est sans doute une des raisons pour laquelle le forgeron est caractérisé par une telle odeur. Une autre explication pourrait être le caractère ambivalent de ce peuple et la tendance de celui-ci à établir des lignes de stricte séparation entre les groupes sociaux. Chez les Kapsiki, le caractere de l'odeur semble renforcer les positions de démarcation ainsi que la dépendance mutuelle des groupes opposés.

The inhabitants of Kaokoland, Himba and Herero, have recently gained prominence in the discussions concerning a controversial hydro-electric power scheme in their region. They are depicted as southern Africa's ‘most traditional pastoralists’ by groups opposing the dam and those demanding it. The article describes how Kaokoland's pastoralists suffered tremendously from the politics of encapsulation the South African government adopted against them. Having been enmeshed in interregional trade networks, commodity production and wage labour around 1900, they were isolated by the South African government within a period of twenty years. Buffer zones for the commercial ranching area and prohibitions on movement across other newly invented boundaries limited their spatial mobility. Trade across borders was inhibited altogether. Pastoralists who had diversified their assets during the previous fifty years and had taken the chance of a first wave of commercial penetration were forced back on to subsistence herding.

Earth‐eating is common among primary school children in Luoland, western Kenya. This article describes the social significance and meanings attributed to it. Earth‐eating is practised among children before puberty, irrespective of their sex, and among women of reproductive age, but not usually among adult men or old women. To eat earth signifies belonging to the female sphere within the household, which includes children up to adolescence. Through eating earth, or abandoning it, the children express their emerging gender identity. Discourses about earth‐eating, describing the practice as unhealthy and bad, draw on ‘modern’ notions of hygiene, which are imparted, for example, in school. They form part of the discursive strategies with which men especially maintain a dominant position in the community. Beyond the significance of earth‐eating in relation to age, gender and power, it relates to several larger cultural themes, namely fertility, belonging to a place, and the continuity of the lineage. Earth symbolises female, life‐bringing forces. Termite hills, earth from which is eaten by most of the children and women, can symbolise fertility, and represent the house and the home, and the graves of ancestors. Earth‐eating is a form of ‘communion’ with life‐giving forces and with the people with whom one shares land and origin. Earth‐eating is a social practice produced in complex interactions of body, mind and other people, through which children incorporate and embody social relations and cultural values.

Au sujet de l'histoire du village de Green Valley dans le Bantustan sud-africain de Lebowa à travers les six dernières décennies, cet article examine les relations complexes entre la chasse aux sorcieres et l'action politique. Je m'oppose aux notions, courantes en littérature anthropologique, que les acteurs politiques prennent part à la chasse aux sorcières dans un effort pour mystifier l'exploitation ou pour intimider leurs adversaires. De telles notions mettent trop l'accent sur les dimensions instrumen-tales du systeme complexe qu'est la sorcellerie et ne prête pas assez attention a sa dimension existentielle/intrinsique en tant qu'explication personnalisée de l'infor-tune. En prenant entiérement connaissance de cette derniere, la chasse aux sorcières peut être vue comme un effort créatif pur éliminer le mal et éviter l'occurrence du malheur dans le futur. II est débattu ici qu'au cours du temps, les chefs et Camarades ont trouvé qu'il était commode sur le plan politique d'identifier et de punir les sorcières dans leurs efforts pour atteindre la légitimité parmi les villageois.

Joe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

The Peabody Harvard Kalahari Expedition, under the leadership of Laurence K. Marshall, has made four field trips between 1950 and 1955 into the Kalahari Desert in South West Africa and the Bechuanaland Protectorate to find and study Bushmen who were living in their own way, and not working for white farmers or for Negroes. The last of the four expeditions, that of 1955, was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution as well as by the Peabody Museum of Harvard.

Our principal study was made with the !Kung Bushmen of the Nyae Nyae region of South West Africa. The Nyae Nyae region extends about 150 miles north and south, about 100 miles east and west, and is centred approximately at Gautscha Pan, which is located at c. 19° 48′ 30″ S. and 20° 34′ 36″ E. on the map of a survey of the area by the Administration of South West Africa dated 7.11.1935. The Nyae Nyae region is separated from the farmed areas of South West Africa by a stretch of waterless, uninhabited country over 100 miles wide.

Eduard Hahn, to whom the ethnological study of economics owes a considerable number of important discoveries which have been published repeatedly and in varying forms, seems to have paid scarcely enough attention to the good work of the scholars who preceded him in the fight for the recognition of the outstanding position of women in the lower forms of soil cultivation. Steinmetz and quite recently Koppers, have pointed out that Buckland already attributed to the female sex the invention of the most ancient method of soil cultivation, or hoe culture, as, since Hahn, it has generally been called. He was followed by Roth, Lippert, Mason, Grosse, Schurtz, and finally Eduard Hahn with his very logical and ingenious deductions. The modern student of social history is not so easily satisfied with evidence arbitrarily collected from all over the world and the theories based on it, which are then said to hold good for all mankind; he finds the results of the research of the so-called ‘zones of culture school’ (Kulturkreisschule) much more convincing. Gräbner, the leader of this group of German ethnologists, has now recently made his numerous works, in condensed form, accessible to a wider public. Here we find, in particular, a clearer statement of the arguments of Grosse, Bachofen, and others about the connexion of matriarchal society and lower forms of soil cultivation. Matriarchy and hoe culture are assigned to definite chronologically determined stages of civilization (older forms of the so-called ‘two class culture’, and later ones of ‘bow culture’). Koppers, of the Austrian branch group, associates matriarchy and hoe culture with these two civilizations, which he, as does P. W. Schmidt, designates more aptly as ‘exogamous matriarchal’ and ‘free matriarchal’.

Cet article étudie le comportement des commerçants de bétail en Somalie du Sud dans les conditions d'un marché précaire, d'un déclin macro-économique et d'un contexte politique instable. L'analyse attire l'attention sur les types de relations bivalentes et de strategies de diversification qui permettent aux commerçants de bétail de supporter les longues périodes de précarité. En distinguant quatre marchés différents et cinq types de facteurs de marché, l'étude s'efforce de démêler les complexités du commerce de bétail dans la Somalie du Sud, et de différencier deux catégories de négociants, ceux qui ont fait du profit, et ceux qui ont pâti des récents changements. L'analyse semble indiquer que, dans la situation actuelle de crise en Somalie, les commerçants qui sont devenus les agents de gros négociants tournés vers l'exportation et centrés sur un marché unique, s'avérent les plus atteints, alors que ceux qui sont établis dans de petits villages et qui sont impliqués dans des marchés à la fois intérieurs et d'exportation ont parfois prospéré. Le commerce de bétail entretenu de façon soit-disant officieuse avec les pays voisins, comme le Kenya, permet à certains groupes de réchapper à un environnement d'une extrême instabilité économique et politique, exceptionnelle même dans un tel contexte comme l'Afrique. L'article conclut par un débat général sur l'importance des relations sociales dans le commerce et sur les réactions des négociants face aux changements survenus dans les indicateurs macro-économiques.

This article examines agricultural labour contracts and household-based production in Dedza District, Malawi. Deepening impoverishment seemingly creates conditions for profound social changes. In agriculture, small-scale contracts rather than big work parties mobilise the bulk of ‘extra-domestic’ labour. Although labourers are paid in cash or in kind, they are most often the recruiter's relatives or affines. The pattern fits, therefore, uneasily with the ideas of labour as a commodity and persons as mutually independent individuals. Claims about changing values must be accompanied by careful analyses of personhood. Among Dedza villagers the notion of the self in the idioms of morality discloses social relations as the origins of a person's interests. By recruiting labour, wealthy villagers make their valued relationships visible. These observations caution against viewing ‘agrarian change’ as a uniform and teleological process in which the buying and selling of labour necessarily entail individualism. As an example of how, in any case, moral sentiments are historical phenomena the article examines the predicament of landless refugees in Dedza District. Under conditions of social and material alienation, agricultural labour contracts became exploitation.

Definitional questions, such as ‘Who are the Waswahili’, posed by Eastman (1971) in this journal, appear to have been of little interest in the past, as many social anthropologists either ignored the problem or assumed that the answers were self-evident. However, those who have confronted this task have shown that simplicity and self-evidence is rarely a characteristic feature of the inquiry. Even classic ethnographic cases of supposed culturally homogeneous and distinct tribal groups are at present being re-examined in light of the renewed interest in this topic (cf. Helm, 1968). Whether or not the Nuer are the Dinka, or vice versa, it has been minimally established that such questions are legitimate and even fruitful in sharpening our analytical approach to subject populations.

L'apparition des écoles européennes en Afrique de l'ouest à la fin du dix-huitième siècle, a déclenché une profonde transformation culturelle. Les Mende de la Sierra Leone, qui furent la cible de plusieurs des premières expériences scolaires en Afrique de l'ouest, ont commencé à se faire une autre idée des idéaux européens sur la dissémination gratuite du savoir qui leur était imposé. L'article porte moins sur ce qui est enseigné que sur la façon dont l'enseignement est donné; il montre alors que les Mende ont changé leurs idéaux sur la transmission du savoir selon les principes culturels et locaux du secret et du contrôle du savoir. Ces principes considèrent que, une excellente instruction étant un atout économique et politique essentiel, les professeurs, en tant que propriétaries de cette connaissance, méritent une compensation pour la transmettre: ce modèle éducatif est apparu de la façon la plus frappante dans les célèbres sociétés secrètes de la région. Comme cela fut le cas pour le savoir plus “traditionnel”, le principe culturel majeur, par lequel les enfants acquièrent un savoir “civilisé” à l'école, et sont ainsi promus dans le monde moderne, est d’ “acheter” ou de “gagner” les grâces de ceux qui les éduquent. En s'adressant aux idéologies du savoir, du pouvoir, et du secret, l'article diffuse une nouvelle interprétation sur l'evolution de l'enseignement dans un pays—au sein même du groupe éthnique—qui a constitué la clé de voute des expériences scolaires britanniques au dix-neuvième siècle en Afrique.

In a recent paper Gluckman puts forward a general hypothesis to account for the wide variation in the frequency of divorce among some African societies. Contrasting the bilateral kinship system of the Lozi of Northern Rhodesia with the strongly agnatic one of the Zulu of Natal, he notes that divorce is common among the former, rare among the latter, and suggests the general hypothesis that stable marriage is associated with patriliny. Gluckman tests this hypothesis against a substantial body of comparative data, drawn mainly from trans-Saharan Africa, and concludes that the available evidence seems generally to support it. He notes, however, that data for many areas are inadequate and he is properly cautious in the face of the methodological difficulties involved in putting such hypotheses to decisive test:

I am aware of the difficulties of establishing the validity of the hypothesis, but even if it is wrong it may be useful. Some of the difficulties are inherent in sociological analysis, since in this there are always complicating variables. Others arise from the vague and embracing use of categories and concepts (of which I too am guilty) such as patrilineal, lineage, marriage, divorce, &c….

I am myself uncertain whether it is the stability of people's attachment to specific areas, or patriliny or father-right itself, or the agnatic lineage, or all of these together, which, whatever the other variables are, tend to be associated with a strong marriage tie.

He concludes by inviting further testing and reformulation of the hypothesis.

Depuis le milieu des années 70, de nombreuses associations pour le développement et pour la jeunesse, avec une adhésion basée sur l'affiliation à un territoire particulier, ou sur une affiliation ethnique, ont été fondées dans le nord du Ghana. Bien que celles-ci soient devenues des agents importants dans plusieurs arènes politiques, elles n'ont pas encore suscité un intérêt de la part des chercheurs—un manque que cet article cherche à combler en examinant l'histoire des associations, l'image qu'elles donnent d'ellesmêmes, leurs organisations internes et politiques aussi bien que leurs dynamiques culturelles.

Prenant l'exemple du nord-ouest, certains problèmes typiques qui confrontent les associations pour la jeunesse font l'objet d'une discussion détaillée, par exemple, les conflits qui ont surgit après avoir créé et delimité la communaute dont l'association se dit représenter les intérêts au monde extérieur (les frontières territoriales contre les frontières ethniques), et les problèmes qu'il y a eu en définissant le concept d'adhésion (automatique contre volontaire), qui reflète les tensions entre la communauté et l'organisation, entre le peuple et l'élite éduquée.

Parce que ces problèmes pourraient menacer la survie même des associations, elles utilisent une proportion considérable de leur énergie en devenant un mouvement «d'identité», transformant un groupe hétérogène de la population en une communautenauté. Les discours, les symboles et les rituels se rapportant à ce niveau d'action de la part des associations pour la jeunesse sont analysés dans la dernière section de l'article.