Achille Mbembe's ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ has become a canonical contribution to the literature on postcolonial African politics, yet the piece has also proved difficult to digest and build upon. This article focuses on Mbembe's thesis that postcolonial rulers and subjects share an ‘aesthetics of power’, involving ceremonialism and an emphasis on bodily functions and metaphors. It attempts to disentangle Mbembe's insights into such political dispositions from the state-centrism and radical pessimism of his account by examining its analytical indeterminacies and critically re-evaluating his theoretical deployment of Bakhtin. It then develops an alternative Bakhtinian approach to Mbembe's problematic through an analysis of the public staging of political relations in Buganda (Uganda). The standardised ceremony staged by local communities in Buganda to welcome visiting dignitaries—a ceremonial form here designated ‘political hospitality’—projects and enacts legitimate relations of reciprocity and communication between rulers and subjects through performative prestation and the giving and eating of food. It thus lends itself to political ceremonialism and the elaboration of corporeal political metaphors without entailing the pathologies that Mbembe (mis)identifies as intrinsic to such dispositions and discourses. The distorted magnification of this ceremonial pattern by the national state does contribute to the state–society impasse that preoccupies Mbembe. Yet, contrary to Mbembe's bleak vision, such local idioms also provide resources for popular critical consciousness and, thus, some grounds for cautious optimism regarding the postcolonial African political predicament.

The 1990s saw the emergence of a thriving Nile perch export market from East Africa. This commercial table fish species is landed by migrant fishermen at villages that have sprung up along the shores of Lake Victoria, and then exported to overseas markets. By analysing the Ugandan perch fishery as a set of careers, the article shows that, although some fishermen have benefited from the perch boom, most face an uncertain and marginal existence. Few of them, however, move away in response. Analysis of an anthropological case study reveals that this is because the fishermen value the urban culture characterizing prominent village landings, expressed in particular clothing and hairstyles, the prevalence of non-kin ties, and a prospering leisure industry epitomized by the proliferation of pool tables. Hence, a cultural preference for life at the landings, rather than a universal quest for economic opportunity, drives their economic decision making.

Using a case study of a rural town in the Ashanti Region, this article explores transformations in enterprise, property relations and informal governance that have occurred since Ghana embarked on a period of neo-liberal economic and political restructuring in the mid-1980s. Rather than a linear move away from state-controlled markets and authoritarian rule toward privatization and democratic decentralization, Ghana has witnessed a proliferation of authorities and economic enterprises, both formal and informal, that defy clear-cut distinctions between public and private property and institutions. In the town described here, as in many other localities in Ghana, chiefs have figured prominently as both instigators and examples of transformations in economic and governing practices and institutions.

‘A translation of the meaning of the Holy Koran into the Hausa language’ – this is the careful wording of the title of the work sponsored by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam (whose President is the Sultan of Sokoto) and signed by Abubakar Mahmoud Gummi, the chairman of its executive committee and former Grand Khadi (Gummi, 1980). It is, in short, as official a Muslim publication as there can be in Nigeria. The Arab text (set in a standard Beirut naskh typeface) is on the right of the page, the Hausa, in roman script (boko), on the left; yet colleagues say that the Hausa still reads as if it was simply part of an oral, abbreviated tafsiri transcribed for printing. Though it is nowhere labelled as tafsiri, it has some footnotes and a sentence introducing each sura; and it is a truly vernacular translation – that is, it is not as awkward to read as, say, the books translated by Haliru Binji into what one could best describe as ‘malamanci’. Lastly, the printed text originally was circulated in sections – in part, it is said, to assess people's reactions to a Hausa translation of the Holy Koran being sold in the streets of Nigerian cities. It is a measure of the public's acceptance of this work – which is in reality no more than a printed version of the various oral ‘translations’ one can hear every year in public, on the radio or on tape – that not merely has it now appeared as a single volume but that it has already gone into a second edition; indeed, Alhaji Nasiru Kabara has now almost completed the process of producing his own version.

This paper is the result of a study of all the known rock painting copies and photographs, undertaken during 1963 and early 1964—in the first instance to plot the occurrence of patterned giraffe paintings against those only in silhouette. The list has grown, however, and all animals and humans have been indexed and plotted on distribution maps, all information being finally synthesized. An analysis is presented of the human types and domesticated animals recorded in the art of Southern Africa. These items have been plotted on distribution maps, the significance of which is discussed in the following sections. The importance of the Mopani belt and of linguistics are also examined and a possible way from the east of Southern Rhodesia to the Cape of Good Hope indicated. The distribution of animal types is the subject of another paper (Cooke, 1964).

Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice. It is a lens on the politics of post-colonial Africa, on the current political economy of Nigeria, and on its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. The legitimation of vigilante activity has extended beyond dissatisfaction with current levels of law and order and the failings of the Nigeria Police. To understand the local legitimacy of vigilantism in post-colonial Nigeria, indeed, it is also necessary to recognize its internal imperatives. Vigilantism in this context is embedded in narratives of contested rights, in familiar everyday practices, understandings of personhood and knowledge, and in alternative, older registers of governmentality. In addition to mapping temporal and spatial communities in which young men are vested with the right to exercise justice, this article assesses the legitimacy of Annang vigilantism within cultural frameworks of accountability linked to conceptions of agency, personhood and power, and the oppositions this produces between vigilantes and thieves.

This article is a contribution to reflection on the question of land markets in Africa. Based on a case study of Abure society (Côte d'Ivoire), the article emphasizes, first, the relation between the intra-family dimension of land rights and the functioning of the land lease market. Particular attention is paid to intra-family land tensions induced by the land lease market, and their repercussions in the form of inter-community conflict reflecting the ethnic-national basis of the land lease market (with autochthonous Abure lessors and Burkinabe tenants). Second, emphasis is placed on the socio-political dimension of land tenancy relationships. The article is based on a deciphering of the land rights and land tenure practices within Abure family groups, and of a 2001 conflict which set Abure young men against Burkinabe pineapple growers. Beyond the inter-community conflict surrounding land, the article reveals an intergenerational conflict within Abure society itself between social juniors and the elders who manage family land, regarding the delegation of rights to lease out family land and the distribution of land lease (rental) income.

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.

This article deals with the moral panic that emerged in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that under-age Nigerian girls were being smuggled into the country to be put to ‘work’ in the sex industry. A massive police investigation not only found hundreds of cases but also uncovered the fact that certain unknown and occult rituals played a part in how traffickers, ‘madams’ and other sex bosses appeared to keep the girls locked in this exploitative system. Soon an unspecified notion of ‘voodoo’ came to dominate the entire police operation, the public image of what was happening to these girls, and the way in which the girls were treated within the Dutch judicial system and its care. The article deconstructs the moral panic and all the images of Africa and the occult which became so crucial to the way the Dutch state tried to deal with the situation. It sets this analysis in the context of an anthropology of globalisation and a cultural exploration of how issues of morality and identity are affected by what the Comaroffs have called the occult economies of late capitalist relations. It concludes that to a great extent the scale of the moral panic can be understood by pointing at the rigidity of the identity politics of the Dutch nation state in previous years. Its policies were meant to curb some of the effects of globalisation (such as illegal immigration from Africa) in order to preserve its integrity, but it now found them seriously undermined by something the policies were not designed to cope with.

Among the different tribes of the Kuba group, three forms of initiation rites are practised: the eastern tribes (Ngende, Ngongo, and the Shoowa) follow a common form, the Kete of the Luebo region have their own, and the Bushong of the south have yet another form.

I was initiated according to the Bushong rites at the village of Mapey in the south from 23 October to 9 November 1953. Initiation rites at the capital have fallen into disuse and, apart from the capital, may only be performed in villages which pay a special tribute to the king and are known as ‘royal villages’. The people of Mapey allowed me to be initiated because the king himself vouched for me, and because they hoped that I would refute the allegations of immorality brought by the missionaries.

Extreme flexibility in the residential and financial arrangements attached to marriage and matrilineal kinship have remained a consistent characteristic of Asante throughout this century. The constant renegotiation processes that constitute and renew family relations have kept them remarkably strong through a series of radical changes in the enacted content and boundaries of those relations, linked with dramatic fluctuations in the economic and political environment of Ghana. The degree of personal agency sustaining this Asante social framework has challenged and stretched a succession of theoretical models, since this negotiability extends to the principles and limits of negotiation itself. The continuing vitality of Asante matriliny actually requires a high degree of individual autonomy, including the economic autonomy that anchors the negotiating position of each social adult. Recent life history work among Kumasi women traders shows that the elastic framework of family relations can absorb considerable change in the expectations and the balance of power between spouses or between parents and children as long as the pace remains slow enough and individual self-reliance stable enough to preserve the continuity of the renegotiation process. The economic crisis of the final decade of the century has threatened the basis of social reproduction by reducing the opportunities for financial independence. Without basic autonomous subsistence young men and women can no longer function effectively as Asante adults.

Among the Kofyar of Northern Nigeria the organization and composition of the household is ecologically adapted to certain features of the subsistence technology and the physical environment. While reductionist arguments of environmental determinism or diffuse functional interconnexion are not adequate, it is possible to demonstrate specific reciprocal influence. This paper considers the kinds of evidence available for empirically determining the connexion between a particular social pattern and the productive activities of a society, providing an example of the analysis Steward called ‘cultural ecology’ (1953: 30).

In the 1990s the feared witch among Tonga-speakers of Gwembe Valley, Zambia, is often the father, whose adult children accuse him of using witchcraft to gain power over the child's life force to use in his enterprises. Suspicions of the father arise from changing family dynamics associated with restricted economic opportunities and a changing agricultural system involving cash cropping where family labour is of vital importance. Witchcraft fears, as elsewhere in Zambia, have become more salient as worsening economic conditions have led to general malaise and the loosening of restraints on public accusation. Feeling victimised and vulnerable in a world where transport minimises distance has led to witches being endowed with the power to operate without regard to distance. Nevertheless witchfinding deflects hostility from national political figures to elders in the neighbourhood, especially fathers, who are continuous sources of immediate frustration and are also vulnerable to local action.

While doing field-work among the Fipa of south-west Tanzania between December 1962 and June 1964 I collected evidence about an anti-sorcery cult or movement called Kamcape which was then active in the area. The present article describes this evidence and seeks to assess its sociological significance.

Keen to show the fluidity of border areas, and the limits of state control, much anthropological scholarship on borders highlights arrangements, activities and opportunities that pass beneath the official radar. But while such a clandestine focus casts border dwellers as preoccupied with resisting state regulation, this article shows how Zimbabwean–South African border dwellers make the most of their location by being visible to state officials, as waged farm workers. They seek agricultural jobs as a foothold in building lucrative businesses. Moreover, waged farm workforces are hubs of border trade, as workers remit goods for resale as a response to the crisis at home in Zimbabwe. The article therefore questions the wider theoretical opposition between the creative entrepreneurship of the informal economy and the drudgery of formal employment. Formal and informal modes of livelihood constitute one another, intersect and are interdependent. This article unpacks the spatial and temporal articulations between waged work and other means of making ends meet. In so doing, it suggests fixating less on the border itself as a distinctive feature, replete with smugglers and murky goings-on, and appreciating the various meanings of work in borderland economies.

I describe a people who, in aspiring to Swahili Islamic values and life style, marginalise themselves economically and politically.

The title of the article both indicates the dilemma of their identity and, for scholars who study Swahili-speaking peoples, is deliberately provocative. How can people whom we call or who call themselves Swahili possibly also be referred to as Mijikenda? After all, these two peoples have in other descriptions been shown to be sharply distinct, either as enemies, as traders in separate goods, or as employers and labourers respectively. Yet, though this is a reasonable characterisation of a difference of great historical significance for the creation of Kenyan coast culture and hegemony, it forgets the areas of overlap between the two peoples, where, in effect, it becomes sometimes impossible to posit consistent differences. The sharp delineation conventionally recorded by writers between the Swahili and the Mijikenda (and the various names by which they have been known before the use of this term in 1945) is as much a result of the conditions under which such writings were produced: they unconsciously reproduce the very distinctions by which pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial authorities administered and ruled the area and its peoples.

Although the Nuer are generally described as ‘naked’, the ethnographic literature and photographs suggest that they hold certain notions about ‘nakedness’ and ‘nudity’ which prescribe wearing or not wearing certain garments or ornaments in certain social situations. Some of these notions seem closely related to important Nuer conceptual categories of their social groups and their world, especially those related to sexuality, marriage, and affinity, and the process of changing from one social status or moral state to another. Some of these are considered in this paper.

It has only been in recent years that anthropologists have begun to investigate women as actors with resources important in the political field and to broaden the concept of political system to include the activites of women (see Collier, 1974 and Nelson, 1974 for another statement of the problem). The analysis of the political processes of the nineteenth century Kikuyu (Kenya) presented here lays the framework for the inclusion of women's subsistence activities and domestic decision making with the field of public or political relations.

Cet article conteste l'usage répandu du concept de “caste” pour décrire des professions minoritaires marginalisées dans le Sud-Ouest de l'Ethiopie. Il aborde trois types d'objections: idéologique, génétique et structurel, se rapportant respectivement aux facteurs culturels, historiques et sociaux. En termes idéologiques, la marginalisation est généralement non justifiée à travers une philosophie religieuse cohérente; les mythes sont souvent absents et rarement élaborés, et n'expliquent pas une hiérarchie différentielle des groupes de professions. Des notions de pollution sont largement répandues et généralement présentées dans l'idiome dominant des transgressions alimentaires; mais la majorité rurale n'est pas considérée pure. En termes génétiques, aucun des modèles existants n'explique les origines de tous les groupes marginalisés. Tandis que le modèle “vestiges” est largement discrédité et le modèle “différenciation interne” actuellement privilégié, cet article souligne l'importance de la migration qui est intimement liéc aux professions non-rurales ainsi qu'à des statuts marginalisés et minoritaires. Une absence de modèle interculturellement valide unique, des explications multiples et des différences parmi divers types de groupes de professions (intragroupes et intergroupes) compromettent l'usage du concept de “caste” pour interpréter les origines des groupes marginalisés dans le Sud-Ouest de l'Ethiopie. En termes structurels, l'usage du terme “caste” ne s'applique pas à la majorité rurale mais uniquement à la minorité des artisans et des chasseurs. Toutefois, l'argument selon lequel les rapports entre les marginalisés et les groupes dominants reposent sur des rapports patron-client dyadiques n'infirme pas la nette marginalisation structurelle politique, économique et sociale. Quant à l'argument selon lequel les marginalisés forment un bloc unique indifférencié, il est suggéré que l'endogamie porte à la différenciation en dépit de la rareté de hiérarchies strictes. Plutôt qu'un manque de hiérarchie, les variations et les changements spatiaux survenus au fil du temps méritent une explication; ceci suggère qu'on ne peut pas parler de principe organisationnel cohérent comparable à celui que l'on peut s'attendre à trouver dans les sociétés de “castes”. L'article en conclut que le manque de fondement culturel idéologique uniforme, les origines et processus de marginalisation complexes et variés, ainsi que les rapports structurels spécifiques entre la majorité et les groupes dominés suggerènt que le concept de “caste” n'a qu'une valeur analytique minimale et qu'il est done préférable de le limiter au contexte indien. Une meilleure compréhension de la marginalisation peut passer initialement par l'analyse des différentes conceptions locales et de la façon dont l'endogamie structure la différenciation et est liée à la profession. Une analyse plus claire des processus de marginalisation impliquerait une étude suivie des migrations, de la concurrence à l'égard des ressources et de l'évolution des rapports technologiques, économiques, sociaux et culturels entre les artisans et les groupes dominants ainsi que des interactions interethniques.