Cet article commence par exposer la position des Maasai, leur territoire et l'organisation sociale à l'avènement de la période coloniale. Il documente l'érosion progressive du territoire et l'imposition de nouvelles frontières sur les Maasai depuis les années 1880 jusquʼau présent. Il utilise les études de l'auteur sur l'usage des terres Maasai à présent et sur le système de production sur les terres tanzaniennes des Maasai, ensemble avec des données comparatives sur les terres Maasai au Kenya, afin de montrer comment les communautés Maasai ont fait face à ces contraintes.

Des données sur la performance de l'élevage, la richesse des exploitations, la structure des fermes, et la situation diététique et alimentaire sont utilisées en tant quʼindicateurs écologiques des effets de la création des frontières. Cet article examine l'effet des réponses des communautés Maasai, soit celle qui à consisté à circonvenir les limites imposées, exploitant et dans certains cas attaquant les ressources que les frontières étaient désignées à protéger, ou celle qui a consisté à développer des stratégies afin d'incorporer et d'utiliser à bon effet les débouchés que les frontières peuvent présenter.

This story begins with Robin Horton's thoughtful and stimulating article ‘African conversion’, published in Africa in 1971. My own ‘Conversion reconsidered’ followed in 1973. This was in part a response to Horton, though concentrating upon Islamic conversion, which had been only a supporting feature in Horton's chiefly Christianity-based argument. I also explored a little the possibilities for Muslim/Christian comparison in black Africa, a fruitful and promising field which has not figured prominently in the subsequent discussion, but to which I return briefly towards the end of the present article. Horton's own rely (‘On the rationality of conversion’, in 1975) being essentially rather acid in tone, it seemed best at the time to let the matter rest, which I did.

The aim of the essay is to highlight gaps in existing knowledge of African women and bring to light new queries. The argument being presented is that African women assert their individuality by exploring the options available within their respective societies. While it is unsafe to generalize about Africa, the dominance of men in the public, especially the political and ritual spheres, is well illustrated by ethnographies on Africa. Women are on the whole invisible or shadowy figures except in a handful of ethnographies that take a woman's perspective (for example, Leith-Ross, 1939; Kaberry, 1952; and Paulme (ed.), 1963). The ideology of male dominance is taken for granted as representative of the true state of affairs between men and women in Africa. Whereas every researcher probably knows that ideologies are not realities, somehow that knowledge becomes insignificant when dealing with African societies.

Zimbabwe has adopted the name of the Shona state, centred on the city of Great Zimbabwe, which flourished between five and eight hundred years ago, and whose ruined stone walls are one of the most remarkable monuments in Africa. Great Zimbabwe was a considerable human achievement, evidence of the acquisition and management of a huge and docile labour force, of prolonged political stability and economic prosperity.

When the British South Africa Company occupied the country in 1890 the monument became the subject of considerable settler polemic and controversy. While its origins were still uncertain Cecil Rhodes recognized the considerable propaganda value that evidence of ancient foreign settlement, preferably white and successful and with Biblical origins, would have. It would give a precedent and respectability to the conquest and a promise of similar prosperity to the settlers and investors in the new colony. Rhodes acquired many antiquities from Great Zimbabwe, and initiated excavations at the site and searches of the archives of Rome and Lisbon for documents referring to it. He himself sought parallels to its art in the museums of Cairo. He also commissioned eminent mining engineers to determine the origins and yield of the ‘ancient gold workings’ in the country. Finally, he had Richard Hall, an enthusiastic propagandist of the settler cause in newspapers, lectures and exhibitions, and a fanatical advocate of immensely old Biblical origins for Great Zimbabwe, appointed curator of the Ruins expressly to instruct important visitors in his theories.

This article deals with an aspect of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren: the fosterage of grandchildren by their (classificatory) grandparents. By becoming social parents with full responsibility for their social children, grandparents—as foster-parents—take upon themselves the characteristics typical both of parental roles involving authority, and grand-parental behaviour involving joking, warmth and proximity to their fostered grandchildren. The practices of grandparental fosterage, as well as changes in them, need to be understood in the broader context of widespread fosterage among Baatombu, where the majority of children grow up not with their biological parents but with foster-parents. The gradual decline of old forms of fosterage is affecting foster practices between grandparents and grandchildren. The grandparents’ generation evaluate this decline negatively and fear that changing fosterage patterns may adversely affect their social security in old age.

Cette étude s'efforce de trouver des variables dans la littérature économique et antropologique sur le pastoralisme qui peut être utilisé afin d'obtenir une vue d'ensemble sur les stratégies d'élevage bovin en Afrique de l'ouest et leur type d'intégration dans un marché régional plus large, dans lequel les différentiations écologiques jouent un role important. Cet article concerne surtout les implications de cette intégration économique pour l'analyse des stratégies d'élevage et il essaie d'identifier les variables que les guardiens de troupeaux bovins manipulent afin de réaliser leurs objectifs en ce qui concerne la gestion des troupeaux et une adaptation à des contraintes particulières et des débouchés sur le marché.

II met le point sur le degré auquel les structures d'élevage reflètent les pratiques de la gestion des troupeaux et l'intégration dans les marchés. Ceci est une variable importante et pas aussi abstraite quʼelle ne semble, puisque l'image originale qui décrit les pastoralistes comme étant autonome et se souciant plus du bétail en vue d'une abondance sociale que d'une efficacité économique, a été crée par les observations d'un grand nombre de taureaux 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.

In the aftermath of social conflicts and urban violence between autochthons and migrants in Italy in recent years, the question of how to control the growing number of illegal immigrants is increasingly discussed in the language of zero-tolerance anti-crime campaigns. Traffic in women has been a ‘structural’ social reality in the Italian migration landscape over the last 15 years, and is a prominent aspect of illegal female migration. These women are qualified as ‘victims of human trafficking’ when they denounce their pimps. Most of their suffering – involving psychological or psychiatric symptoms and requiring psychosocial support – is expressed through an emic vocabulary that talks about fetishes, spirit possession, witchcraft, sacrifice, debts, and spiritual and moral deliverance. This study – based on extensive field research in Turin into an Ethno-Psychiatric Service (provided by the Frantz Fanon Centre) in which 50 Nigerian women participated – addresses the following anthropological issues: the relationship between emic vocabulary (so called ‘voodoo’ or ‘juju’), migration, and moral economies of violence; and the intersection between symbolic violence and coercion, as experienced through sexual abuse and/or ritual violence (occurring both in Nigeria and Italy, and also during the migration itself in different countries such as Benin, Mali and Libya). In the conclusion of this article, I underline the limits of psychiatric and psychological therapeutical methods vis-à-vis the symptoms and traumatic experiences that ‘mark’ these female bodies; and I discuss in particular the emergence of new forms of post-colonial disorders affecting subjects who are at the mercy of compromised desires.

The Yoruba Ogboni cult has been referred to as a typical ‘secret society’ for over fifty years, yet it has never been described in any detail, or analysed in accurate general terms. Frobenius discovered its controlling importance in Yoruba religious organization in 1910 and promptly became initiated into the Ibadan Ogboni, but only to get information from the priests of other Yoruba cults. He made no attempt to study the beliefs of Ogboni members, whom he dismissed as ‘mystery-mongering greybeards’. Two anthropologists have been initiated into the cult in the course of the last twenty-five years, but have declared themselves bound by its oath of secrecy, and so have published nothing about it.

Recent publications on the rock art of Africa have again focused attention on the tremendous wealth of painted and engraved sites in that continent (Brentjes, 1969; Cooke, 1969; Lee and Woodhouse, 1970; Rudner, 1970). At the same time, however, it is made all too clear that the collection of data is largely unsystematic and subjective and, because of the incomplete nature of the evidence, valid analysis or comparison is difficult. Small wonder, then, that there is such a diversity of often conflicting views on the significance of the art (Vinnicombe, 1972).

Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as ‘activists’ is examined in terms of the related concepts of ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the ‘life-history’ as a way of introducing ‘agency’ that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as ‘history’ and ‘society’ and their own more ‘personal’ lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes.

On 14 October 1999, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the first president of the United Republic of Tanzania, died in a London hospital. In Tanzania, musical bands throughout the country reacted to the news by composing scores of lamentation songs (nyimbo za maombolezo) that mourned his passing and assessed his contributions to the country he helped to create. While elsewhere in the world Nyerere is affiliated with the ‘African socialist’ platform termed Ujamaa that he theorized in his political writings and instituted during his tenure as president, these lamentation songs are notably silent on the topic of socialism. This silence indicates the ambiguity with which Tanzanians today relate to their socialist past. As a necessary prelude to analysis of the nyimbo za maombolezo, this article explores the practices, policies and values promoted in Tanzanian socialisms (mainland and Zanzibar) and in the postsocialist present. Competing rhetorics are revealed in these musical constructions of the ‘Father of the Nation’ and, by extension, the Tanzanian nation itself.

One of the most obvious social situations in the middle Benue Valley is the expansion in all directions of the Tiv, who number some 800,000 and are the largest pagan tribe in Northern Nigeria. One of the most puzzling aspects of Tiv expansion has been that, although it is obviously connected in many areas with land shortage and accompanying economic factors, it is precisely in those areas in which land shortage is least severe that the rate of migration appears to be most rapid.

Centrifugal expansion is intimately associated with the social and political structure of the Tiv people—is, in fact, a facet of it. In order to analyse this association, and incidentally to explain the paradox of the rate of expansion, it is necessary to divide the movement into two sorts: expansion and disjunction. Expansion refers to that type of movement which leads to the enlargement in area of a lineage's territory. It may eventually lead to a change in geographical location of the lineage territory; it does not affect the over-all juxtaposition of lineage areas. Disjunction, on the other hand, characteristically brings about a separation of groups in space and affects not only the geographical position of a lineage territory, but also the juxtaposition of lineage territories.

The first section of this article will set forth briefly the relationship between movements of lineages, territorial organization, and the structure of political lineages. The second section will examine expansion; the third, disjunction. The fourth will show that the two types of migration are both present in all parts of the country, and that it is the primacy of one or the other which gives rise to an apparent difference in rate of migration.

The collective violence in rural areas of southern and central Plateau State between June 2002 and May 2004 was accompanied by widespread social mobilization and heightened ethnic and religious divisions. Vigilantes adapted to the new insecurity and were important local actors in the crisis, but became polarized along religious lines. Their emphasis shifted from vigilance against theft within villages to vigilance against the more serious threats posed by armed militias. The intersection of vigilantes and militias was situational; where there was less violence vigilantes were more prominent, but elsewhere their functions merged. Social action and the patterns of violence were shaped by power relations between identity groups and the struggle for territory. The notion of indigeneity continues to be used by all sides to make territorial claims, and historical narratives of belonging and grievance are actively put forward to bolster political legitimacy. The violence was also strongly defined by religion – the political dominance of Muslims, especially in Wase, generating particular animosity. Religious and cultural beliefs were also expressed by vigilantes and militias themselves, and, while not a direct cause of violence, supernatural beliefs did affect forms of mobilization and decision making.

The article addresses African and Indian newspaper networks in Kenya in the late 1940s in an Indian Ocean perspective. Newspapers were important parts of a printing culture that was sustained by Indian and African nationalist politics and economic enterprise. In this period new intermediary groups of African and Indian entrepreneurs, activists and publicists, collaborating around newspaper production, captured fairly large and significant non-European audiences (some papers had print runs of around ten thousand) and engaged them in new ways, incorporating their aspirations, writings and points of view in newspapers. They depended on voluntary and political associations and anti-colonial struggles in Kenya and on links to nationalists in India and the passive resistance movement in South Africa. They sidestepped the European-dominated print culture and created an anti-colonial counter-voice. Editors insisted on the right to write freely and be heard, and traditions of freedom of speech put a brake on censorship. Furthermore, the shifting networks of financial, editorial and journalistic collaboration, and the newspapers’ language choice – African vernaculars, Gujarati, Swahili and English – made intervention difficult for the authorities. With time, the politics and ideologies sustaining the newspapers pulled in different directions, with African nationalism gaining the upper hand among the forces that shaped the future independent Kenyan nation.

Increasingly, the poor are to be found in the urban areas of developing countries. Many urban households, not only the very poor, face economic insecurity and deprivation. Despite the steady growth of low-income groups in the urban areas of Africa, the mechanisms for coping with urban poverty were not studied to any great extent until the end of the 1980s. Most research into the strategies developed by households to cope with poverty had centred on the rural household. This article focuses on the inhabitants of the town of Mopti, situated in the Sahelian zone of Mali on the border of the inland delta of the river Niger. It deals with the subsistence strategies of different types of urban households and their adjustments to uncertain and deteriorating economic circumstances. In analysing these coping mechanisms account is taken of the various factors affecting households' ability to cope with reduced earnings or lack of income, such as their socio-economic position, migration status, composition and size, and ethnic background. A pertinent question in the analysis is whether urban households, in deteriorating circumstances, diversify their sources of income or specialise in one activity.

This article discusses sexual licences and prohibitions among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania with particular reference to the institutionalized yet controversial sexual relations between young pre-menarche girls and adolescent unmarried men. These relations are referred to as children's ‘play’ in the local vernacular, and as such fall within a larger moral order of age and gender hierarchies that privilege male seniority. The article uses the metaphor of ‘serious games’ adopted from Sherry Ortner as an analytical device in order to capture the dynamic and ambiguous character of Maasai sexual licences and prohibitions. Being at once serious and playful, ‘games’ lend themselves particularly to players' creativity, initiative and agency. The article aims to demonstrate how the structures of the games open up and create space for women and other ‘juniors’ to act intentionally and with purpose in their sexual lives.

This article proposes an analytic framework to describe variation in forms of land-related conflict that emerge in widely varying circumstances and settings. Focusing on conflict among smallholders, the article suggests that these social processes can often be thought of as redistributive conflicts that are shaped by the land tenure regimes that govern land access and allocation. Land tenure regimes can be conceptualized schematically as constituted by rules about property, authority, jurisdiction and citizenship, and as differentiated along these dimensions. They define a locus of political authority over land rights at the local level, a territorial arena, social groups with different land rights and interests, and the distribution of political and economic powers and rights among them. These arrangements vary across space and over time, shaping the political arenas in which land rights are contested and producing different forms of land-related conflict. In many situations, these dimensions of land regimes are blurred, layered and changing, adding additional dimensions of complexity to land politics that the analysis proposed here may help to illuminate.

As the title of this paper suggests, the movement described in it is not the first of its kind to have been recorded in Central Africa. About fourteen years ago Dr. Audrey I. Richards reported on a witchfinding movement associated with the Nyanja word mcape. (Local variations include mcapi, mucapi, &c.—referring to the medicine—and the Bemba called the medicine-vendors the Bamucapi.)